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Walther Schubring's Analysis of his 1910 Ācāranga-Sūtra (Ayār'anga-suttam) edition
229
Analysis
(Schubring's page numbers are supplied in the form (...).)
(45) The comprehensive tradition which has come down to the present time in the layers of the Niryukti, Cürņi, Tīkā and Dipikā attempts to present an understanding of the Acārânga and it reproduces the intentions of the text as we have it today by and large correctly. For, in the first Srutaskandha, with which the following is solely concerned, what provokes the surprise of the reader (is that): the creation of an uninterrupted continuity of verse, fragments of verse, right up to prose and from it the resultant logical and linguistic somersaults, is not its (the tradition's) doing, but already goes back to the redactor of the text. An original accomplishment is evident in the explanation of individual words, where the scholasticism common to the commentators often obscures the simple sense of the old words and has lead sometimes to a re-interpretation, sometimes to a misunderstanding.
This traditional interpretation, certainly to be respected for its value over the many centuries, is reflected in Professor Jacobi's translation of the entire Acārânga in volume XXII of the Sacred Books of the East (1884) in which he, apart from the Niryukti which hardly deals with the (original) wording of the text, and the Cūrni, agrees with the interpretation of the sīkā and its excerpt, the Dipikā; he thereby, however, brings to light many metrical parts, much more than in his 1882 editio princeps. In the same way, Bose where he deals with Jainism in his Hindu Philosophy (Calcutta, 1887), and Pullé in Catalogo dei Manoscritti giainici della Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (Florence, 1894) stand on the basis of tradition, the former closely following Jacobi. Even Devrāj 1902, to conclude from the notes which he takes from the Țīkā, is completely dependent on it, at least in the explanation of words; and his arrangement of the text in 522 short paragraphs is only apparently a progress in free judgement.
The textual-historical examination, which I attempt in the following for the first time, produces quite a different picture, in front of which the difficulties which were felt by editors and translators till now obviously disappear. (46) The examination begins appropriately with the distinction between metrical and prose parts.
The metrics of the Bambhacerāim-so the traditional title of the first Śrutaskandhacontains triştubh, jagatī, śloka, āryā, and quite sporadically also vaitālīya (24, 29) and aupacchandasaka (29, 1) The distribution of the verses in between the prose is not uniform. Sometimes both are in constant alternation, sometimes there is an undisturbed series of stanzas, sometimes there are long periods without any trace of verse at all. Two kinds of style, now, should be distinguished: first, the prose style, unmixed prose discourses in broad detail, largely in an organized construction of complete sentences. On the other hand, the frequent
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