Life and Stories of Jaina Savior Parcvanatha

Author(s): Maurice Bloomfield
Publisher: Maurice Bloomfield

Page 13

Preface
another's body,' in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. LVI, pp. 1-43. This is no better than many others, e. g., the story of King Hariscandra's courageous endurance, 3.556 ff.; or the story of Vanarāja, the waif who became king, 7.501 ff. The present work gives a sufficient account of them all. The stories as a whole, as well as the individual motifs which enter into them, are accompanied or illustrated by references to parallels, on a scale perhaps not attempted hitherto in connection with any fiction text. A good many of these remarks proved to be too cumbersome to incorporate as foot-notes on the pages of the story itself; they are relegated to a rubric of Additional Notes, following immediately after the main text.
The Digest of the Stories, the main part of the work, is preceded by an Introduction which deals briefly with the sources of the Pārçva legend, and then epitomizes the legend itself. In this way the frame story of Pārçva is marked off from the incidental or emboxed stories. The Pārçvanātha, is, however, not only a story text, but also a sort of Nīti-çāstra, or Book of Moralities.' A thousand or more nīti-stanzas, follow the entire range of Jain morality, beginning at the top with dharma (religion), and going downward thru nīti (conduct or tact) to artha (worldly wisdom), and kāuțilya (shrewdness or trickery). Many of these stanzas belong to the floating stock, long familiar thru Böhtlingk’s Indische Sprüche, and many that are new are just as shrewd or racy as the old. A brief account of the substance of this nīti is given in Appendix I.
Further, the language of the book is rich in new materials: The influence of the Prākrit languages, the primary literary vehicle of the Jains, is at work in the otherwise excellent Sanskrit of the author. The text is