Kalplata Vivek

Author(s): Murari Lal Nagar, Harishankar Shastry
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

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INTRODUCTION Those who are familiar with the history of Sanskrit literature would not be surprised to meet with Sanskrit literary works which are annoyingly reticent about their authors, or with works whose dates have provided subject for perennial, nay endless, controversy. In such cases, the inquisitive reader is left to the clues available from the corpus of the work concerned and to external evidence whenever available. Kalpalata-viveka, the present work, is by no means an exception to this. It does not allow us the privilege to know the name of its author. However we are able to fix its date with a reasonable degree of certainty with the help of internal evidence supplied by the work and its earliest available manuscript and of external evidence afforded by various other sources. Another and perhaps greater difficulty with the present work Viveka is that it is not by itself an original work but a sub-commentary on such a work, the latter and its first commentary, not being available, if not irretrievably lost. We know from Viveka that the name of the original work on which it is a sub-commentary is Kalpalata and that there was a commentary - an auto-commentary as we shall see afterwards - on the latter called Kalpapallava or merely Pallaval. We do not get any information whatever regarding the authorship of these two works from the present work, Viveka. Authorship of Kalpalata : Viveka does not furnish any information about the author of Kalpalata. It does not even tell us about its own author, in case the two do not have a common author. Fortunately we get a reference to the name of the author of the Kalpalata and Pallava in the Syadvadaratnakara and we can gather some information about him from the following sources : (i) Syadvadaratnakara : This is an auto-commentary by the Jain dialectician Vadi Devasuri on his treatise on Jain Logic, Pramana-nayatattvaloka. Devasuri refers in this commentary to a work named Kalpalata 1. pred 7 faza gate wagte farfa faya atat att faastalagta: 11 P. 1 कल्पपल्लवमात्रेण न ये कल्पलतां विदुः / yun ngalsi fud algasar: II (ibid P. 320 )