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PURATANA-JAINAVAKYA-SUCI
king Siladitya was ruling on Wednesday, Svati Naksatra, Caitra Paurnima, the current Saka year being 531 Such and other chronological details, which are lately coming to light, will require us to state with reservations the famous remark of Whitney that all dates given in Indian literary history are pins set up to be bowled down again. Further, the zeal of Sastradana has so much permeated the hearts of pious Jainas that they took special interest in getting the Mss, of books prepared and distributed among the worthy A typical case I may note here, and it gives a great lesson to us who never issue, even today, an edition of more than one thousand copies of any Jaina scripture A pious lady, Attimabbe by name, fearing that the Kannada Santipurana of Ponna (c. 933 A. D.) would be lost altogether had a thousand copies of it made and distributed This zeal of preservation and propagation of literature has assumed a concrete form in the establishment of Sruta-bhandaras those at Pattan Jaisalmer, Moodbidri, Karanja, Jaipur etc can be looked upon as a part of our national wealth As distinguished from the prasastis of authors, we get those of pious donors of Mss at the end of many of them; and they are full of historical details which are useful not only for reconstructing the history of Jaina society in particular but also of Indian society in general
The early literature, of Jainism is in Prakrit But the Jaina authors never attached a slavish sanctity to any particular language Preaching of religious principles in an instructive and entertaining form was their chief aim, and language, just a means to this noble end According to localities and the spirit of the age the Jaina authors adopted various languages and wrote their works in them The result has been unique, they enriched various branches of literature in Prakrits, Sanskrit, Apabhramsa Old-Rajasthani, Old-Hindi, Old-Gujarati, Tamil, Kannada etc In every language their achievements are worthy of special attention The credit of inaugurating an Augustan age in Apabhramsa, Tamil and Kannada unquestinably goes to Jaina authors, and it is impossible to reconstruct the evolution of Rajasthani, Gujarati and Hindi by ignoring the rich philological material found in Jaina works, the Mss of which bearing different dates, are available in plenty Their achievements are equally great in Sanskrit literature, and their value is being lately assessed by research scholars The Jaina works in different languages often show mutual relation, and their comparative study is likely to give chronological clues and sociohistorical facts
When we take up the original and authoritative treatises dealing with Indian literature, as a whole, in different languages, we find that full justice is not done to Jaina works coomensurate with their merits and magnitude There, are some notable exceptions like A History of Indian Literature, Vol II, (Calcutta 1933) by M Winternitz, Karnataka Kavicharite, Vols I-III (Bangalore 1924 etc ), etc The reasons of this neglect are many We should neither blame nor attribute motives to the historian of literative, because his chief aim is to collect systematically the results of upto-date researches carried on in the literature of which he is writing a connected account. The orthodoxy of Jainas did not open the Ms libraries to early European scholars who led the front of research in Indian literature, the Jaina works were perhaps the last to fall in their hands, the Prakrits and Dravidian languages attracted few scholars, naturally the work that was done by them was limited, and the Jaina literature
