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LITERATURE
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literary activity of the Jainas. A vast and varied exegetical literature in the form of Niryuktis, Cūrņis, Bhāsyas, sīkās, etc., as also numerous independent works on different subjects, religious as well as secular, including scientific, were produced in different languages, in prose, verse and other literary forms, during the centuries that followed; and the process goes on even now.
Among these compositions, from the first to the eighth century A.D., works written in the Prakrit language predominate and there is no doubt that the best and greatest amount of Prakrit literature belongs to the Jainas who cultivated alike the ArdhaMīgadhī, saurasenī and Mahārāstrī forms of that language. Apart from religious and philosophical treatises and the very voluminous commentaries, they gave to this language several works on scientific subjects and some excellent pieces of belleslettres like the Pauma-cariu, Samarāicca-kahā, Dhūrt-ākhyāna, Kuvalaya-mālā, Gauda-vaho and Prakrit Dvyāśraya-kāvya.
They began writing in Sanskrit also as early as the first-second century A.D., but it is only from the sixth century onwards that Sanskrit works begin to predominate, and there is quite a good number of Jaina pieces of Sanskrit literature which favourably compare with the best in that language. For example, speaking about the poetry of Jinasena (circa 770850 A.D.), the author of the Pārsv-ābhyudaya-kāvya, Mahāpurāna and Jaya-dhavalā (837 A.D.), Dr. M. Krishnamachari observes that it is “of a high order and often equals, if not surpasses, the beauty of Kālidāsa's expression” while another scholar writes about his Pārsv-ābhyudaya that “this poem is one of the curiosities of Sanskrit literature. It is at once the product and mirror of the literary taste of the age. Universal judgement assigns the first place among Indian poets to Kālidāsa, but Jinasena claims to be considered a higher genius than the author of the Cloud Messenger".
