In Search of the Original Ardhamagadhi English Translation

Author(s): K R Chandra, N M Kansara, Nagin J Shah, Ramniklal M Shah
Publisher: Prakrit Text Society Ahmedabad

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In Search of the Original Ardhamāgadhi
K.R. Chandra
The First Adhyayana of the First Śruta-skandha of the Acaränga, is considered to be the earliest and oldest composition of the Jaina Ardhamāgadhi Agamas. It has been reedited linguistically only. The task undertaken by its editor Dr. K. R. Chandra is a Herculean one as per the opinions of various scholars and particularly of the late Āgamaprabhākara Muni Shri Punyavijayajī and Pt.Bechardas Doshi. It took the editor ten years of pains-taking labour to prepare this edition as it was first of all very necessary to sort out the archaic word-forms of the original Ardhamāgadhi from the published authentic editions of the important Āgamic Ardhamāgadhi texts and from the all available manuscripts. It entailed the preparation of thousands of cards for recording the variant readings, to be arranged alphabetically in order to ascertain the original. By way of preparing the background of his researches, Dr. Chandra had published three works to do the spadework. The first one was about discovering the ancient archaic Ardhamāgadhi language of the 6th century B.C. when Mahāvīra delivered his sermons in that language to the laity. The next one was about the restoration of the original language of the Ardhamāgadhi texts. And the third one was the exploration of the ancient traits of the Ardhamāgadhi language from the Prakrit Grammar of Hemacandra and those of others.
The author knows well that right from the times of the 24th Tīrthařkara Mahāvīra, the emphasis has been on the contents of the sermons delivered by the great Arhat, than about the exact nature of the language, since the sermons were essentially oral, that it was the task of the direct principal disciples, known as Ganadharas, to reduce them to laconic aphoristic texts and preserve them in oral tradition, and that the texts thus preserved in oral traditions were sought to be reduced to written documents much later, from time to time centuries after the demise of Mahāvīra.
But, being a linguist by profession, the editor has taken up the uphill, and almost impossible, task of discovering the original nature of the language of the times of the great
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