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JAINA CONCORDANCE AND BHĀSYA CONCORDANCE
by K. BRUHN and C. B. TRIPATHI, Berlin
Some years have elapsed since we published our "Prospectus" of a Jaina Concordance (concordance of Prakrit verses) in the quarterly Jain Journal (Calcutta, January 1970). Meanwhile the work has made some progress and a review of the present position seems both desirable and possible. The project is not concerned with any well-known literary area but with the metrical material in early Jaina literature, more particularly with the so-called "Niryuktis" and "Bhāșyas". These two literary types—commentaries and pseudo-commentaries on the Svetāmbara Canon-have baffled the specialists since Leumann's day. One of the latest publications in this field is L. Alsdorf's article on "Jaina Exegetical Literature and the History of the Jaina Canon". It discusses the various stages in the development of the exegetical literature (verse and prose: Niryuktis, Bhäşyas ; Cūrņis, Tikās) and has a direct bearing on the present subject. As the words "Niryukti" and "Bhäsya" will be used throughout the article, it seems necessary to stress from the outset that here we do not use them in the sense of two different literary types (although this is inevitable and justified in certain cases), but as a collective term-"Niryuktis-and-Bhāsyas"—distinguishing the corpus of metrical commentaries from that of the prose commentaries (Cūrņis, Tikās). The contents of the metrical commentaries (commentaries, pseudo-commentaries, independent literary matter designated as commentary) can be summarized as follows:
(i) "Nikṣepas" (and analogous dialectical structures) filled with dogmatical and non
dogmatical matter, detailed discussions of well-defined topics being rare.--Studied by E. Leumann, L. Alsdorf, B. Bhatt.
(ii) Monastic discipline.-S. B. Deo, C. Caillat, A. Mette, C. B. Tripathi, K. K. Dixit. (iii) Narrative matter (summaries, references).-E. Leumann (publications and left
papers).
(iv) Various dogmatical topics.-E. Leumann.
On the whole, a study of the literary stratification presents still greater problems than the study of individual topics. The reader who is interested in the literary problems and wants some general information on the relevant works is referred to the
