History of Canonical Literature of Jainas

Author(s): Hiralal R Kapadia, Nagin J Shah
Publisher: Prakrit Text Society Ahmedabad

Page 255

APPENDIX1
Schubring's ĀCĀRĀNGA ANALYSIS
A longstanding tradition that has come down to us in the strata of Niryukti, Cūrņi, sīkā and Dipikā seeks to convey an understanding of the Acāranga, and, speaking generally, it correctly gives out the intentions of the present-day text. For in the first Śrutaskandha - concerning which alone we ought to speak in the following - what causes startle to the reader viz. the building up of an uninterrupted continuity right across verses, verse-fragments and prose and the logical and linguistic salti mortali resulting therefrom is not its doing but reaches back to the text's editor himself. Its own achievement comes to light in the explanation of particular words where (however) the scholasticism usual with commentators has often overwhelmed the simple meaning of old words and led to many a misinterpretation, many a misunderstanding.
This traditional understanding - not void of regard in the course of its currency for many centuries - was reflected in Prof. Jacobi's translation of the entire Acāränga in volume XXII of the Sacred Books of the East (1884) where he, ignoring the Niryukti - which hardly concerns itself with the wording of the text - as also the Cūrņi, follows the interpretation offered by the sīkā and its abridgement, the Dipikā; however, in this connection he already brings to light not a few metrical portions, adding yet more to those he had done in his editio princeps of 1881. Similarly, Bose, when he deals with Jainism in his 'Hindu Philosophy (Calcutta, 1887) and Pullé in the 'Catalogo dei Manoscritti gainici della Bibliotece Nazionale Centrale di Firenze' (Florenze, 1887) take their stand on the ground of the tradition, the former most closely following Jacobi. To judge from his notes which he borrows from the
1.
This Appendix is prepared by Dr. K. K. Dixit specially for the present revised edition.
(Ed.)