Distribution Of Absolutive In Una In Ittarajjhaya

Author(s): Herman Tieken
Publisher: Herman Tieken

Page 20

280
HERMAN TIEKEN
As to the other possibility, the following points should be considered. In the first place it should be noted that Uttarajjhāyā is a compilation. The fact that the principle behind the arrangement of the individual chapters has not been made explicit is not exceptional. The same situation is found in, for instance, Dasaveyāliya. The situation becomes more problematical if we turn to the individual chapters and try to imagine what they look like without the frames. Here we may again make a distinction between the legendary chapters, on the one hand, and the dogmatic and disciplinary ones, on the other.
To begin with the legends, in the case of the Jātakas there is evidence pointing to the existence of texts consisting of the bare dialogue verses (LÜDERS 1941: 136 ff.). However, the existence of such bare texts only shows that the dialogue text was fixed and that it was left to the imagination of the narrator, or the reader, to make up the story. The very fact that the stories were not fixed, accounts for the popularity of this “ascetic poetry" (ALSDORF) among the various religious streams of India; each could, and did, adapt the material to its own purposes. Whatever "sectarian" elements one wished to introduce had to be relegated to the story. This means that even if in the source from which the Jains borrowed the material the dialogue verses had been embedded in full-fledged prose stories, the Jains most likely ignored the prose text anyway. It follows that the agreement between Uttarajjhāyā and the Jātakas on the point of the dialogue verses does not tell us anything on the format of the source used by the Jain redactors. On the other hand, even if the hypothetical first Jain redactors worked from a version which consisted only of the verse dialogue, we cannot be certain that they repressed the urge to add narrative passages of their own making. In any case, the Jātakatthavannanā, on the one hand, and the present text of the Uttarajjhāyā, on the other, would testify to the universality of this urge.
Turning to the dogmatic and disciplinary chapters, it appears that if we remove the verses containing absolutives in -ūņa(m) and the āryā verses the result is a highly irregular text. Side by side with chapter 31, which has been neatly introduced and summed up, we would have had chapter 36, without any introduction or conclusion, and chapter 20, with an introduction, but no conclusion. The origin of this uneven situation is very difficult to explain. As to the process of the compilation of the Uttarajjhāyā the hypothesis involving an Ur-Uttarajjhāyā, that is, the present text without the later addition, seems to be premature. In the case of the legendary