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Vol. XXIII, No. 1 dominant characteristic is that of an illustration story told to illustrate one or the other of the pāramitās and other like virtues. As regards its being called Birth Story' or 'Siory of the Buddha's former
irth', it is evidently a misnomer, Jātaka as a tatsama word means 'a new born babe' and not birth' and never the repeated births of one and the same individual. Roots of the Jātakas lie in the illustration stories found in the Pali canons in the form of digest verses (samgraha galbā). These were later elaborated into prose-and-verse stories The root sense of Jātaka <Iñāpaka having been lost, and the pseudo sense of birth' becoming dominant along with the urge to relate all the stories with the BuJdha. the protagonists of all such stories were converted into tbe Buddha in his former births. Nay, Buddha in his former birth was deliberately imposed even on popular stories of other types having little to do with the Buddha or Buddism. Thus the Jātakas grew into a heterogeneous collection having only one string in common, the Budha in his former births. Naturally it became the sine qua non of Jātaka and bequeathed an alien meaning upon this word.
Now let us come to the third derivation viz. from Nyāya, meaning a popular maxim or citation. This has been suggested by Dr. Hiralal Jain. The sagacious veteran of letters has intuitively taken a stride in the near right direction, because between Jñāta and Nyāya (in the above mentioned sense) the latter is semantically closer to 'illustration story'. A Nyāya, such as 'nppa-nāpitaputra-nyāya' or ‘yrddha-kumāri vākya (vara)-Dyāya is essentially constitu stumps of what once might have becn a full fledged illustration story. The stumps help one in recalling the illustration or example story. So Nyāya (in the above mentioned sense) is a close kin of Naya. Nevertheless, Dr. Jain's suggestion has to be turned the other way round, because in all probability it is Nāya which has given rise to Nyāya through a process which may be called false or pseudoSanskritisation of Prakrit words. Nyāya as popular maxim or citation has nothing to do with its root meanings such as justice, logic, discernment etc. It is rather akin to Naya, an illustration or example. So it is not Nāya deriving from Nyāya, but Ņāya falling wide of the mark in course of retracing its origin and blundering into Nayāya. In Prakrit etymology such blunders are not rare. The irony of it is that, the causal sequence having been lost or reverted, the blunder becomes indiscernible. We have another example of such false or pseudo-Sanskritisation in Višvakarma' of which the usage is not in conformity with the etymological meaning. The word is used to denote the presiding doity of engineering, sculpture and masonry etc. But etymologically it should mean the maker of the universe, whereby
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