Jaina Concordance And Bhasya Concordance

Author(s): K Bruhn, C B Tripathi
Publisher: K Bruhn, C B Tripathi

Page 11

78
K. BRUHN and C. B. TRIPATHI
dictionary, the Paia-Sadda-Mahannavo. Others are found, but only as occurring in Niryuktis and Bhāṣyas. This development is certainly not explained by the nature of scholasticism alone. It would rather appear that there was a tendency in the metrical commentaries to replace as many words as possible, even words of a trivial character, by farfetched substitutes, and this can already be seen in the case of our two verses (p. 74 above). Probably we ought to say that the authors of the Niryuktis and Bhāṣyas not only coined new words (as was probably done in all periods), but that they strove to develop a vocabulary which was only understood in the community.
(3.4) The last point to be mentioned here is the pattern of disposition, the Dispositionsschema, as found in the works. There is a very conspicous endeavour on the part of the ancient authors to state beforehand the points to be discussed. This may be done in various forms, but chains of the type just discussed and dvaragāthās are the commonest. Here, we do not refer to the character of these organizing devices but to the lack of conformity between such "announcements" and the actual text which should correspond to them. Such discrepancies are possibly an inherent feature of the exposition and not just the result of textual changes (enlargement, abbreviation, transposition).
(4) A systematic comparison of different metrical works showing partial agreement in their texts is always faced with the problem of different degrees of relationship. Two verses may agree totally, almost completely, partially, and so on. It follows from the foregoing remarks that the situation is still more involved in the case of the Bhāṣyas and Niryuktis. There is not only agreement between different works, but also within one and the same work. Moreover, verses and parts of verses occur in different contexts with different functions. Chains are ubiquitous, but also evasive, being sometimes reduced to a single member. Conventional types of parallelism are not missing: Sometimes entire blocks of verses occur in two different works. But it is on the whole difficult to express the amount of overlapping, repetition etc. in quantitative terms.
(5) The last problem to be discussed is purely technical. Verses which agree completely or in part are separated in our concordance whenever the beginnings show differences. But such differences can be removed to a large extent by standardization, more particularly by a "rigid" standardization. A "limited" standardization would merely remove differences due to misspellings (jati, i.e. Skt. yadi, corrected into jai). A "rigid" standardization would remove all orthographical variants: even the correct form jadi would be replaced by the common jai (but here, and probably even in some cases of misspellings, the original form would remain on record in one way or the other, replacement being merely a procedure concerning the alphabetical arrangement). One of the best examples is [Skt.) yathd which appears very often at the beginning of a verse and is variously rendered by jahā, jaha, jah', jadhā, jadha