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Shri Mahavir Jain Aradhana Kendra
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111
Acharya Shri Kailassagarsuri Gyanmandir
editors of the first two works have exhaustively dealt with the philological aspect of the language and there is very little to add to what they have said. In a general way we may remark that the language of the early Mahāyāna texts is really a Prakrit of a peculiar type, using largely Prakrit words with Sanskrit inflexions and Sanskrit words with Prakrit inflexions, and in doing so the authors have conformed to the rules of either the Sanskrit or the Prakrit grammar. There are endless examples of irregularities, e.g., plural subjects having singular verbs and vice versa, same word referred to by pronouns of any gender, lack of sequence of tenses, indiscriminate euphonic combinations, arbitrary conjugations and declensions. It seems that the authors were well up in the Prakrit language and grammar and developed a linguistic medium containing a mixture of Prakrit and Sanskrit. In view of the uniformity maintained even in their irregularities, it may be inferred that a language of the type used in the texts got currency at a certain period in the extreme north-west of India.
An interesting fact relating to the findspot of the mss. is that they were deposited within the vault of a stupa. This is not a singular instance, for in Central Asia and Eastern Turkestan also, mss. have been found deposited in the stūpas. In more than one ms., the name and gotra of the donor of the ms. appear in the body of the mantra in place of "such and such person of such and such gotra" of the Chinese and Tibetan versions (vide, p. 56). The practice of mentioning the name and gotra of the sacrificer is common in Brahmanic mantras. This leads us to the inference that the mss. were specially prepared for a certain ritualistic purpose, and after the performance of that ritual, the mss., sacred as they were, were placed in a stupa. But this explanation cannot be applied to the texts which were not meant for any ritual, e.g., the sutras, avadānas, vyākaraņas, etc. The only plausible explanation that we can offer is that well
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