________________
Introduction
a work rather than a well arranged and finished treatise'. Hoernle has edited this work as early as 1880, when Prākrit studies were in their infancy, and nothing in fact was known about Apabhraíśa as a dialect commanding vast literature; his material was scanty: his was a difficult tak to rebuild a consistent text, with Pāli language and Asokan inscriptions in view, out of bewilderingly chaotic material. His rigorous method, about which he has sufficiently explained and against which Pischel and Gune have rightly complained, has led him to relegate this sūtra and the quotation to the appendix indicating thereby that they belong to Revisionists. The context in the Grammar, where the present sūtra with the illustrative verse
occurs in the company of ten other sūtras, all referring to Apabhramśa, is not a proper one this we will have to accept with Hoernle. But this does not forbid us from accepting them as genuine in other parts of the grammar, remembering that the sūtras appear to have been disturbed in their arrangerent. Canda recognises an Apabhramśa dialect in which r as the second member of the conjunct group is preserved. That this was a fact of an Apathramśa dialect is seen above. It is illustrated by Rudrata's slēşa verse and by some illustrations of Hemacandra. We expect that Canda could not have disposed of Apabhraíša in one sūtra; by accepting the above Sūtras more information is being added about Apabhramsa. It is natural that the grammarian might illustrate his sütras with quotations from literature. It is significant that this quotation does not occur in Hemacandra's grammar : that sets aside the suggestion that the Revisionists might have added it from Hemacandra's work. With Gune I am inclined to accept that the presence of these süfras, with the quotation, is quite natural in Canda's grammar,
Different views are held as to the date of Canda. Hoernle thinks that his reconstructed text, which mainly follows Ms. A, presents a very archaic phase of Prākrit language, and therefore Canda's work is composed probably scmeuhat later than the 3rd century B.C., the period of Asokan inscriptions, ard probably earlier than the beginning of the Christian era 'assuming of course that he was contemporary with that language'.2 According to Hoernle the present sūtra and the quotation belong to the Revisionists whom he puts later than Vararuci, but how much later he does not say anything. The approximate date assigned to Vararuci is 500 A.D. According to Gune Canda lived at a time when the Apabhraṁsa had ceased to be a mere dialect of the Abhiras and become a literary language, i. e., after the sixth century A.D. and not before'. Thus the revised form can be tentatively placed about 700 A.D.3 SO P.-Prakasa will have to be put earlier than Präkıta-lakşanam.
1 Dalal and Gune : Bhavisayattakahä Intro.. p. 62, Baroda 1923 2 Hoernle's Intro. pp. 1. 20, etc. 3 M. Ghosh : Journal of the Department of Letters (Calcutta University), Vol, XXIII, P.17
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
