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PREFACE
It was a great honour for me to deliver the seventh Siddhantacharya Pandit Phoolchandra Shastri Lecture at the kind invitation of H.H. Charukirti Bhattaraka Mahaswamiji of Shravanbelgola, at a function held there on 20th October 2004, under the auspices of the National Institute of Prakrit Studies and Research.
My academic carcer began in Varanasi in 1952 as a Lecturer in Pali at the Banaras Hindu University. It is there that I had the good fortune of meeting and conversing with revered Pandit Phoolchandraji, almost on a weekly basis. I was overwhelmed by his vast knowledge of the profound doctrines of Jainism, which he had expounded in his masterly editions of the Sarvārthasiddhi, the Dhavalā, and the Samayasāra-kalasha, and by the boundless enthusiasm with which he shared this knowledge with students eager to learn. In 1956 I joined the University of London and moved to the University of California at Berkeley in 1973. During this period I was able to combine my researches in Buddhism with Jainism, a task made easy by the numerous insights gained through reading such polemical works of Panditji as the Khāniyā-Charchā (1963) and his most celebrated Jaina-Tatva-Mīmānsā, a copy of which he kindly presented to me with great affection during a meeting in 1979.
Pandit Phoolchandraji. who relentlessly pursued Truth throughout his works, would have wholeheartedly approved this lecture on an unpublished work called Caurāsī Bol, by Pande (Pandit) Hemaraj. He was a contemporary of Kavivara Banarasidas and is well known for his Hindi Bālāvabodha commentary (dated 1653 A.D.) on the Pravacanasāra of Acharya Kundakunda. In Caurāsī Bol, Pandit Hemraj, most probably for the first time, expounds on 84 Points of Contention between Shvetāmbaras and Digambaras, not moved, as he says at the end, by sectarian spirit, but by a desire to arrive at the true meaning (satya-artha) of the words of the Jina!
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