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THE SOURCES OF VĀDĪBHASIMHA'S GADYA-CINTAMANI :
A FRESH ENQUIRY
N. M. Kansara Jivandhara, also known as Jivaka, is regarded as a Jaina historical personage, a king, counted among the followers of the 22nd Tirthankara Nemil, and contemporary of the 24th Tirthankara Mahāvīra and his disciple Sudharmā. He is celebrated as the 23rd Kāmadeva? along with the sixty-three divine personages (salākā-puruşas) in Jainism. Excepting the passing enumerative reference to the name ‘Jivaga', there is hardly any reference to Jaina Canonical works to this hero of the several poetic works of medieval period, in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Apabhramsa, Kannada and Tamil. So far, among the available texts, Guņabhadra's Jivandhara-carita', comprising a part of the 75th parva of his Trişasti-laksana-mahāpurāņa-samgraha, popularly known as the Uttara-purāna, is the oldest one. Gunabhadra's work is in turn a latter part of Jinasena's Mahā-purāna. Jinasena was a contemporary of the kings Jagattunga and Nrpatunga Amoghavarsa ( A. D. 815-877) of the Rāstrakūta dynasty, with their capital at Mānyakheta ( malkhed )'. His disciple Gunabhadra completed his Mahapurāņa posthumously, some years before A. D. 897.5 Later on the story was adopted almost in toto by the great Apabhraíśa poet Puspadanta in his Mahāpurāņa ( A.D. 965) in the 99th pariccheda, also called sandhi.6
As has been the case with most of the folk literature in India and abroad, the strings of names and skeletons of the stories were current among bards and chroniclers, preserved from ancient times in oral tradition, and were at times strung together in anthologies of folktales, as in the case of Gunādhya's Brhatkatha. The Jaina monks, too, preserved numerous such stories and further enriched them with details from their wider studies and elaborately narrated them for the occasion, as in the case of Haribhadrasūri who developed a grand campū, the Samarāiccakahā, just from a string of names. Many of the tales included in the Mahāpurāna of JinasenaGunabhadra must have grown like that.? The impetus for giving a definite shape to the Jaina religious tales in the form of a mahāparāna seems to have been provided by a similar activity in the preceding centuries during the Gupta period of the Indian History, which saw the renovation of the Vedic-Brahmanical Purāņa tradition.
So far we know only a few sources used by Jinasena and Gunabhadra. But possibly their main source was the Vāgartha-sangraha of Kavi Parameśvara which as yet has not come to light; on a few quotations therefrom have been traced. It is not unlikely that Gunabhadra had some sources other than those in Sanskrit, either in Prakrit, or in the Dravidian languages before him; that alone may explain a proper name like 'Praśasta-varka' (UP. LXXV, 698) which is a Hybrid Sanskitisation of 'Prasasta-vākya' or 'Prasasta-vaktra'.9
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