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परिशिष्टम् । जानाश्रयी-छन्दोग्रन्थान्तर्गत-प्राकृतवृत्तवर्णनम् ।
INTRODUCTORY NOTE Jānāsrayi is an old work on Sanskrit:metres composed by some Pandit at the court of King Janāśraya, who is generally identified with Madhavavarman I of the Vişņukuņdin dynasty who ruled over the districts of Krishna and Godāvarī towards the end of the sixth century A. D. The work consists of six chapters which respectively deal with the Samjñās, the Vişama Vșttas, the Ardhasama Vrttas, the Sama Vrttas, the Mātrā Vrttas and the Prakriyās such as the Prastāra and others. The Mātrā Vrttas in the fifth chapter are defined under four different heads or Prakaraņas, namely, the Vaitālīya, the Mātrāsamaka, the Aryā, and the miscellaneous. Among these the last is the most important one for the history of ancient Prākrit prosody; it consists of Sūtras 45 to 75, which describe about nineteen metres of which eleven are strophic, the others being single ones. These are defined and illustrated as Sanskrit metres, but the commentator tells us that they are
a few Jätis current among the people'. Many of these metres with their names are found in Virahānka's Vșttajātisamuccaya and ought to leave no doubt that they are old metres which properly belong to the Prākrit prosody. In the Arya Prakaraṇa too, there are two or three new varieties, most important among them is the Gītikā which played a very important part in the construction of strophic metres and had retained its peculiarities for a long period during which it was very popular with the poets (as the dimunitive termination kā in its name suggests ), until Hemacandra formally obliterated the difference between it and the Gīti. Hemacandra, as a matter of fact, has treated the Gītikā as a kind of the Gīti, giving different names to its three varieties, probably following his great predecessor Svayambhū in this respect.
2. I have published this portion of the Jānāśrayī, namely Sūtras 39 to 44 from the Arya Prakarana and 45 to 75 from the last Prakarana, with an exhaustive introduction in the Särdhasatäbdi Volume of the Bombay Asiatic Society, Bombay 1957; but I am reproducing it here owing to its importance for the Prākrit metres, whose origin and deve. lopment I have tried to trace in the introduction to the present volume of Hemacandra's Chandonusāsana. As said in the abovementioned
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