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THE JAINA GAZETTE
raised to him at Sravana Belgola naturally came in an early period to be called as Gommata (or Gommatesvara) which is but a 'Tadbhava' form of the original name Manmatha. Thereafter, Nemicandra, in order to perpetuate the memory of the great and pious act of its installation by his disciple Camunda Raya, adopted for him the new name 'Gommata' (or 'Gommata Raya'), i.e., the 'Raya' who had installed the 'Gommata and addressed him as such and recorded it in his 'Gommatasara' which he had expressly written for the said Camunda Raya, and which he called 'Gommatasara' in order to preserve for posterity the new name he had conferred on his disciple. For, the title 'Gommatasara' of the said work means 'the quintessence (of the philosophy of Jainism, of course) made for (or offered to) Gommata (i.e., Camunda Raya)' in which new title (of the said work), its real and subjective title Pancasamgraha (i.e., 'a compendium of five things') has been utterly lost,
Post Script.
Though it has been said above that the Sanskrit word Manmatha was transformed into the Kanarese 'Tadbhava' form 'Gommata', it seems far more probable that the Kanarese borrowed it from the Marathi language rather than directly from Sanskrit. There was (and there still is) a very large commerce of words between Marathi and Kanarese (for the provinces in which these languages are spoken are contiguous at several points), especially in those far-off times, as is amply evidenced by a pretty large number of words native to 'any one of these languages also found in current use in the other. Marathi, it need hardly be said, is derived from the ancient Maharastri Prakrit and is thus an Aryan language, while the Dravidian Kanarese is not; and the Maharastri Prakrit, as is well-known, was much in vogue among the Svetambara Jainas. Now side by side with Marati there was (and still is) another Prakritic language derived from the Magadhi (or Ardha Magadhi) Prakrit, which being the vernacular of the Konkan, is known as Konkani. This Konkani (possessing no literature of its own and sunk into insignificance now) was once in a flourishing condition. It is Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
