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these three groups-viz their pre-occupation with an examination from the Jaina standpoint of certain more or less important theoretical questions One has a feeling that Prof Deleu tends to emphasize what is peculiar to In any each of these groups rather than what is common to them all case, an assessment has to be made of what Prof Deleu contributes towards an understanding of these three most important groups of Bhagavat passages Prof Deleu himself makes no over-all evaluation of the contents of these three groups of passages -not, of course, of Bhagavatt as a whole Maybe he feels that the time has not yet come for making such an evaluation For in most cases there is so little continuity of contents between one Bhagavatt passage and one that follows that all attempt at evaluating the contents of the text as a whole torns out to be a frustrating experience And yet what Prof Deleu himself has done should facilitate such evaluation on the part of the future students of Bhagavatt Even so, what he has done has to be examined with a view to guessing as to what his evaluation of the whole text is likely to be, in other words, It is necessary to make a critical assessment of Prof Deleu's summary analysis of the contents of Bhagavan (occasionally supplemented by his own explanatory notes), an analysis that constitutes the main body of his present study However, before that is done let us cast a glance at the last thing-a very important thing-that Prof Deleu has done in the course of his introduc tion, viz. his sarmising the possible causes that led to the present arrangement of the Bhagavan passages into uddešakas, of the uddeśakas into latakas, and of the latakas into the total text.
( 11 )
On the face of it, the Bhagavatt arrangement of passages into uddejakas seems to be most disorderly possible And since no single author could have composed such a huge mass of passages so loosely connected with one another the surmise was natural that here we have before us a case of some traditionally received material indiscriminately reproduced lu the form of the present text by some tradition-bound and dull editor or group of editors After Prof Deleu's study the situation undergoes an interesting change Of course, Prof Deleu too concedes that a logical interconnection between the consecutive passages is hardly ever present here, (he even goes to the extent of hluting (p 45, footnote 53) that in case such an interconnection is actually observed anywhere then It ought to be treated as being a result of some interpolation) But on his showing two types of extraneous connection are a frequent enoug occurrence within the body of Bhagavant, they may be designated 'associa tion of ideas' and 'association of sounds" The presence of both thes types of extraneous connection in the Jaina canonical texts was firs
