Jainism and Karnataka Culture

SR No.: 011062
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: S R Sharma
Publisher: Karnataka Historical Research Society Dharwar
Publication Year: 1940
Total Pages: 263
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 9 MB

Page 100

JAINISM AND KARNĀTAKA CULTURE
because his Tatvārthādhigama Sūtra has found several commentators in the South. Chief among these are Samantabhadra, Pūjyapāda, Akalanka, Vidyananda, Prabhācandra, and Śrutasāgara. The importance of Umásvāti's work may be judged both by the number and extent of these commentaries. Samantabladra's commentary entitled Gandhahasti-Mahābhāsya is supposed to have run into 84,000 Slokas, but unfortunately the work is not extant.14
About Samantabhadra's date, as well as, of all these early writers, there is the greatest diversity of opinion. “The chronology of all the early Jaina writers who used Sanskrit and wrote on philosophy," says Mr. E. P. Rice, "depends on the date of Umāsvāti, whose Tatvārthādhigama-Sūtra is the fountain-head of Jaina philosophy and also of the use of Sanskrit by the Jainas. This date cannot be earlier than the fourth century, for he quotes' the Yoga-sutra which cannot be dated earlier than A.D. 300. Samantabhadra wrote a commentary on Umāsvāti's great work, and the earliest author who quotes him is Kumārila, who flourished A.D. 700. Thus Samantabhadra must belong to the fifth, sixth or seventh century".16 If the Yoga-Sūtra referred to by Rice is that of Patanjali, ( as it must be, because there is no other work of that name), then it must date from the third or at least second century B. C. and not 3rd cent. A. D.,16 in which case it does not preclude the possibility of Umāsvāti having lived in the first century A. D. as mentioned above. Hence, the date of Samantabhadra need not necessarily be so late as that mentioned by Mr. E. P. Rice. The late Mr. Lewis Rice, who in his Mysore and Coorg assigned
14 Hirālāl, op. cit., pp., pp. ix x.
It is however, possible that Umāsvāti does not quole, from the Yoga" sutra and that the identity is quite accidental or dae to a common
source. 15 Rice ( E. P. ), Kanarese" iterature, p, 41. 16 Of. Macdonell, Sanskrit Literature, Imp. Gaz. II, p. 267; Sʻris'a
Chandra Vasu, Introduction to Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, p. 1; Apd P. C. Chakravarti, Patanjali, 1. H. Q. II, pp. 74, 265 f.