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

Page 123

REVIEWS AND OPINIONS ON ĀCĀRANGA Tīrthařkara, and has been working on it with utmost missionary zeal. In this he has obtained the commendations and enconiums from veteran scholars of Prakrit language and Jainism, like Prof. A. M. Ghatage, Prof. G. V. Tagare, Dr. Nathmal Tatia, Prof. S. R. Banerjee, Shri J. P. Thaker, Shri M. A. Dhaky, Prof. Sagarmal Jain and many others, since it is beyond controversy that the language in which Lord Mahāvīra taught his sermons was definitely archaic Ardhamāgadhi.
It should be noted that the editor has gone about the task undertaken by him here very systematically, First he has presented the concordance of the orthographic variants sūtra-wise from the editions of the Mahāvīra Jain Vidyalay, the Āgamodaya Samiti, the Jain Vishvabharati, the silanka's commentary and from several earliest known manuscripts of the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries. Next he has documented
ariation between writing the nasal consonant as a dot or homo-organic (para-savarna) nasal, between the n and n, between preservation, voicing or elision of the intervocalic stops or the stop-constituents of aspirate stops.
Dr. Chandra has given, in the fourth section statistical information about certain phonetic changes as seen in earlier and later word-forms, along with a complete alphabetical index of all the word-forms of the restored text, and has also presented in parralel columns, the restored text along with the corresponding texts according to the known earlier editions. Thus, the present work by Dr.Chandra succeeds in giving a glimpse of some phonological and morphological features of the original Agamic Ardhamāgadhī, of which we find a later form in the Eastern Asokan inscriptions. And the literary evidence based on comparative documentation and assessment of all available data substantiates it.
Dr. Chandra has tackled one of the several aspects of the task of restoring the Agamic texts. Other requisites for forming a sound, authentic and trustworthy idea of the original character of the Agamic texts and the historical
106