Mahavira Jain Vidyalay Suvarna Mahotsav Granth Part 1

Author(s): Mahavir Jain Vidyalaya Mumbai
Publisher: Mahavir Jain Vidyalay

Page 510

A SAINT LIKE THAT' AND 'A SAVIOUR' : 49
The consequence of the Tibetan way of translating tâyin can be observed in so many ways that in cases of doubts, if one should read tāyi or tāpī in a Sanskrit MS, one will certainly prefer tāyīl4 when the corresponding Tibetan passage reads skyob-pa. And even in a case where tāyī occurs without having skyob-pa in the parallel Tibetan passage we may conclude that the Tibetan translator had no tāyi before him in his Sanskrit MS.
The question arises how tāyin, which obviously had its home in the Middle-Indic Prakrit sphere, could survive in its original form even in Sanskrit texts, though its meaning was determined as Protector and not by anything which could remind us of “Such a one". The argument that tāyin was taken over unchanged into Sanskrit, as it had become a technical term 15 does not fully explain, why this term had not been sanskritized into trayin throughout its occurrences, after the meaning " Protector” had been assigned to tāyin, as the Tibetan translations of this term show. The main presupposition for a correct transformation of a Prakritic word into Sanskrit was that its elements were of such a kind that they could be clearly ascertained. The tendency thereby is to return to a Sanskrit form which is supposed to be the original one. The task of transformimg tāyin correctly into the corresponding Sanskrit form was not as easy as in the case of samma-sambuddha for instance. In the case of tāyin a correct analysis of the term was necessary in order to reach tādrs with which this word originally was connected. The Tibetan translation of tāyin shows clearly that the original meaning had changed. It was, therefore, nearly impossible to transform tāyin into tādrá16 for those who were arranging Middle-Indic text on the ground of the changed meaning of a comparatively rare word, the original meaning of which had become obsolete.
How the meaning "protector" became attached to tāyin is clearly to see. We should try to realise, how a translator had to behave, who was going to translate such a term. He will certainly have consulted
14 So Cecil Bendall was not sure if áhāra-prajñātāpino is correct or
0-tāyino in his edition of Santideva's Sikşāsamuccaya (p. 31.3 and n. 1), as ya and pa cannot be discerned in his Proto-Bengali-cum
Maithili MS. 15 Lüders-Waldschmidt, Urkanon, $ 108, p. 94. 16 Occasionally there appears tādrnah instead of tāyinah, cf. Bernhard.
Udanavarga, p. 256 quoted under Var. lect. 3d): (Chakr.) devāpi
tasya spphayanti tādȚnah. Cf. n. 12 of my article. G.J.V. 4