Jain Journal 1968 04

Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

Page 46

192
JAIN JOURNAL
The wide-spread education-not literacy-was a concomitant of a situation in the long course of history of this country in which public debates under the auspices of some interested courts had always provided the forum for the establishment of the intellectual eminence of the great scholars Such public debates have gone out of vogue now and in recent times though we have a plethora of seminars, meetings, conventions and conferences, financially supported by the Government, they come nowhere near the great public debates among savants that was a characteristic of the intellectual life and heritage of this country
King Jayasimha who has been called Siddharaja maintained a highly learned assembly of which the king himself was the chairman He had four colleagues in this assembly, Maharsi who was a scholar of eminence in logic, Mahabharata and Smrt of Parasara, Utsaha who had attained fame for his learning in Kasmira (which establishes the existence of intellectual communication between Gujarat and Kasmira), Sagara who was the ocean of wonderful intellect and Rama who was versed in logic and dialectics It was before this learned assembly in the very presence of the king that the famous debate between the Digambara Kumudacandra and the Svetambara Devi Suri was held which has been immortalised in the celebrated Sanskrit work Mudrita-Kumudacandra
Coming now to the intellectual climate in which Hemacandra flourished, R C Parikh writes, "It was in this intellectual milieu that Hemacandra, the greatest intellectual of the age, lived and did his work He must have received immense benefit and impetus from such an environment but he must have also found it very difficult to shine amongst such a galaxy of learned men This, probably, explains his tremendous literary output-encyclopaedic in its scope and accurate in detail"
In the galaxy of talents that created the intellectual climate, the foremost that comes to our mind is Govindacarya, the spiritual master of our aforesaid Suracarya and such other illustrious names as Dronacarya, Viracarya, Vardhamana Suri, and many others According to the Prabhavakacarita, Govindacarya was living in the reign of Jayasimha In all probability, the savant who had created so many master minds of the age must have been very old by this time Among his better-known disciples Suracarya was indeed the foremost The readers have already got a test of his intellectual calibre at the beginning of this paper Suracarya was a cousin of the king Bhima and son of the latter's maternal uncle Sangrama Singha, who was perhaps the ruler of Marudesa His earlier name was Mahipala Mahipala lost his father pretty early in life and was handed over for his education by his mother to