Bruhat Katha kosha

Author(s): Harishen Acharya,
Publisher: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan

Page 25

[A 14]
important document of medieval Hindi life and religion in Western India, and will have a unique importance in world of Indological studies.
The other three volumes so far out are an edition of Rajasekhara's Prabandhakosa (14th century) Jinaprabha-suri's Vividha-tirtha-kalpa and an English translation of Bühler's Life of Hemacandra from the German. The Prabandha-kośa (Pub. 1935) is a collection of narratives about 24 celebrities of ancient India 10 of whom were great saints and teachers of Jainism, 4 literary celebrities of Sanskrit, 7 great princes of ancient and medieval times, and 3 other Jaina worthies of repute. It is a work of the type of the Prabandhacintamani; and a number of similar works written in Western India show that it was favourite literary genre. These works sometimes overlap, naturally enough, when they treat of the same personality. In his introduction, the editor discusses the historical, literary and other importance of the Prabandha-kosa, and he promises us a collection of similar other Prabandhas treating the same topics. The present edition is of course far in advance of the rough print of the work in pothi-form published some years ago in the 'Patan Hemacandrācārya Granthavali' Series.
Jinaprabha's Vividha-tirtha-kalpa (pub. 1934) is, as its name shows, a sort of guide-book or gazetteer of Jaina Sacred places of India of the 14th Century A. C. Of the holy places described, 8 are in Gujarat and Kathiawād, 7 in Rajputana-Malwa, 6 in Northern India (U. P.) and the Punjab, 11 in Oudh and Bihar, 3 in Mahārāshtra, and 3 in Karṇāṭak and Telingana. The work is published for the first time from the original MSS., and the MSS. material utilised is adequately described: the edition of it by D. R. Bhandarkar and Pandit Kedarnath of Jaipur has remained unfinished, after only one facicule of it (96 pages only corresponding to 30 pages of the present edition of 108 pages) was published by the Asiatic Society of Bengal.
Georg Bühler's masterly treatise on the life and works of Hemacandra, one of the most erudite scholars of Medieval India was published from Vienna in 1889. It has so far remained confined to the original German work, and has been a sealed book to most Indian scholars. It was a happy idea to present it in an English garb to a large circle of students in India and abroad, and Dr. Manilal Patel Ph. D. (Marburg) a young Indologist, has done his task successfully. Professor M. Winternitz of the German University of Prague has contributed a Preface. The learned Preface by the General Editor, Muni Jinavijayaji, supplements and corrects some of points in Bühler's work in the light of later discoveries and more close studies, and thus brings the work up-to-date. This model of careful research forms a distinct addition of the valuable output of the Singhi Jaina Series.
The "Singhi Jain Series" has come out with great promise and we hope that with the financial and scholarly collaboration of Babu Bahadur Singh Singhi and Muni Jinavijayaji and others, it will have a brilliant output in the course of the next few years.