Nyayavatara and Nayakarnika

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

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Siddhasena and his Works
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approach much is written full of confusion and misunderstanding. Pt. SUKHALALAJI is vacillating about the age of Siddhasena assigning him between 5th to 7th centuries of the Vikrama era. Though the Prabandhas mention the Nyāyāvatāra, they do not include Sanmati among the works of Siddhasena : this is a riddle for which no satisfactory explanation is given. The Sanmatí could not have been the work of a pupil of Vțddhavādi who was threatened with excommunication because of his proposal to put the canon into Sanskrit: it is all a later thought.
No indisputable evidence is brought forth for the common authorship of the Dvā.s, Nyāyāvatāra and Sanmati, beyond saying that these works are the product of such an intellectual gift that all of them emanate from one and the same source. There is good deal of similarity between the works of Samantabhadra and Siddhasena. Intellectual equipments can be found among other authors also as noted. There were thus three clear distinct Siddhasenas: i) the author of the Sanmati; ii) the author of the Nyāyāvatāra; iii) and another, the author of some Dvā.s. The remaining Dvās might have been composed by some other Siddhasenas, more than one. : 1) Siddhasena is said to uphold abheda- or ekopayoga, as against krama, and yugapad-vādu in connection with the jñāna and darsana of a Kevalin. Abhayadeva and Yasovijaya endorse this interpretation, and the latter calls this a new doctrine of Siddhasena.
2) The first (1.32), second (2.30) and fifth (5.21-2) Dvā.s present the yugapad-vāda which is the same as that of Samantabhadra (101) and further endorsed by Akalanka. The author of these three Drā.s cannot be identical with that of the Sanmati. Haribhadra, in his Nandi-vrtti, too quotes Gāthās from the Visesanavati of Jinabhadra attributing yugapad-vāda to Siddhasena, so also Malayagiri on the same, but Yasovijaya has tried to explain it differently so that it could be attributed to the author of the Sanmati. If there was any other Siddhasena advocating yugapadvāda, he must be the author of these three Dvā.s.
3) In the Niscaya-Dvā, No. 19, it is stated that the Jina has two Upayogas, as against the ekopayoga of the Sanmati.
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