Jaina Concordance And Bhasya Concordance

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

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Jaina Concordance and Bhāşya Concordance
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of canonical passages. They are a later development issuing from the earlier phase of the Āgama. Under these circumstances, any prose passage from a prose commentary or from the Agama itself may supply a true "parallel" (parallel in the normal acceptance of the term) to a concordance verse. To these two main considerations (unedited works, verse-prose relationship) we have to add two more points. The prose commentaries contain a large number of verses, and it is with the help of our concordance that such verses can be "identified" (by tracing them somewhere as parts of a work included in the concordance). But there are numerous verses in these commentaries which will not be found in the concordance works ("new verses''). For a sample survey we have included one prose commentary (Sāntisüri, see Section C on p. 69 above), containing 770 verses. (The inclusion of verses which appear in the prose commentaries but may be Niryukti or Bhāşya verses-p. 69 above-is a different matter.) So far it has not been possible to ascertain the number of "new verses" supplied by Sāntisūri, and as the extraction of verses from a prose commentary takes much time, it was not possible to extract the verses from other commentaries as well.–Finally we have to mention that in the case of some works it was difficult to decide whether they should be included in our corpus, partly because they seemed to be later in date (though "old" in a general sense) and partly because the subject matter differed considerably from the material in our concordance works. The works under consideration are, however, of limited extent in the case of large works it would have been easy to reach a clear decision).
Jaina tradition and Indian tradition generally speaking) not only operates with certain types of works (angas, upāngas, mūlasūtras, etc.) but also with fixed lists of works ("11 Angas", "10 Niryuktis''). These are noteworthy attempts on the part of ancient authors (redactors, "historians of literature") to organize their material. Even the traditional concept of a fairly well defined "canon" (Agama) should be viewed from this angle. Whether such attempts have more than historical interest (study of the ancient "history of literature") has to be explored in each individual case. The old lists need not depict correctly the actual state of the literary material in their respective days. In any case we should not let ourselves be misguided by striving after completeness in the terms of those early authorities. A concordance covering "all the existing Bhāşyas and Niryuktis" is not on that ground a complete concordance. A verse from the Uttarādhyayanasūtra or even a prose passage from the Ācāra (Canon) may be much more relevant to a discussion of disciplinary matter (on the average Niryukti and Bhäşya level) than a verse from the little-known "BỊhadbhāşyas" on the Niśithasūtra and BỊhatkalpasūtra.
(2) A problem which affects not only the Concordance but also the interpretation of the material (see the next point) is the abundance of "chains of terms" or Begriffsreihen. The term Begriffsreihe has come to stay in Buddhological studies (E. WALDSCHMIDT et alii). It is still more relevant to Jaina dogmatics. Naturally such chains are very often transmitted in more than one form. Even then we may be permitted