Dictionary of Prakrit for Jain Literature Vol 01 Fasc 01

Author(s): A M Ghatage
Publisher: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute

Page 12

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a quotation from Vacaspatya. Its use in Prakrit is unknown. It quotes long passages from Prakrit works along with the Sanskrit commentary on them when available and even whole chapters are included in this respect. This procedure accounts for its bulk. It is more of the nature of an encyclopaedia and includes both Prakrit and Sanskrit material, which the author considers as useful for studying the Jain canonical works and their commentaries. It is obviously modelled on Sanskrit works like the शब्दकल्पद्रुम and the वाचस्पत्य and as such has both the merits and short-comings of these works.
In spite of its obvious defects, the work has been carefully scanned to get some items and meanings which are not otherwise available. The material utilised is mostly based on the memory of the author and the MSS. used were not critically edited. Its bulk bas certainly affected the judgements of both F. W. Thomas and W. Schubring when they speak of this work in their reviews of 1924 and 1935. The strictures passed on it by Pt. Hargovind Das Seth in the preface of his Dictionary in 1928 appear to be not fully justified, as claimed there that the name of a work of Yagovijaya अज्झत्थमयपरिक्खा in Prakrit is coined by the author.
To nis text he has added a Sanskrit commentary explaining the meanings of these words and illustrates their use in a large number of stanzas composed by himself. Pischel is very critical about these as having no literary merit, even after giving due consideration to the constraints under which they were composed. In spite of this limitation they are often of use in deciding the me nings of words when they are polysemous in Sanskrit itself and hence they are often cited for this purpose in the dictionary.
Hemacandra makes two more points worth noting.
He explicitly says that he has not included in bis work numerous words current in different parts of the country on the ground that they are too many to be listed. He has confined himself to such words as are actually found used in Prakrit literature. He also defines what he means by Desi qualitatively in his stanza 3. There he lays down the criteria that they should not be justifiable by the rules of grammar, or not known to Sanskrit lexicons and not justifiable by interpreting their sense by the device of a figurative or transferred meaning. More particularly words derived from the socalled a are also excluded. He thus makes a distinction between Desi words not derived from Sanskrit words and Dhatvadeśas which are not genetically connected with Sanskrit roots, a distinction which is reflected in the further history of such words in the modern Indian languages.
All the modern Dictionaries of Prakrits are arranged on the alphabetical principle, but the way in which the alphabet is arranged differs from dictionary to dictionary. Particularly in the treatment of the Anusvāra no definite
principle is followed and hence groups of words involving this sound are found at different places in these dictionaries. Nor is the principle followed by a particular dictionary used consistently throughout and herce the Anusvära, if it occurs in the middle of a word, is not given the same treatment as is given to it, if it occurs in the first syllable of a word.
The largest modern dictionary which professes to deal with Prakrits is called Abbidhanarajendra, composed by Vijayarajendrasuri (1826-1906), edited by his two pupils Dipavijaya and Yatindr vijaya and published between 1910 and 1924, in seven folio volumes and contains more than 9000 pages of a large size in two columns. The lemmata are given in Prakrit, but that does not mean that all such words actually occur in the Prakrit literature. For example the entry on page 3 is based on its Sanskrit counterpart far and its meaning as current in the Mimamsa is given with
The author has used about a hundred books in Prakrit and Sanskrit and has also listed the words under which the bulk of the information is to be found in the introduction. But their number is very small. The introduction also includes the whole of the Prakrit grammar of Hemacandra with a new commentary in Sanskrit verses written by the author, which however gives no new information.
During the thirties of this century two more
dictionaries of Prakrit were published. Unlike the work mentioned above, they were planned as regular dictionaries of the modern type, arranged alphabetically and the meanings of the words explained with a few The various meanings which the words examples. conveyed are systematically numbered and separated from each other. The usual parts of speech are indicated and the verbal bases are clearly marked. The words are collected from the literature and they are given with their Sanskrit equivalents based on the rules of changes of sounds which the Prakrit grammarians have formulated. Of these two, the Ardha-Magadhī dictionary was planned to include all the words in the Jain Svetämbara canon or sacred books, overlooking the legitimacy of the books called Prakirņakas. All the 45 books, which form the canon, were utilised. However, in spite of the fact that Ardba-Magadhi as a Prakrit is confined to the canonical works only, some other