Contribution of Jainas to Sanskrit and Prakrit Literature

Author(s): Vasantkumar Bhatt, Jitendra B Shah, Dinanath Sharma
Publisher: Kasturbhai Lalbhai Smarak Nidhi Ahmedabad

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Preface
The idea of publishing the Felicitation volume for Dr. K. R. Chandra came into our mind in March 1998. We had a number of problems like dearth of resources, men power etc. to meet the needs of the mission. But the sublime personality and scholarship in Prakrit of Dr. K. R. Chandra inspired us to prepare this volume. It was natural for him to be such a great scholar for, he was ably boosted by his teacher Prof. Shri Hiralal Jain. His academic career started from the Nagpur Mahavidyalaya as a lecturer. But soon he was invited by Pt. Dalsukhbhai Malvania in the L. D. Instt. of Indology as a research officer. When the Gujarat University introduced Prakrit and Pali department in the School of Languages, he joined it as the head.
Despite doing Ph. D. on Critical Study of Paumacariyam of Vimalasuri, a challenging job, he brought about a revolution in the field of editing Jain canonical texts. He noticed that the language spoken at the time of Lord Mahavir and Lord Buddha cannot appear to be later than the languages of Tripitakas and Ashokan inscriptions. Pali, the language of Bauddha Tripitakas, is contemporary to Ardhamagadhi and anterior to the Ashokan inscriptions. But if we observe the Ardhamagadhi texts edited so far, they do not seem to be as old as the Pali and the language of Ashokan inscriptions.
Dr. Chandra noticed the deviation of the Ardhamagadhi from its original form. He prepared cards of all words of the Acharanga, Ashokan inscriptions, Isibhasiyaim, Sutrakritanga and other treatises of the same age. He, then, compared the words of Ardhamagadhi with others. He counted the percentage of droppings of medial non-aspirate consonants of all these and found that the dropping was more than 60% in the Ardhamagadhi texts and almost nil in other texts. Apart from this, he found other changes which led him to editing the texts again from linguistic point of view. While doing so, he consulted many scholars of India and abroad. Everybody recognised his endeavour and supported him normally.
As we know that the Prakrit languages are known for changes in their vowels, consonants and suffixes. These make them different from Sanskrit. The more they show dropping of medial non-aspirate consonants, the posterior age, they show. This was the key point Dr. Chandra caught and made it the basis of his study of the Ardhamagadhi. Fortunately, there are many variant readings mentioned under footnotes of the published Agamas, which are retaining their