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Life and Works of Āgama Prabhākara Muni Punyavijayaji
Dr. Umakant P. Shah, Baroda. It is indeed a great privilege to pay my humble tributes to Agama Prabbākara Muni Sri Punyavijayaji who has completed by now seventy five years of his significant and scholarly life dedicated at the feet of the Goddess of Learning. It is not only a privilege but also an opportunity to fulfil though partly my duty towards one who is one of my main teachers in my Jaina studies and without him I would not have been able to get such an easy access to various Jaina shrines and manuscript libraries,
Not only this, but we are, as destiny would have it, related in an interesting manner as if all this was predestined long ago. The grand-teacher (Dadaguru) of Muni Shri Punyavijayaji bad before renunciation married a cousin sister of my father.
In the year of Grace 1895, on Sunday, October twenty-seven, was born in a middle class Bania family at Kapadvanj, in Gujarat, a child which within the last fifty years or so has made what may be called 'Dharma-vijaya' not only in India but also in countries of Europe and America,
Kapadvanj is situated on the ancient traditional highway between Gujarat and Malwa, at a distance of about twentyeight miles N.E. of Nadiad. It is an old historical city well-known for its famous torana (archway) of stone built in the Solanki Age. Still earlier it has been mentioned as a district town called Karpațavanijya in a copper-plate charter, dated equivalent to 867 A.D. (Epigrapbia Indica, Vol.I, page 55). Known to the Skanda Pujāņa, this place, especially the region around it, was known as Karpata in the age of the Mahābhārata. As its old name suggests the town was naturally a trade centre on the ancient highway followed by caravans. But it was also a cultural centre as is obvious from the toraņa mentioned above and varions antiquities found in this district. It continued to be a cultural centre down to our age and the famous Jaina Ācārya Sri Sāgarānandasūri, wbo is credited with publishing for the first time, in our age, almost all Jaina cancnical texts which hitherto were almost inaccessible to in odern scholars, was boro bere. In this town of Kapad vanj died the great commentator of Jaina canops, Acārya Śr Abhayadeva Sūri, in the eleventh century. He died on the Rsi pañcant day and Āgamaprabhākara Muni Punyavijayaji was born on the Rşi pañcami day after atout pine centuries. The Rşipoñcami is an auspicious day of worship of Jñana-booksand both these great scholars have spent their lives in the preseivation and propagation of knowledge-the Āgamas. In a way Muni Punyavijaya has excelled the work of both Abhayadeva Sūri and Sāgarānanda Sūri by preparing critical editions of the Agamas and other monumental texts like the Vasudevahindi.
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