Life of Hemchandracharya

Author(s): Manilal Patel
Publisher: Singhi Jain Shastra Shiksha Pith Mumbai

Page 55

36
LIFE OF HEMACANDRA must have taken a long period of secret intrigue before the king allowed himself to visit the Jaina Upāśraya and to sit at the feet of Hemacandra as a listener to the sermon. However, as to the manner in which the gradual friendship was formed and how Hemacandra won the favour and the confidence of the king, we may at least put forward certain assumptions, not wholly baseless, with the help of some suggestions from his other works, even though we may fail to attain full certainty. But before these remarks are made, it is necessary to go over Hemacandra's activities during the period from V.S. 1199, the year of Jayasimha's death, until his acquaintance with Kumarapāla in V. S. 1214 or V. S. 1215.
As has been said above on p. 18, Hemacandra had undertaken, after his appointment as the Court-Pandit about V. S. 1194, the task of writing a complete series of manuals for the worldly sciences and specially for Sanskrit Composition. Of these, the Grammar and its appendices with the commentary, parhaps also both of the Sanskrit Lexica and the first fourteen cantos of the Duyūsrayakāvya were completed before Jayasiṁha's death. After V.S, 1199 he appears to have pursued his plan further without worrying the loss of his position in the court, and worked on tirelessly as a private scholar. The first work belonging to this period, is his Manual of Poetics, the Alamkāracūdāmani.se In the above-mentioned (Note 38) passage of the same it is said that it was written after the completion of the Grammer, and another very striking circuinstance shows quite clearly that its compilation took place at a time when the author did not enjoy royal favour. For, the dedication, the compliment to the ruler of Gujarat, is lacking not only in the text but also in the commentary which contains a great number of verses. This latter point is all the more weighty as it was a fashion of the courtwriters on poetics always to add verses in honour of their patrons. And Hemacandra himself is no exception, for we find him missing no opportunity of flattering his lord in two of his other works. The one case in point occurring in the Commentary on his Grammar was mentioned above. The second one will be forth with discussed. Particularly in a work on Poetics it would have been easy to celebrate the heroic deeds of Jayasimha or Kumārapāla in the same way as is done by the older Vāgbhata in his Alamkāras'āstra.?" As, however, this does not happen, it can well be supposed that the author at the time of writing the work, had no connection with the king and it is not hard to determine that that was the period between Jayasimha's death and the beginning of the acquaintance with Kumārapāla. The same is true about the Chandonus'āsana," the work on Metrics, which was written, as is evident from the introductory verses, immediately after the Alamkāracūdāmani; as also about the Commentary belonging to it. Here, too, we miss the dedication and the compliments to the king in the illustrations. Moreover, it is to be noted that the texts of both of these manuals were first finished and the commentary on the Alamkāracūdāmani was written just after the completion of the Chandonus'āsana. This is evident from the fact that Hemacandra refers to the latter in the former and speaks of it as a completed work." Also numerous supplements to both the great Sanskrit Kosas had their origin in that period as well as, surely, the text of the Prakrit Lexicon, the Des'ināmamālā or Ratņāvali. To the supplements belongs, first of all, the Sesākhyā Nāmamālā which purports to complete the Abhidhānacintāmani, and which contains particularly extracts from Yādavaprakāśa's Vaijayanti.78 Then the Nighantu or Nighantus'esce,
numerous suppehe text of the Prabu Sesäklyā