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212
JAINA GAZETTE.
[June & July
of it, two lithographed, and one in movable types (era 1832-3, 1810 and 1882. respectively). There is no evidence that its author was a Jain ; but the text which this author translated was a combination of the two oldest Sanskrit texts of the Jain recension.
Turning now our eyes from Gujarat to Maratha, we here find several reductious of the Panchakhyana, partly in Sanskrit, and partly in Maratha. · All of them are based on or directly translated from the two oldest Jain recensions of the Panchakhyan.
There is, first, a Sanskrit version by some Brahman named Anant a Vaishnava, who in his introductory stanzas calls himself a son of Nag Deo Bhatt, a scholar belonging to the Vedic school of the Kanina. He calls his work which, on the whole, is but a meagre abstract from the textus simplicior, Kathamritnidbi or, ‘Ocean of the Amrit of stories'. Wherever he alters the purport of bis source, he shows a very poor taste. His book is much inferior to its Jain source,
Another Sanskrit version is that of the Vaishṇava Ramchandra.
This seems to be merely a first draft which never was finished. The colophon, by Ramchandra's son Vasudeo, is dated Samwat 1830, Shake 1695. This recension is a combination of the first and fifth Tantras of the textus simplicior and of the fourth and fifth Tantras of the so-called Southern Panchatantra spoken of in the above lines.
Amongst the old marathi versions, there is first an anonymous prose redaction, which seems to have been handed down in two different tests. Both of them contain the stanzas in Sanskrit, with or without Marathi translations. The text from which the translation was made was a combination of the two oldest Jain recensions One of the two tests of this translation has been published by Vinayak Lakshman Bhame in numbers 38 to 45 of his Maharashtra Kavi, Bombay, Induprakash Press, Shake 1929.
A metrical version in Old Marathi was made by a Bhagvata whose name was Nirmal Pathak. The only Manuscript of this recension which is known to me belongs to the India Office Library,
London. Nirmal Pathak, apparently had but a slight knowledge Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
