Doctrine of Jainas

Author(s): Walther Shubring, Wolfgang Beurlen
Publisher: Motilal Banarasidas

Page 97

THE CANON
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works mark the end of a long development; what follows them (dipikā or avacuri1) is insignificant and mostly no longer independent. The personalities mentioned are preceded by Haribhadra who, among various other scholarly works, wrote the Nandi-and Avasyakaṭīkā. As has been proved by JINAVIJAYA2 he belongs to the middle of the 8th century. His epoch is significant by its definitely turning away from the Prakrit commentaries in favour of such in Sanskrit. The development of the former at that time had reached the stage of the cunnis. A cunni is a composition in prose3 of a kind wherein a change of language announces itself by a more or less intensive penetration of Sanskrit words and phrases into Prakrit. The object of the explanation is not confined to the canonical text, the Sutta, but also refers to the foregoing commentary, the Bhāsa or the Nijjutti. A Bhasa is in metres and of a considerable length. Comprising thousands of Gāhās it far surpasses each Cunni, the name of which -Sanskrit: cūrṇi-dispersion-is not badly chosen when compared with the block called bhāsa.5 This again is the Nijjutti. for us the Nijjutti (mroyuktı®) is the earliest tangible stage in the Svetambara commentaries, but itself it is the gähä-skeleton for the body of prose explanations which had existed long before and were the ancestors of the material exhibited in a Cunni. The usual size of a Nijjutti, as we know it, is relatively small (a few hundred gāhās), but even there Bhāsa verses have been inserted. As long as such insertions were limited, the title of Nijjutti remained, in which case we find, in the course of time, a Nijjutti followed by a Cunni. But when the size of the latter had swollen
I Often, but wrongly, avac urna.
2. JACOBI, Samarãiccakahā p 1 ff on account of JINAVIJAYA's results exposed in Sanskrit and published Poona 1919 under the title the Date of Haribhadra Süri Thus LEUMANN's calculation ZDMG 43,349 (s 904) is obsolete now.
3. Wrongly called metrical by CHARPENTIER Utt p 52.
4 The word is not confined to the Svetämbaras nor even to the Jains. We find it, though apparently in a different meaning, in the Sivajnanabodha of the Shivaites, see SCHOMERUS, Der Çaiva-Siddhanta p 26. Here cürnikā, vārttika, and udaharana are rendered as "assertion, argument,
example"
5. bhasa and cunni were confounded by JACOBI, Sthav (2nd ed )p. VI. 6. WEBER, Ind Stud. 17, 57 CHARPENTIER, Utt. S. 48.