Nyayavatara and Nayakarnika

Author(s): Siddhasena Divakar, Vinayvijay, A N Upadhye
Publisher: Jain Sahitya Vikas Mandal

Page 19

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ing him the name, Divākara. Being Brahmin by birth and proficient in Sanskrit, this Divākara, now Siddhasena a Yapaniya monk, must have migrated to Ujjain attracted by the great and generous Gupta ruler and by the atmosphere of Sanskrit learning../
It is argued that Siddhasena did not belong to the South, because the peculiarity of d found in the Prakrit of the Jaina works of the South is absent in the Sanmati. The argument, apart from its being negative, is, on the face of it, deceptive and obviously motivated to prove that Siddhasena belongs to Northern or Western India. First, the change of t to d and retention of d are not a regional feature, much less are they confined only to Jaina works of the South. They are a dialectal feature found in the North as well, and while studying Prakrit dialects one cannot confine oneself to Jaina works only. Secondly, in the text of the Sanmati, the speciality of the old Prakrit works and Mss., preserved in Western and Northern India, namely the ta-sruti (which is found even in the Mss. of literary works like the Samaraiccakahā, Kuvalayamālā etc., then what to say about texts like the Vise şavasyaka-bhāṣya etc.) is conspicuously absent. One has to accept that the Mss. of the Sanmati do not possess any of the characteristics of those preserved in the West of India. Thus the argument to disprove that Siddhasena belonged to the South holds no water. The critical text of the Sanmati based on all the available Mss. is still a desideratum. If the variants available on Kundakunda's Pravacanasāra waver between di and i, in the Present 3rd p. sing., the Sanmati has preference for i. But it has to be remembered that the evidence of the Prakrit dialect is almost always a secondary one.