Jainas in History of Indian Literature

Author(s): Jinvijay
Publisher: ZZZ Unknown

Page 28

NARRATIVE LITERATURE OF THE JAINAS
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Parisista Parvan or Sthavīrāvala Carita is a very store-house of tales and stories of all kinds.".
Numerous are the works which contain poeti cal life-stories of individual Tirthakaras, especially the most popular among them, viz, Rşabha, śāntinātha, Nemī, and Pārsva, besides Mahāvīra himself, Some of these works, as f. i, the PārsvanāthaCaritra by Bhavadeva Sūri (1255 A. D), contain a great many interesting stories, fables, fairy-tales and gnomic sayings.
Again another kind of narrative literature is represented by the Caritras and Prabandhas. The Caritras are legendary biographies of the Tirthakaras, Cakravartins and Kșis of the past, while the Prabandhas contain stories of famous monks and laymen of historical times. That the Caritras contain by no means only dull lives of saints, but also many interesting and amusing stories, for which the life of a saint is only a frame, may be seen from the Pārsvanāthacaritra of Bhāvade vasūri which has been edited at Benares 1912, and of which M, Bloomfield has given a full account. A voluminous work on the lives of all the Tirthakaras is the Trişastisalākāpuruşacarita with its far more interesting appendix, the Sthavīrāvalicarita or Parisistaparvan (edited by H. Jacobi, Bibl. Ind. 1894 and translated into German by J. Hertel, 1908).
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Loc. cit. pp. 505 ff. Loc. cit. pp. 512 ff., and cf. M. Bloomfield, The Life and Stories of the Jaina Saviour Pārsvanātha, Baltimore, 1919. Loc. cit.,
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