________________
128/The Raṣṭrakūtas and Jainism
as a holy book. Another suggestion as a probable title of the work is upasarga kevali stories, a variant of mahā-puruṣa stories. But these are all innovations of later period. The title of the work, as intended by its author, is Ārādhana-KarṇāṭaTikā.
5.4.8. Till recently the work was wrongly attributed to the authorship of Sivakōtimuni. Of all the commentaries on Ārādhanā, and of all the katha-kōśas of the Ārādhanā tradition including that of Harisena and Sricandra (kahakosu), the best is Bhrājiṣṇu's Ārādhanā-Karṇāṭa-Ṭikā. Bhrājiṣṇu's monastic or cognomenic appellation is not known. But the supremacy of AKT, a work of soaring ambition, is that it was written at a transition period of Kannada language. Exactly that was the stage when the preold Kannada language was slipping away making room for the familiar old Kannada phase. From the beginning of ninth cent. onwards and upto the end of eleventh cent., oldKannada dominated the scene of Kannada literature. The traits of modification of pre-old Kannada into old-Kannada are explicitly seen in Vaḍḍārādhane. Bhrājiṣṇu is facile in different Prakrit languages such as Ardhamāgadhi, Apabhramsa, Śauraseni and Jaina Mahārāṣṭrī:
grāma-nagara-maḍamba-pattana-droṇāmukha, types
i.
of villages and towns.
ii. grāme eka-rātram nagare-pañca-rātram aṭavyā daśarātram, a standard phraseology prescribed for the stay and movement of Jaina friars and nuns in the canonical literature.
iii. Vata-pitta-śleṣma-svāsa-khāsa-jarã-aruci-cardi etc, the names of seven hundred diseases.
5.4.8.1. Such other descriptive and enumerative repititions often found in different storeis of AKT, is the influence of Ardhāmagadhi prose style. This confirms that
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
