Makaranda Madhukar Anand Mahendale Festshrift

Author(s): M A Dhaky, Jitendra B Shah
Publisher: Shardaben Chimanbhai Educational Research Centre

Page 103

92
Anna Radicchi
Makaranda
reprinted the Introduction to the Kāśikāvivaranapañjikā by Srish Chandra Chakravarti, dated 1925. On the one hand this rightly indicates the importance of the publishing of the Nyāsa, in Chakravarti's excellent edition, as a contribution to this field of studies; on the other hand, it implies that in 1986 it was believed that nothing of significance had been contributed to the subject following the 1925 study.
Shortly afterwards, in 1988, Narayana Miśra reconsidered, in "Varttamānakāśikāvettigata-jayādityavāmanāmsa-vibhājana-vivecanam", the evidence from native commentators already examined by Chakravarti and drew his first conclusion : the vrttis by Jayāditya and Vāmana originally must have been extended to the entire Astādhyāyī and the evidence now allows us to affirm that the Kāśikā we know contains Vāmana's vrtti only from 6.2 to the end of the Astādhyāyī. Then, however, Narayana Miśra also considered the Nyāsa under pratyāhārasūtra 4 and under 7.4.71 (and also the Padamañjarī under 7.4.71 and 8. 2. 18) and reached the final conclusion that although the attribution of the Kāśikāvrtti to the double authorship of Jayāditya and Vāmana is based on tradition, commentaries like the Nyāsa do not in any case allow the definitive ascription of the parts of the yrtti to Vāmana or Jayāditya respectively. Nor do we find greater clarity or authority in more recent native commentators. We must be satisfied with considering the Kāśikā as the work of the two authors. After more than a century of research, this is a meagre result indeed.
Taking a different path in the same period, another scholar became even more sceptical regarding the possibility of now determining the real author of the Kāśikāvstti. J. Bronkhorst, on two occasions," dealt with the controversial passage of the Chinese pilgrim I-ching who mentions, in the context of Indian grammatical studies, a work he calls the vrtti-sūtra that he attributes to Jayāditya who, he says, had died thirty years earlier. Both the term vrtti-sūtra, which in fact is used in the Mahābhâsya in the sense of sūtra tout court, and the mere mention of Jayāditya, whom tradition names along with Vāmana as the author of the Kāśikāvrtti, have been discussed since the first appearance of the translation from I-ching by Takakusu, who considered vrtti-sūtra=Kāśikāvrtti.