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THE CANONICAL LITERATURE OF THE JAINAS [CHAP. The 3rd type explains the sutta under consideration.
All the Ninjuttis attributed to Bhadrabāhusvāmin must have been concise and written in gāthās as can be inferred from the 8 printed ones. They were surely compiled long before the Redaction of the Jaina canonical works, and according to the Jaina tradition they belong to the fourth century B. C. If this is correct can we look upon them as the oldest metrical commentaries forming a part of the Indo-Aryan literature ? Whatever may be a reply to this question, it is certain that these Nijjuttis were later on followed by several other commentaries: Out of them the two types of commentaries known as Bhāsa and Cunni seem to be the oldest. After their composition, there came an age when the commentaries began to be freely composed in Samskrta, thus making the exegetical literature on the Agamas of the Jainas of four types: (1) Nijjutti, (2) Bhāsa, (3) Cunni and (4) sīkā. I use this last word to denote Samskặta commentaries. This Nijjutti etc. are mostly in the chronological order of development. For, Cunni seems to be an intermediate stage between Bhāsa on the one hand and Tīkā on the other, on the ground that it is neither entirely in Prākta like its predecessors Nijjutti and Bhāsa nor mostly or completely in Sanskrta like its successor Tikā; but it is a mixture of Prāksta and Samskrta so much so that not only one and the same sentence contains portions written in two languages', but even a Samskrta stem has Prākṣta terminations at times. This indicates that the Samskrta language was slowly but surely re. ceiving more and more attention at the hands of the Jainas who wanted to popularize their literature. Cunni is written in prose, and this is another respect in which it differs from Nijjutti and Bhāsa.
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Dhanapāla has written Virastuti of 11 verses wherein the 1st hemistich of every verse is in Samskrtu and the 2nd in Prākrta, and Rāmacandra Sūri, too, has written Adidevastava of 8 verses in this manner whereas Haribhadra Sūri's Samsäradavänala, Ratnasekbara Sūri's Caturvimsutistavana and Bhatti's Bhattikävya (XIII) are so composed that they can be considered to be works both in Sanskrta and Prāksta and can hence be looked upon as examples of bhaşaśleza,
