Book Title: History of Canonical Literature of Jainas
Author(s): Hiralal R Kapadia, Nagin J Shah
Publisher: Prakrit Text Society Ahmedabad

Previous | Next

Page 265
________________ 248 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, Jain Education International For Private & Personal Use Only www.jainelibrary.org

Loading...

Page Navigation
1 ... 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322