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Studies in Jainology. Prakrit
147
The question cited above leads us now to some serious reflections, both linguistic and literary. As I have observed elsewhere, “It was the sublime virtue of the Jaina teachers and authors that wherever they migrated and settled down, they learnt the regional language. cultivated it to a literary one, if it was not so then, and cnriched it through their instructional and literary activities. It exactly happened so in South India and particularly in respect of Kannada.”l4 After the Jaina Samgha migrating from the North during the great famine, established its first colony at Kalbappu or the modern Sravanabelgola in c. 300 B.C., the Jaina teachers and monks, who were Prakritists, must have gradually learnt the Kannada language and begun to use it, by all means, during the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D. There was every possibility of Ācārya Kundakunda’s not only using Kannada language, but also cultivating it for his sermons, which act could have produced some type of Kannada oral religious literature that might have asserted its existence along with rather earlier Kannada oral folk-literature. Admitting a hundred years for the consolidation and perfection of such cultivation of the Kannada language for such oral religious literature on the part of Jaina teachers, there must have appeared during the 4th and 5th centuries A.D., some Kannada Jaina inscriptions15 and a few Kannada literary compositions, which could, in all probability, be a few commentaries on some important Pāhudas of Acārya Kundakunda himself, who had produced for the first time such important pro- canonical texts and who had founded the Mūlasangha that was bound to carry on the torch of his teachings and writings to the wider vistas; and I may even say with stress that his Ratnatraya,16 particularly the Samayasāra, could hardly escape some commentaries in Kannada during this period.
Thus just as the Brahmi script of the early Prakrit inscriptions might have served as the model source for the Kannada script, similarly Acārya Kundakunda's (and his associates) cultivation of the Kannada language for sermons (for oral religious literature) and his important Prakrit Pāhudas might have later given rise to
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