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Shri Mahavir Jain Aradhana Kendra
www.kobatirth.orgAcharya Shri Kailashsagarsuri Gyanmandir
pleasure, and to be greetly after self-indulgence, is but to increase the load of sin, forgetting the great change that must come, and the incoristancy of human life."
Cf. Udānáv., ch. 1. ("Impermanency'), v. 37:* Continually afflicted by disease, always emitting some
impurity, this body, undermined by age and death, what is the use of it."
Notes.---These three verses, which are quite peculiar to the Prakrit
text, are bound up together in thought as completing the ascetic reflections in v. 5, supra. Tlie Pali parallel of the first line of v. 21, (and posteriori of vy. :0, 22) is in the Saryutta verse cited above, and that of the third line of each of the three verses occurs in the Therayathā, v. 32, and ove need not be surprise'l if the parallel of the middle line, which is common to all the verses, be found out in some uther Pāli verse, not yet discovered. The linking together of three lines, that is, of three separate ideas, into one verse, appears to be a novelty, serving to give altogether a new idea, though the combination seems somewhat incongruons. At any rate, they betray quite a mechanical growth, however much a commentator may try to make out some grand meaning by his ingenuity. We are confident that the process of such co-ordination is earlier in the Buddhist literature, and that in all probability the number of vefses was originally less than three, and perhaps not more than one. As may be conjectured from the Samyutta verse and that in the Udänavarga, the original verse consisted of two lines, and ended with the question "what is the use of it ?" or "kā rati" as in v. 19, supra, or with such reflectiuns as we find in the second line of the Samyutta verse : attiyāmi hariyāmi kāmatanhā samūhatā. However, taking the verses as they are, they seem to admit of a two-fold interpretation : either (1) that there is a break at the end of the second line, the construction lacking in some expression to complete the Stoic rune like that which miglii bu translated "what do you gain (by)"; or (2) that these verses mark a turning point in the general trend of thought, in that they draw the hearer's attention away from the vain moralising on the transitoriness of the body to the real purpose to which the body should be employed. The secund interpretation leals 118 to understand the underlying idea of these verses as follows: "Takiny for granted that the body is such and such, the
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