History of Canonical Literature of Jainas

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

Page 265

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THE CANONICAL LITERATURE OF THE JAINAS
Meanwhile, in sequence of the fact that certain contextual groups have by now come to light this (assumption) stands confronted by the circumstance that in these complexes there occur only metrically identical verses or fragments. So it is not the prose that is primary - for then it would remain unclear why its author has drawn his illustrative citations only from the sources of an identical sort - but these metrical constituents themselves form the skeleton of our Verse-Style. The popular verse-series stand at the basis of the clarificatory and explanatory speeches. However, these speeches themselves have not come down to us in all details. Rather they have been preserved firstly in just those cases where their connection with the verses was particularly intimate - inasmuch as in between these verses the preacher inserted, often at the cost of disturbing the rhythm, his own words or it was that he re-wrote their content, supplemented it, nay, even restricted it (13, 4). In these explanations verse-citations are employed not seldom. These are the passages which, in the text, in order to be distinguished from the spoken (,,“) and meditated (“) words, stand within a particular quotation-mark (, ). Secondly, there have been left intact passages that are (somehow) striking - mostly series and enumerations of a substantive, schematic (23, 3) or logical (25, 12-16) type which as such impress themselves on memory. The longest such series are to be found in 1C and 3C and in both cases certainly in the neighbourhood of a plenty of decided chiastic figures which have likewise been preserved as a characterizing mark. From 3, 14 jē logam abbhāikkhai, se attānan abbhāikkhai and vice versa onwards there are fifteen of them in the text. On account of their occurrence - though in unequal measure - in both the types of VerseStyle they are a proof for their approximately simultancous rise, and in their surprisingly large number - along with certain plays on words (16, 14f. 25, 26) - they constitute a characteristic for the rhetorical individuality of the preacher. (The possibility) that this (preacher) Mahāvīra himself was is excluded in view of the direct references to him (12, 19 33, 22 39, 15). On the other hand, in the group of prosefragments 1A etc. there apparently lie before us ipsissima verba which have been imported even as such.
Thus behind the verses “split in the course of preaching", so to say, the analysis allows the appearance of a pure versification - which, of course, does not quite brilliantly satisfy the laws of regular verseconstruction. It is much more irregular than that of the Sūtrakrtānga,