Vaishali Institute Research Bulletin 1

Author(s): Nathmal Tatia
Publisher: Research Institute of Prakrit Jainology & Ahimsa Mujjaffarpur

Page 188

PROGRESS OF PRAKRIT AND JAINA STUDIES
177
his advent. The Jaina philosopher's intense love for new knowledge, irrespective of the language of its revelation, enabled him to bequeath a glorious heirloom of logical literature to posterity,
Language is after all a means to expression and not an end in itself. The early Jaina literature, though mainly written in Prakrit, was the storehouse of all sorts of knowledge. The Aņuyogadara Sutta, for instance, though primarily concerned with the possible ways of exposition, discusses topics like weights and measures, atoms and molecules, music and musical instruments, grammar, epistemology, logic and a motley of other subjects which are apparently unconnected with its central theme. Likewise, there are other Prakrit texts such as the Viyahapannatti, Thānanga, etc., which deal with a number of problems only distantly connected with religion and philosophy. The contents are thus unrestricted, though the vehicle of their expression is limited to Prakrit which appears to have been the popular medium of educa. tion. But the growing demand of the intellectuals was also to be satisfied. The Jainas, therefore, had to switch over to Sanskrit much in the same fashion as the Buddhists had to change over to Sanskrit when their Prakrits (Pali being only one among them) had failed to serve their purpose. The Jainas had to write Sanskrit commentaries to explain the Prakrit texts--a phenomenon which reveals the inadequacy of the Prakrits to satisfy the needs of the intellectuals of those days. There is no doubt that, at some stage, the best thought of the time crystallized in Prakrit and Apabhramsa texts. But the necessity to explain even such texts through Sanskrit at a later period shows that those texts had no appeal to the common man. Sanskrit enjoyed constant patronage on account of its being intelligible to the intellectuals of the different parts of the country and being able to function as the lingua franca acceptable to the people engaged in higher learning in art and science. While the Prakrits functioned as regional languages, Sanskrit provided the linguistic norm for the propation of the essence of our thinking among the people at large. The relation between the Prakrits on the one hand and Jainology on the other is to be appreciated in the context of this wider perspective. The study of Jainism without the knowledge of Prakrits is as much impossible as the researches in Buddhism in the absence of a grounding in Pali, though the relation between Pali and Buddhism is slightly different from that obtaining between Prakrits and Jainology. While the entire Pali literature is Buddhist, all Prakrits do not owe allegiance to Jainism, though the latter comprises the major portion of it. Jainism, like Buddhism, goes to Sanskrit in order to fulfil a larger interest and satisfy the demands of a higher stratum of the society.
12