The Doctrine of the Jainas, Described after the Old Sources c7.42

c7.42

§43. The commentaries on the canonical texts exhibit the usual preferences and defects of scholastic literature, i.e. they represent the apprehensions of their time. We cannot neglect them, though, frequently, we are not in a position to follow them. Most popular among them are, of course, the Sanskrit explanations (ṭīkā, vivaraṇa, vṛtti) composed, as regards the Angas and Uvangas, by the classical scholars Śīlāṅka or Śīlācārya, who concluded his Ācārāṭīkā in Śaka 798=872 A.D., Abhayadeva, who wrote in s. 1135 or 1139, and Malayagiri, who composed his Sanskrit Grammar between s. 1200 and 1230¹. These great works mark the end of a long development; what follows them (*dīpikā* or *avacūri*¹) is insignificant and mostly no longer independent. The personalities mentioned are preceded by Haribhadra who, among various other scholarly works, wrote the Nandī-and Āvaśyakaṭīkā. As has been proved by JINAVIJAYA² he belongs to the middle of the 8th century. His epoch is significant by its definitely turning away from the Prakrit commentaries in favour of such in Sanskrit. The development of the former at that time had reached the stage of the *cuṇṇi*. A *cuṇṇi* is a composition in prose³ of a kind wherein a change of language announces itself by a more or less intensive penetration of Sanskrit words and phrases into Prakrit. The object of the explanation is not confined to the canonical text, the Sutta, but also refers to the foregoing commentary, the Bhāsa or the Nijjutti. A *Bhāsa* is in metres and of a considerable length. Comprising thousands of Gāhās it far surpasses each Cuṇṇi, the name of which—Sanskrit: *cūrṇi*—dispersion⁴—is not badly chosen when compared with the block called *bhāsa*.⁵ This again is the Nijjutti. for us the Nijjutti (*nirvyukti*⁶) is the earliest tangible stage in the Śvetāmbara commentaries, but itself it is the gāhā-skeleton for the body of prose explanations which had existed long before and were the ancestors of the material exhibited in a Cuṇṇi. The usual size of a Nijjutti, as we know it, is relatively small (a few hundred gāhās), but even there Bhāsa verses have been inserted. As long as such insertions were limited, the title of Nijjutti remained, in which case we find, in the course of time, a Nijjutti followed by a Cuṇṇi. But when the size of the latter had swollen up owing to an extraordinary number of Bhāsa verses, it was they that gave the whole work its title.¹ Both Bhāsa and Cuṇṇi do not furnish much information about individual words. What they do have to say is dictated by abstracts and is very schematical to the degree that we seldom find a connection with the Sūtra.² Instead, their importance as to history of thought and of literature will be great, when one day all of them will be accessible and subjected to scholarly study.