Book Title: Kevalaodhi Buddhist And Jaina History Of Deccan Vol 2
Author(s): Aloka Parasher Sen, B Subrahmanyam, E Siva Nagi Reddy
Publisher: Bharatiya Kala Prakashan
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SOMADEVASURI’S NITIVĀKYĀMRTAM A JAINA SANSKRIT CLASSIC OF THE TENTH CENTURY AD
G. S. DIKSHIT
It is a privilege to be asked to contribute an article to the B. S. L. Hanumantha Rao Commemorative Volume, which is expected to probe into the realm of Buddhist and Jaina History of the Deccan---the special area of research of the great scholar. It was my good fortune to be his guide for his Ph.D Thesis on Religion in Andhra. This work is a monument to his profound scholarship. Our association continued till his untimely and unfortunate end. I learnt as much from him, as I suppose, he did from me.
This article is an attempt to place Somadeva's Nītivākyāmsitam in its proper place in the Indian literature on polity or Rajanitiśăstra. The two Sanskrit works of Somadeva, which are extant are the Yaśastilaka and the Nitiväkyämritam. The former is a romance in prose and verse or Champu and has become well known to the Indologists because of its masterly appraisal by K.K. Handiqui' in his work known as Yaśastilaka and Indian Culture. Handiqui's estimate of Somadeva as a writer deserves to be quoted: “He is a master of prose and verse, a profound scholar with well-stocked memory, an authority on Jaina dogma and a critic of contemporary philosophic systems. He is a close student of the art of government and in this respect his Yaśastilaka and Nitiväkyämritam supplement each other".
We are concerned here with the last part of the previous paragraph, which says that Somadeva was a close student of the art of government and in this respect his two works supplement each other. But before we come to explain this aspect, we will fix the date of the composition of the Nītivākyamritam and then point out what this work has to say about the scholarly attainments of its author.
Somadeva's Nītivākyāmsitam is divided into 32 chapters consisting of aphorisms on the different aspects of Rajaniti or Polity. The author does not state when he wrote it. He, however, says that he wrote his other work Yasastilaka in 959 AD in a place called Gangadharam in the reign of Vagarāja also known as Baddega. Gangadharam is in the Karimnagar district of Andhra Pradesh. Baddega had built a Jaina temple called Subhadhama-Jīnālaya in his capital Lembulapataka. His son and successor Arikēśari IV granted the village of Vanikatapulu in 967 AD to Somadeva for the repairs and upkeep of Subhadhama. Both Baddega and Arikēśari IV belonged to a branch of Chălukya dynasty and were feudatories of the last great Răshtrakūta emperor Krishna III. Somadeva died in Koppala in Karnataka in 983 AD according to an inscription in that place. Taking all these things into consideration-namely date of the composition of Yasastilaka in 959 AD, receipt of the grant of a village in 967 AD and his death in 983 AD we will not be far wrong in presuming that Somadeva wrote the Nitivákyāmsitam in Gangadharam in about 965 AD, that is after he wrote the Yaśastilaka in 959 AD, which he mentions in this work.
