Swayambhuchand

Author(s): H D Velankar
Publisher: Rajasthan Prachyavidya Pratishtan

Page 6

PREFACE
- It is a matter of great pleasure for me that the Rajasthan Puratana Grantha mala publishes herewith as its No. 37 Svayambhū's important manual of Prakrit and Apabhraṁs'a metres, called Svayambhūcchandas. Systematic accounts of Sanskrit and Prakrit-Apabhramsa prosodies reached their culmination in Hemacandra's Chandonusrāsana. The Svayambhūcchandas was one of the basic sources of the latter. . Hemacandra's arrangement, classification and illustrations of metres owe much to Svayambhū.
But the importance of the present work is not confined merely to the fact that it was a two hundred and fifty years senior ancestor of the famous Chandonusāsana. The Svayambhūcchandas is unique in several other ways too. Firstly, Svayambhū himself was a Kavirājaa front rank poet with several voluminous epics of acknowledged merit to his credit. The literary worth of one published work of Svayambhū viz, Paumacariu (edited by my beloved pupil and learned colleague, Dr. H. C. Bhayani, a profound scholar of Apabhraís'a and allied literature and published by me in 1953 and 1960 in three volumes in the Singhi Jain Series) is ample enough to establish it as a high water mark of Apabhraís'a poetry. Svayambhu's account of metres, therefore, bears that stamp of authority of a practising artist, which the work of a mere theoretician would lack. And some of the illustrations in the Svayambhūcchandas are in fact taken from the Paumacariu (vide Appendix III, pp. 241-242 of the present volume.) Secondly, unlike Hemacandra who has composed his own illustrations, Svayambhū has drawn upon more than eighty earlier (or contemporary) Prakrit and Apabhraís'a authors to illustrate his metrical definitions. This fact by itself is enough to make the Svayambhūcchandas highly authoritative
Incidentally, however, so many citations of greatly varying form and content from divergent sources give us for the first time (if we exclude the stray lyric anthologies, with their near-worthless ascriptions) names of a host of authors who, over centuries preceding