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 terms of sources utilised, have frequently been influenced by certain flawed presuppositions about the value of the readings provided by the manuscript tradition.
Ideally, any truly critical edition of a Jaina scriptural text would be accompanied by as wide of range of readings as feasible and by all the various available layers of medieval commentary. Such an edition can in fact be found in the recent remarkable Ph.D. thesis ("The Nirayāvaliyāsuyakkhandha and its commentary by Śrīcandra: critical edition, translation and notes') submitted to The Australian National University in 2000 by Royce Wiles. However, it would have to be admitted that the work in question, the relatively short and little commented upon cluster of upangas 8-12, is more amenable to this sort of presentation than the older and longer scriptures of the canon. An alternative editorial strategy might then be radically to reconsider the nature of the readings which have been bequeathed to us by the manuscripts and early commentaries connected with the old mula sutras, the most important textual witnesses for early Jainism.
It is just such a thoroughgoing reappraisal of this evidence, hitherto largely taken for granted, which has occupied the energies of Professor K.R. Chandra in recent years. Though a laborious sifting and analysis of the available printed sources (a task which, it should be said, was accomplished without any electronic assistance), Professor Chandra has been able to show how many earlier editorial procedures employed in producing 'critical' versions of the Śvetāmbara āgama were based on erroneous assumptions about the nature of the Prakrit in which the texts were composed. Chandra's findings, which in effect represent a bold attempt to reconstruct the linguistic shape of the original Ardhamāgadhi of the canon,
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