Sambodhi 2004 Vol 27

Author(s): J B Shah, N M Kansara
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 52

46
RAMKRISHNA BHATTACHARYA
SAMBODHI
countries, filled with fields of grain, plantations of cane, herds of cattle, indicated by their wealth the Master's lack of greed. The Lord made Bharata-zone in like videha-zone in general by the people being made to know discrement about what was to be accepted and what rejected. From the time of his coronation of king, the son of Nābhi passed sixty-three lacks of pūrvas directing the affairs of his kingdom
We have already noted that Hamacandra was following some age-old legendray traditions which are not specification Jain in origin. But much of his account is taken from Jain cononical works, For example, the idea of the wishfulfilling tree, although found lesewhere also, occurs in detail in the jambudvīpa-prajañapti and pravacana-sárodhāra. The account of the origin of customs it mostly drawn from Avaśyakasūtra. As to the seventy-two arts, (instead of the traditional sixty-four found in Brāhminical sources), Samavāyangasūtra. Antakrddaśā, and Rājapraśniyasūtra, etc., have been mentioned.22 All the accounts in earlier sources, however, do not tally. The origin of alphabet and their numbers vary from source to source. The Avasyakasūtra, Anuyogadvāra, Sthānāngasūtra, but most importantly the first one, provided Hemacandra with necessary information about several stages of continous degeneration. He was not sighing for the lost Golden Age. Nor was he personally sorry to see how things deteriorated in course of time. He simply goes on recording what has been traditionally regarded as the (E)uchronia of the past. It will be futile to search in this account for the chronology of the rise of the arts and crafts that mankind must have mastered slowly throught the ages. The arrangement of the itroduction of different customs is neither logical (the appearance of the king with his cabinet ministers and army before man learnt the art of cooking is literally preposturous) nor empirically valid. But what fascinates the reader is the striking similarity of the very idea of the Golden Age, and its degeneration as found in ancient Europe and Asia.
This kind of primitivism, "technological primitivism,” accords well with the soft variety rather than with the hard one. The legend of the Hyperboreans as described by Diodorus Siculus similarly hints at the natural fertility and all productiveness of the land beyoungd the North Wind. Mela (first century AD) writes, “The narrow land is sponteneously fertile. The inhabitant are very just and live longer than any other mortals and more happily. In fact always happy with festive leisure they know neither wars nor altercation."23
Lastly, we may metion Solinus (third century AD) and Martianus Capella (firth century AD) who also emphasize how the trees (though not wishfulfilling