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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FOREWORD There can be very few significant literary or religious writings which have been immune from some forin of scribal, editorial or interpretative alteration in the course of their transmission through history. The continuing use of texts and the mutability which they evince as a consequence are, after all, sure signs of their living significance and of the regard in which they are held amongst the various communities in which they are located. Against this background, many recent participants in philological scholarship have found the notion of a definitive version of any particular work less alluring than it may once have been, and over the last decade or so, pluralistic times indeed in the academic world, textual instability and polyvalency have been deemed particularly worthy of scholarly attention. Nonetheless, this situation, commendable though it may be in many respects, need not entail a further acquiescence to the claim that because the primal versions of ancient texts, especially those, as in early India, whose origins may lie in an oral setting, cannot possibly be retrieved authoritatively, attempts to speculate about their original configuration are therefore vain or valueless. The basic aims and obligations of philological scholarship have not altered so much in this respect.
The production of printed editions of the “vetambara āgama is hardly a new phenomenon. The process started in the mid nineteenth century, although, as Ludwig Alsdorf pointed out (Les Etudes Jaina : etat present et tāches futures, Paris : College de France 1965, p.31), the testimony of each of these early editions had little more value than that provided by an individual manuscript. However, more recent editions, whether Indian or western, althciigh often better organised
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