Doctrine of Jainas

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

Page 98

84
OF THE JAINAS
was
up owing to an extraordinary number of Bhāsa verses, it they that gave the whole work its title 1 Both Bhasa and Cunni do not furnish much information about individual words. What they do have to say is dictated by abstracts and is very schematical to the degree that we seldom find a connection with the Sutra.2 Instead, their importance as to history of thought and of literature will be great, when one day all of them will be accessible and subjected to scholarly study.
DOCTRINE
The Nijjuttis are looked upon as works composed by Bhadrabahu, but they are centuries later than the leader of the Order who bore this name in the 3rd century B.C (§ 23. 26) as is proved a o by their being a domain of the common gāhā which was far from being in use at that time 3 LEUMANN holds that the collection of Nijjuttis to be mentioned presently, came into existence about 80 A D. "It follows that 'Bhadrabahu' is an author's name of the kind we meet with in India in great number (e g. in law-books and many other literary products". The author of Av 2, 5, a great scholar, sees his task in writing a NiJJutti on Avass, Dasao, Utt, Āyār, Sūy, Dasão, Kappa, Vav, Sūrap, and Isibhāsiyāim Those belonging to the works in italics are at hand and have been printed with the exception of the Utt -and Dasã-nijjuttis The printed Bhāsas will be registered below. Some Cunņis are-or were-independent of Bhāsas, they partly belong to canonical works, a.o to Viy, Jiv., Pannav, partly to non-canonical ones as Pakkh and Jiyakappa But we must not forget that the word curni in Sanskrit commentaries may denote the famous Avassayacunni.
The authors of tīkās and vrttis often register a different reading (päthäntara, vācana'ntara or sim ), and the same occurs in the Cunnis (paḍhujjai ya). Such variants, partly considerable in
I
LEUMANN, Übersicht 15 b.
2
Comp Dasav -ny] with Dasav 4 (LEUMANN ZDMG 46, 587 f ) CHARPENTIER Utt p 49 wrongly finds fault with the metrics of the Bhāsas and Nijjuttis On the contrary, their authors have sacrificed grammar in favour of metrical correctness
3
4 Übersicht, p 28 b
5 Ib p 23 b JACOBI, Sthav (2nd ed ) p VI calls the author a namesake of the 6th patriarch