Operation In Search of Sanskrit Manuscripts in Mumbai Circle 1

Author(s): P Piterson
Publisher: Royal Asiatic Society

Page 68

IN THE BOMBAY CIRCLE.
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will be able to form an opinion with regard to the value of the collection. I shall be happy to undertake to procure for scholars, with the consent of H. H. the Mahârâna, which I doubt not will be cheerfully given, copies of any of these books.
Oodeypore during the time of my visit was in what we should call a state of great spiritual activity. The Mahârâna and the bulk of his people were celebrating the primæval rites of the Dusserah as Tod saw them, * and as the spectator of a thousand years ago may have seen them. Opposite the little group of English, who watched the great procession of the worshippers of the Sun go past, the reformer, Dynananda Sarasvatî, mounted on an elephant, and surrounded by a little crowd of believers, was there to see honours almost regal paid to the high priest of the famous shrine of Eklinga, whose constant occupation at all other times is to wash, dress, feed, and worship a hideous black stone, but who, for this rite, leaves the holy place and comes into the town. The Digambara Jains in their turn, who are very numerous in Oodeypore, had been fluttered by the arrival in their city from Edur of a Bhattacharya, whose descent by “spiritual succession and the laying on of hands" set him in their opinion high above all other powers, spiritual and temporal, in Oodeypore.
I regret that circumstances prevented me from having an interview with the Brahminical reformer: though, as Professor Max Müller may be interested to hear, I was indebted to him for the loan of a volume of the editio princeps of the Rig Veda, to which I had occasion to refer. But I saw Kanakakîrtti, the Jain teacher, in his mandira, or cathedral, more than once; and obtained a great deal of information from him. Kanakîrtti worthily maintains the traditions of Jain learning. He is the owner at Edur, his chief seat, of a library of Digambara books, numbering according to his own account no less than 10,000 volumes, which he has promised to throw open to me if I can make it convenient to visit that remote town. Among the books brought by the Bhattacharya with him to Oodeypore on the occasion of his present visit, I was highly gratified to come at once upon a poem called the Yaśastila k am, by Somad ev a, which I had been on
* See the first volume of Tod's "Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan," p. 582.
† 1 visited the shrine of Eklinga, and was a witness of this extraordinary exhibition,