Scientific Contents in Prakrta Canons

Author(s): N L Jain
Publisher: Parshwanath Vidyapith

Page 13

[ XI ]
that knowledge is an everflowing and growing river rather than a static pond. Hence, the knowledge contained in texts of different periods should be taken as specific to those periods and a mile-stone to future growth fronts. Thus, the contents of ancient periodical texts should be studied and analysed with historical perspective. This gives a chance for evaluating the growth of knowledge in different periods. This approach was initiated by the Austrian Indologist in case of Jainology which has been followed by Dixit in this country. The author feels that by adopting this attitude, one is in a position to clarify many earlier inconsistencies at any time without disregard to earlier scholars who had their own limitations of intelligence, studies and experiments. This will also validate the ancient texts on this basis, thus maintaining the continuance of faith in them. Of course, this perspective gets somewhat blurred in cases of those systems which have shown little sense for history. However, it is the current scholar's duty to approximate this history from the available material and contents. It is also felt that this has not probably been the case with many authors of articles, books, booklets on some subject-matters covered by this academic attempt despite the fact that some could mention the differences in canonical and current physical facts. Modern scientific age, therefore, requires to collect, classify and discuss at least the physical contents in early Jaina canons mostly written in Prākṛta language, in a co-ordinated way so that it could be comparatively evaluated with respect to its growth and current state of knowledge. An additional advantage of this exercise will be that it will be let known to the science historians of the world who are little informed about these contents and their overall contribution to the history of science.
These objects have encouraged to undertake the current work. This is a partly materialised form of the project entitled Scientific Contents in Präkṛta Literature approved by the University Grants Commission, New Delhi, under their humanities research scheme. It has covered only six subjects: (i) Chemistry,