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Shri Mahavir Jain Aradhana Kendra
www.kobatirth.org
Acharya Shri Kailassagarsuri Gyanmandir
20
Kalpasútra.
been fixed before the final rearrangement of the Jaina books. Originally a popular dialect, it was naturally adapted by those who handed down orally the sacred lore, to the dialect current at their time and in their country. As the idiom. of Mahârâshtra seems to have ranked, during the early centuries of our Era, foremost amongst the vernacular dialects of India, because the Grammarians treat it as the standard of all Prâkrits, and because it possessed a large literature, of which considerable specimens are still extant, it will not be astonishing that the Jainas yielded to its influence, and when reducing their sacred books to writing, shaped their language according to it. Such a change of language, even in written books, is not without a parallel in the history of literature, for I have already adduced above p. 4. a similar change of the German language, due to the copists, in the compositions of the middle ages. The editor of the Jaina scriptures did not choose to adopt the Mâhârâshtrî with all its peculiarities, but he retained many archaic forms which were, probably, sanctified by long tradition. For an archaic language has always been considered peculiarly fitted for a serious style.
The Jaina Mâhârâshtri, being once fixed as a sacred language, continued to be the literary language of the Jainas until it was replaced by Samskrit. All the old commentaries, the cûrnis and erittis, and a great many independent compositions, were written in Prâkrit. Between 1000 and 1100 A.D., the Jainas adopted Samskrit as their literary language. But the change was neither a sudden, nor a complete one. For Samskrit poems by Jaina authors previous to that period, such as the Bhaktâmara stotra, the Kalyanamandira stotra, the Çobhanastutayas, are still extant, and Prâkrit works were composed later than the twelfth century, e. g. the Paryushanâkalpaniryuktivyâkhyâna by Jinaprabhamuni (samvat 1364) and a great many Prâkrit stotras.
Before I leave the present topic, I must call attention to the orthography of the Jaina books. In general, all manuscripts follow the same system, but in the following points they are at variance with each other.
1) The yagruti is used in some manuscripts only after a and a, in other MSS. also after i, î; u, û; e, o. Hemacandra prescribes, in his Grammar I, 180, the yagruti after a and a, but in the commentary, he says that it is occasionally seen elsewhere also. His rule is partly confirmed by our MSS. For the ya and ya always occur after the a and a. But many MSS. write the ya and ya after all vowels. Both ways of spelling are found in very old and very good MSS. It is, therefore, impossible to decide which is the more correct one. From an etymological point of view, it is more self-consistent that the yagruti should be written after all vowels, because it is the remnant of a lost
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