Sambodhi 2012 Vol 35

Author(s): J B Shah
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 44

34
M. A. Dhaky
SAMBODHI
list-gurvāvali/paāvali-has been noted or noticed. The Manaka anecdote seemingly thus is of ancient origin and doubtless possesses an historical kernel. It is, in point of fact, singularly serviceable as a lamplight in tracing out and in determining the genuinely older portions that may be ascribed to the intentions and style of Arya Sayyambhava. This is so because, the doctrinal and disciplinary passages and verses, if composed for a very young friar, a minor, have to be what is needed for him, what he can comprehend, and in the most facile manner through which it can be communicated to him.
Traditionally albeit, as a pious just as an explicit faith of the commentators from the sixth century A.D. onward, and also as a fond belief of the current writers including Western, the entire Daśavaikālika-sūtra has been taken as of a single authorship and hence, by implication, of the same period. Indeed, no writer of our times has expressed doubt about it. However, the assumption runs into serious difficulties when analytical tools are applied. Whatever the meaning of the title “Daśavaikālika’ may have been-it has been variously explained by the early and medieval commentators—the fact remains that it contains daśa/ten chapters, of varying lengths, differing styles, and of different decades, as also of differing degrees of seriousness as well as of treatment of the primary matters which a Nirgrantha ascetic ought to know for monastic observances. Taking Manaka, the boyfriar, as our guide, the orientation of the peculiar style, phraseology, and the manner of organization adopted by Arya Sayyambhava can at once be perceived. The factors of language, metre, and the nature of content involved also help detect what was germane to the original author's style, his thinking, intentions and preferences, and what indeed was consistent with the most ancient times and climes in which the author and his young friar-son lived. It would then be possible (even without resorting to textual/linguist analysis) to separate the earliest strata inside the text which, with some confidence, can be ascribed to Arya Sayyambhava.
The history of the continual existence of the Daśavaikālika-sūtra helps take certain primary decisions. That it existed in the eighth, seventh as well as in the sixth century A.D. in the shape much as we today see it, is proven by the exegesis on the work—the Sanskrit vrtti of Yäkinīsūnu Haribhadra sūri (c. mid 8th cent. A.D.), a cūrņi styled as the Vrddha-vivarana (c.last quarter of the 7th cent. A.D.), also an older commentary—the cūrni of Agastyasimha (c. A.D. 575-600)--and of course the niryukti (c. A.D. 475-525). The overall text may have been in this shape before the Valabhi Synod II (c. A.D. 503/