Yasastilaka and Indian Culture

Author(s): Krishnakant Handiqui
Publisher: Jain Sanskruti Samrakshak Sangh Solapur

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AUTHOR'S PREFACE
Somadeva's Yaśastilaka was composed in 959 A. D. somewhere in the area corresponding to modern Dharwar and the westernmost districts of Hyderabad State. It is a Jaina religious romance written in Sanskrit prose and verse, but more important as an encyclopedic record of literary, socio-political, religious and philosophical data, valuable for the study of the cultural history of India, and particularly of the Deccan, in the tenth century and thereabouts, when the Rāstrakūța empire still held sway in that part of the country. The object of the present volume is a critical study of the work; and if we have often gone far outside the limits of the text, it was only to give a more comprehensive picture of the life and thought of the times with reference to antecedent and subsequent factors in Indian cultural development.
The Sanskrit text was published long ago by the Nirnaya Sagar press in two volumes of a little over a thousand pages with the commentary of Śrutasāgara. The second volume of the work appeared in 1903, and the second edition of the first volume in 1916. A voluminous Jaina text composed in a difficult style could hardly be expected to be popular even with advanced students of Indian literature. To add to our difficulties, the commentary, which is our only guide to the work, breaks off at p. 244 of the second volume; and the printed text was found to be far too defective to admit of a critical study of the work.
To obviate these difficulties, I have utilized the following manuscripts of the text kindly lent by the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Poona : 1) Ms. A: No. 230 of 1902-07, folios 434; 2) Ms. B: No. 752 of 1886-92, folios 391; 3) Ms. C: No. 274 of A. 1883-84, folios 341; and 4) another incomplete manuscript of the work. Of these ms. A is the most important. It is not only correct but contains valuable marginal notes which have been of great use in studying the text, specially the portion dealing with Jaina doctrines, on which the commentary is not available. Notes from Ms. A have been incorporated in the present work; and, here and there, a line or a verse omitted in the printed text has been added from the manuscripts in the footnotes. In fact, nearly all the quotations from Somadeva's Yaśastilaka in the present volume have been collated with the manuscripts, especially A.
I am grateful to Dr. A. N. Upadhye, Kolhapur, for his generous and voluntary offer to publish this work on behalf of the Jaina Samskrti Samrakşaka Samgha of