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(xi)
All these works have proved very useful for the students of Jainology, and will remain so for time to come. But whereas the Abhidhana Rajendra and the Jainendra Siddhanata Kosha aim at being veritable encyclopaedias, the former drawing upon mainly the Shvetambara literature and tradition and the latter upon the Digambara, the other dictionaries are either incomplete, partial, sectarian, or confined to a particular topic or section of literature. The need for a comprehensive, methodical, authentic and precise dictionary giving original definitions, in chronological sequence, of each of the Jaina technical terms, gleaned from a wide range of literature including almost all the ancient Jaina works, both Digambara and Shvetambara, and accepted as basic and authentic, therefore, remained unfulfilled.
It was the late Pt. Jugal Kishore Mukhtar (1877-1968) who, as early as 1932, conceived the idea of and later chalked out a detailed scheme for the compilation of exactly such a dictionary under the title Jaina Lakshanavali. He was a doyen of learning and an eminent pioneer researcher in the field of Jainology, who devot. ed the major part of his ninety-one years' life to the service of Jaina literature, and produced many valuable works including critical editions, translations and commentaries of several old texts, a number of scathing critiques, lists of mss., collections of colophons, a valuable index of verses of 64 important Prakrit texts, and historical discussions on most of the ancient authors and their works. In 1936, he founded the Vir Sewa Mandir, started its research journal the Anekant, and began in right earnest, work on his cherished scheme of the Jaina Lakshanavali. For about a year the work went on smoothly, but thereafter laxity crept in and, for several reasons, it was ultimately put off, though not wholly given up. After the Vir Seva Mandir was shifted, in the fifties, from Sarsawa to Delhi and a new registered society was formed to run it, Babu Chhote Lal Jain, its chairman, who had great respect for and interest in the work of Mukhtar Sahib, revived the scheme.
The task of compiling the dictionary was stupendous and required the devoted services of a very mature, experienced and learned scholar, quite at home with the whole range of ancient Jaina literature. Fortunately, the man most suited to this undertaking was Pt. Balchandra Shastri who had been associated with this work in its early stages in the late thirties. During the intervening 25 years or so, he had ably assisted in the editing and translating of the Dhavala volumes (VI to XVI), and himself edited and translated about a dozen other important Sanskrit and Prakrit texts. He was, therefore, entrusted, in the early sixties, with the completion and finalisation of the Jaina Lakshanavali. He took it as a labour of love. The result was that the first volume saw the light of the day in 1972, the second in 1973, and the present is the third and last volume.
This marvellous dictionary amply illustrates all the characteristics of Jaina technical terms, as indicated above. Each term, its Sanskrit form, carries with it its definitions in the original, with reference to the texts from which they have been gleaned, followed by an illuminating substance in Hindi, which enhances the usefulness of the work. Moreover, volume I also contains a list of the 390 texts used for the purpose. Their approximate chronology, a descriptive account of 102
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