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Grammatical Riddles from Jain works
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11. Riddles of this kind available in our Jain corpus refer to a variety of works. To some extent they are of interest for the history of grammatical tradition and for an appraisal of the spread of grammatical schools in Medieval India.
11.1. Jinavallabha's Praśnottara devotes two rather elaborate stanzas to the sautra-jāti, but the commentators' silence about the quoted sūtras and their sources is noteworthy. In the first stanza the pattern is different from the instances of the VMM because it represents a mixed type, called by the author trih-samasta-sútrottara-jāti. Instead of being reached at through the piling up of micro-elements, the sequence forming the answer is taken as a whole and can be understood in three different ways :
sva-janaḥ prcchati, “jainair aghasya kaḥ kutra kīdṛśe kathitaḥ ?" kathayata vaiyakaraņāḥ sūtram Kätyāyaniyaṁ kim ? (JP 64)
One's own kinsman asks : "What have Jains said of sin regarding which thing of which type ?"--Kinsman, bondage regarding the means of activity which is a very big fight bandho, bandho 'dhikarane 'dhika-raņe
Tell, grammarians, what is Kātyāyana's sūtra ? bandho 'dhikarane29
If we except the vocative and the rather artificial analysis of adhikarane as adhika-rane, a compound of rare occurrence (even in the Poona Sanskrit dictionary), the first part states fundamentals of the Jain doctrine with the relevant technical terminology : karmic bondage (bandha) is one of the fundamental truths (tattvas, cf. Tattvārthasūtra 1.4); as for the term adhikarana, for which the standard passage is Tattvārthasūtra 6.8 : adhikaranam jīvājīvāḥ (developed in the subsequent sūtras), its first meaning 'basis or means (of any activity) "30 applies here as well. However, the fact that all activity is viewed as generating particles of karman in the individual soul has led to a restriction of meaning; hence the explanation of adhikarana as "a means, implement or weapon of karmic bondage" and the translation of TS 6.8 as "The instruments of long-term karmic inflow are both sentient and non-sentient entities31." This traditional semantic equivalence accounts for the gloss adhikarane pāpa-vyāpāre of the commentaries on JP 22 (quoted in note 29).
On bandho 'dhikarane as a grammatical sūtra, all the commentaries are silent. The identification of the Kātyāyana mentioned by Jinavallabha
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