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Ancient Jaina Hymns
351
( who was intimately connected with the family of Ambada, and whose very ordination ceremony had been arranged by Ambada's father, the Minister Udayana )“. Some of the later sources add that King Kumārapāla himself was present at the consecration of Ambada's temple, and performed the 'Arātrika' rite (modernārati ). The very much later Jinamandana states in his ‘Kumārapālacarita'47 that the consecration took place in V.S. 1220.
· All those sources, including the Prabhāvaka-carita, are chronologically considerably remote from the actual event, none by less than a century. The only source which stands closer, is Somaprabha Sūri's Kumārapāla-pratibodha, composed in V.S. 1241. This source not only lacks in such features of glamour as Hemacandra's and Kumārapāla's presence at the consecration, but just plainly states that when Hemacandra once visited Broach, accompanying his Guru, he worshipped Muni Suvrata at sakunikā-Vihāra and advised the Kotavāla Ambada to restore the temple, which the latter did*! If those later sources are correct, Ambaďa would thus have followed Hemacandra's advice more than 50 years after it was given, for Hemacandra's Guru, Devendra Sūri, in whose company he is stated to have been then, is known to have died shortly after Hemacandra's initiation as an Ācārya in V.S. 116649.
Hemacandra Sūri, moreover, would at that time have been composing his Trişașțiśalākāpuruşacarita ( 1216-1229 ), the later portion of which contains ( 1.1.) an account of the legends of the origin of Śakunikā-vihāra. As, according to the above later sources, he deemed it proper to praise Ambada's restoration in panegyrical stanzas in the presence of the king, the former poem would have been an ideal place for inserting one or another of those stanzas, or at least mentioning Ambada's name. Yet Hemacandra himself, strangely enough, is perfectly silent about the subject. This would be in order, if the restoration had been effected not in the immediate past, but many decades back, at the time when he was still a young and unknown Sāahu and shortly after he had visited that place with his Guru. For Private & Personal Use Only
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