Two Prakrit Versions of Manipati Charitra

Author(s): R Williams
Publisher: Royal Asiatic Society

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INTRODUCTION
The Manipati-carita or Munipati-carita is a collection of sixteen tales-the figure though in reality inexact is important because it characterises allusions to the work-incorporated in a frame-story, the essential element of which is a false charge of. theft made against a Jaina muni. In this volume are given the text of the oldest known version of the work, an anonymous Prakrit poem to be situated probably in the eighth century A.D., and of the metrical epitome of it composed also in Māhārāṣṭrī Prakrit by a certain Haribhadra Sūri in the twelfth century.
There can be little doubt that, although almost all the Gujarati versions of the tale as well as the Sanskrit Saroddhāra prefer the form Munipati-carita the original title was that used in the present study. It is the form found exclusively in the MPC, and MPCJ and in all the older manuscripts (E, F and H) of the MPCH. In any event as the name of a king 'lord of jewels is inherently more probable than lord of munis'. The second form must have arisen through a corruption in the text of the MPCH where, in their Prakrit guise, the two styles are only distinguished by a slight difference in the penning of a single akṣara, and where the constant repetition of Manivai-muni leads easily to the writing of Munivai-muni. The name of the city is merely based eponymously on that of the hero and can be left aside, but the fact that in all versions except that of the BKK the son appears as Municandra would also have predisposed to such a change.
A distinctive characteristic of the work is its close local association with Gujarat. Of the eighteen versions listed on a later page no less than thirteen are composed in Gujarati; Gujaratisms were detected by Bellon-Filippi in the late Sanskrit prose version, the Sāroddhāra; and Gujarati elements were noted by Upadhye in the vocabulary of the Bṛhat-katha-kośa whose author Harişeṇa was reputedly a native of Kathiawar, and are certainly perceptible in the MPCJ and, and as the glossary will show, in the MPCH.
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