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Shri Mahavir Jain Aradhana Kendra
www.kobatirth.org
Acharya Shri Kailassagarsuri Gyanmandir
the oldest paper manuscripts we possess. No. 14, and No. 15, which is another fragment of the first part extending from Chapters XII. to XVIII., also look as old if not older, though they bear no date. The date of No. 16 itself shows that Uața or Uvata, the author, must have flourished at least five hun. dred years ago; but there is a statement in that
manuscript as well as in No. 14 Uata's date, which enables us to determine
the precise period when he lived. In the colophon of manuscripts ofthis author's works and at the end of some of the chapters a couplet occurs, in the first line of which the name of his father is given as Vajrata and the place where he lived as Ânandapura. The sense of the second line of the couplet as it usually occurs in manuscripts of the Mantrabhâshya is : “this commentary on the Mantras was composed after a mature deliberation of [the sense of] words and sentences.” But in the manuscripts I am speaking about, instead of the words in Italics we have in several places “ while Bhoja was ruling over the earth” or “ while Bhoja was governing his kingdom." Anandapura has been identified with Vadanagar in Upper Gujarat, and though Hwan Thsang, the Chinese traveller, tells us that in his time the district in which the town was situated formed part of the kingdom of Mâlvâ, still it is questionable whether the town belonged to the kings of that country in the time of Bhoja, especially since a powerful kingdom had been established, a good many years before Bhoja came to the throne, at Anahilapattana not far from Vadanagar. But the point is placed beyond doubt by another couplet occurring at the end of the tenth Chapter of No. 14, in which Ūata tells us that “ he composed the Mantrabhashya while living in Avanti and while Bhoja was ruling over the country." This shows that though Vajrata, the father of our author,
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