courage and heroism in the past; so why should they not do the same to-day? The passion for external greatness has enabled nations to create great empires and unbounded wealth, who then shall say that it is not possible to create a passion for things of a more spiritual and enduring nature? Would it really be very strange if modern nations should at last give up the insensate struggle for wealth and power and endeavour to lay the foundations of a new greatness, a spiritual kingdom, and so help to create a free and happy race? Once men loved war and the art of soldiery for their own sakes; later they

loved wealth, power, luxury and the art of money-making; is it quite unthinkable that the time will come when they will begin to love their fellows, and to find their highest well-being in fellowship with them? We believe not. Indeed, we believe, as we have endeavoured in the present series of articles to show, that the King. dom of God, which is the spiritual kingdom of all mankind, the ideal involved in Democracy, is at hand. If we work quietly and well, each in his own place and in his own way, we shall ere long wake up as from sleep and discover that Democracy has spread abroad, that it is Here !

I

gladly avail myself of this opportunity to offer our cordial thanks to the Committee which gave us so hearty a welcome and made so splendid arrangements for our personal comfort. At the same time I may express the feelings of gratitude which for a long time I entertain for the distinguished Muniraj Dharmavijaya Suri with whom I am connected through a correspondence of many years. It gives me great satisfaction publicly to thank him for the obligation under which his uninterrupted kindness not only to me but also to other students of Jainism has laid us. He was always eager to give every elucidation on difficult points of Jain Doctrine which were laid before him and since I have been here I have consulted him on many sudjects; he explained to me some knotty points in the Karmagranthas which had baffled me long, he pointed out to me the passages in the Angas which refer to the worship of the idols of Tirthankaras and assisted me in many more ways. By this means he has in a great measure contributed to bring about correct ideas about Jainism among the

scholars of the West. scholars of the West. We owe to him also the loan of MSS. by which it has be come possible to publish Jain texts. li he had not supplied me with MSS. d the पउमचरिय and the समराइचकडा I shoul never have been able to undertake the edition of these important texts. upon them and some other works that! beg to occupy your attention for the time of this lecture.

The two works I have just mentioned, and a third, उपमितिमवप्रपंचाकथा, which will te issued from the press in a short time, may be described as belonging to the Sahitya portion of Jain literature. It is not about their position in Jain literature I am going to speak, but as this is a Literary Conference of a general Indian character, ny remarks will be restricted to the impor tance they have for the general literature of India. of India. To begin with, the oldest of the three works mentioned, the Paumachariy (Jain Ramayana) by Vimala Suri, i is the oldest Prakrit Kavya preserve to us. In the prasasti at the end of th work the author gives his date 530 afte

Mahavira and states that he put an older work into gathas (they are between 8 and 9 thousands). As regards the latter statement, it is of some interest to note that the Digambaras also have a Padmapurana, a big work of more than 50,000 slokas in Sanskrit, which claims to be based on an earlier work but apparently not the one which was the source of the Shvetambara work ;but the Padmapurana closely follows the narrative in the Paumachariya, adhyaya by adhyaya. It will be of great interest to investigate the relation of these two works, a labour which, however, must be postponed till the Digambaras shall have published the original Padmapurana, a work well worth editing, since it was written in the 7th century A. D. The Shvetambara work is much older, besides it is in Prakrit; but the date as we read it now is probably not correct. For it would be the year 4A. D., but as it gives a lagna in which some planets are given under their Greek names, the book e.g. must have been written after Greek astrology had been adopted by the Hindus, and that was not before the 3rd century A. D. Therefore unless the passage which contains the lagna s a later addition, the book itself may be laced in the 3rd century A. D. or somevhat later.

Now two things are interesting in this vork as far as the history of general ndian Literature is concerned. The first oint relates to the Language, which is on he whole the Prakrit employed by Jain riters. It is not the language of the acred books, but on the whole it may be escribed as Maharastri, which idiom was fterwards generally used by Jain authors. is however decidedly older than their nguage. It is this work, the Paumaariya, to which we are indebted for our 10wledge of this form of Prakrit. The fferences from the common Prakrit of Jain riters consists in the following points.

The cases of declination of nouns, and en forms of the verb are very frequently terchanged to a much greater extent than found in any other Prakrit work, e.g. the ocative plural very often is used for the inrumental devesu for devehim, the absolute r the infinitive Kauna for Kaum, and quently the uninflected form is used for e one with the case-affix. It is therefore primitive and not yet grammatically ined Prakrit.

The second point in connection with the Paumachariya is the following:

Though the language of the work is not grammatically refined, still it is very fluently written, in an easy epic style. We may conclude that a large epic literature in Prakrit had been in, existence, probably popular epics in Prakrit in which the style had been brought to perfection, which Vimala Suri employed to versify an older book in prose. He is certainly not the first who composed metrical works in Prakrit but he had many models which delivered him the readymade style and language. I may also mention that the gathas conform to the nicest rules of metrics, not only those rules which are given by writers on metrics but also one which we have found by analysing the gathas of classical Prakrit works like Hala Setubandha &c. Therefore the legitimate inference from the facts observed in the case of the Paumachariya is, that in the early centuries A. D. there existed a large literature in Prakrit, probably popular epics, which have been lost to us, and of which the Paumachariya is the only remnant.

This epical Prakrit Literature is the first phase of Prakrit literature. It was succeeded by two branches of Prakrit : (1) the Saptasataka of Hala which is an anthology of lyrical poetry. Another anthology of a similar kind, but of much later time, is the Vaggalagga of which a redaction is due to a Jain author Jaina Vallabha. Thus we know that a rich lyrical poetry once existed, from which nearly some 2,000 verses have come down to us; (2) what may be called the classical period of Prakrit Literature, i.e., that period in which were produced the classical works Setubandha and Gandavaha, Kumar Pal Charita, and many more in the highly polished and artificial Kabya style, which have been lost; but of some mention is made in other works. We know this kind of Prakrit Literature best.

Besides these two branches of Prakrit Literature of which I have spoken and of which some specimen have been preserved to us, there must have existed still another branch of popular Prakrit Literature, tales and stories, romances both in prose and in verse.

We know about the existence of such books by references to them in works on Alankara, e.g., the Dhvanyaloka. Now

this whole literature of Prakrit romances and stories has disappeared, unless in some old Jain Bhandar a MS. of these books will be discovered. Only two contemporaneous works have been preserved from which we may form an idea of what these kathas were like; the one is a narrative composed by Haribhadra Suri, the Samaraicca Kama of which I shall have to say more presently and the other is the Vasudeva Hindi, an extensive narrative chiefly in prose. I hope that the latter work will soon be edited by a competent scholar. I know only the beginning of the book where the cycle of stories is told which Hemachandra has incorporated into his Parisista Parvan. The work is a very extensive one, it will take up in print four or five big volumes, though only the 1st and 3rd part are available in MS. and the 2nd part is missing. It is certainly an old work and therefore it is an inestimable testimony as a specimen to the Prakrit Literature lost to us. I can speak on the other Prakrit work the . of Haribhadra with a full knowledge of the subject, since I am editing the text, of which some 600 pages have already been printed in the Bibliotheca Indica. My attention was first called to this work and my curiosity roused by Hemachandra's remark in his Kavyanusasana, for Hemachandra mentions the समरादित्यकथा as a model of the Sakalkatha, or that category of narratives in which all-'s are completed. And then the S. is praised also by Siddharashi, whose धर्मबोधकरगुरु Haribhadra had been, in the beginning of his Upamiti-Bhava-Prapancha-Katha. So when I had got sufficient MS. for preparing a critical text I undertook to edit the work. It goes without saying that Haribhadra wrote this famous book with the object of giving instruction in the Jain religion, but as he says himself in the introduction to this work, he chooses an attractive garb to clothe his religious teaching according to the universally acknowledged principle: to teach by amusing, for by this you will benefit the greatest number of people. I am however not concerned with the religious aspect of the work, but shall dwell on the character of the narrative only in so far as it gives us an idea of what works of fiction in Prakrit Literatur were like. Haribhadra's story

consists of 9 romances in which the two principal persons, an essentially good man and his enemy appear in nine succes sive births. Once they are reborn as father and son, then as husband and wife and so on in different relations, and always the enemy tries and succeeds in causing the death of the good person, till the latter in his last birth reaches mukti. Now this plan of the work offers the author an opportunity of depicting life in all its varieties; sometimes the scene is laid in the court of a king, sometimes in the house of merchants; by this means we get descriptions of all walks of life and we become acquainted with the manners of the different classes from the princes down to the down to the wild tribes living in the woods; court amusements, love-making, marriage ceremonies, the life of ascetics. both Jain and Tapasa, travels on land and sea. The stories of sea-voyages are of peculiar interest, as they show that the Jains of Haribhadra's time, say the 9th century A. D., had no objection to crossing the ocean, making long seavoyages starting from Tamralipti and visiting distant countries, even China. We can collect very interesting details about the sea trade in those times, about the ships, their outfit, the sailing and the dangers of sailing, etc. On the whole, the picture of Indian social life in the middle ages which we get from Har bhadra's tales is most varied, a mine f information to the antiquarian.

Now it is obvious that Haribhadra was

not the first to invent and describe such scenes and adventures; for his purpos was avowedly a religious one. But a great number of stories like those he narrate. must have been in existence at his time, he himself alludes to such books as are merely entertaining. He refers to th large Prakrit Literature of romances and tales which once ministered to the amuse ment of the public at large. For the general public preferred Prakrit, and the learned prided themselves on their know ledge of Sanskrit as Siddharashi, Hari bhadra's disciple, informs us.

To sum up the information on ancien Prakrit Literature which we can gathe from records in Sanskrit writers and from the existing specimens in Jain Literatury we come to the conclusion that there wa a vast Literature in Prakrit of the kin which may be described as Sahitya in a

ts branches: epics, lyrics, stories and other works of fictions. But the Brahmins who preserved the Classical Literature lid not care much for the more popular Literature, especially in Prakrit; for their iterary language was Sanskrit. Thus it appened that of the vast Prakrit Literaure, not peculiarly Jain, only such works have been preserved as conformed to the highest standard of the Kavya, as the Setubandha, or Hala. Everything else was llowed to fall into oblivion, after it had ad its run of popularity, just as it is with he novels of our time. Those of the last generations which once were the delight of the reading public, are almost forgotten ow and read only by the student of Liteature. Had there not been Jain books elonging to the Prakrit Literature we hould not be able now to form an idea of what Prakrit Literature was which once was the rival of Sanskrit Literature and ertainly more popular than it. I have only poken of the oldest works of Jain Kavya Literature, because they were contemporary with the Brahmanical Prakrit Literature, ut it must be mentioned that the Jains ossess such works, Kavyas and Kathas 1 Prakrit of a later time also, when eneral Prakrit literature had already ecome extinct. These books also

are

teresting as specimens of the Literature Kathas, but they are of less importance or the subject in hand than those works have spoken of.

In conclusion I should like to say some ords about another work the Up. Bh. r. K. which I have finished editing. The ork is well known to the Jains but is never mentioned by any other writer ho is not a Jain. In this case too ctarian interests prevailed over imrtial judgments and the principle the Sloka quoted yesterday by the Muni aharaj has been put into practice बना हन्यमानोऽपि न विभेद जैनमन्दिरम् here it 'uld be काव्यामृत' न पातव्यं कदाचिद् जैनपावतः । r the Up. Bh. Pr. K. is without doubt work of rare originality. The plan is andiose and it is as far as I can see olly the conception of the author. He es under the form of Allegory an aspect human life with all its vices and virtues, ich figure in the story as allegorical sons. The allegory is carried out with

admirable ability, and the work compares favourably with Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, a book which has been for 3 centuries the favourite of earnest readers high and low wherever the English Language is spoken. There is one famous allegorical work in classical Sanskrit Literature, the Prabodhachandrodaya, but Siddharashi's work precedes it by a century at least. The mental independence of the author from common prejudices is shown also in his treatment of Sanskrit. Of course he was able to write classical Sanskrit correctly as he has done in his other works. However as he did not write exclusively for the learned but for the cultivated classes at large, he deliberately wrote his work in easy popular Sanskrit without difficult sentences and compounds and farfetched words. He uses many desi words, i.e. words taken from the vernacular and has employed vernacular constructions and idioms which one never meets in classical writings. It requires great personal courage to brave the sneers of the Pandits and to write consciously a popular Sanskrit in order that the general reader should be able to understand one. This was just 1,000 years ago. At that time the cultivated class, what would be called now the educated Jains, used to read this book or understand it when it was read to the public. It is melancholy to think that now, after 1000 years since the time of Siddharashi, so very few of the educated Jains are able to read Sanskrit with ease. I trust that now, since the Jains have been awakened to their interest and exert themselves strenuously to bring the education of their members to a high pitch, a change will take place for the better, and that the time is not far when the educated Jains will consider it their duty to learn Sanskrit, not to pass an examination in it and then to forget it, but in order to be able to read the valuable works which Jain authors of the past have composed. And if this time should come by the combined effort of the Conferences of all sections of Jainism, Shvetambaras and Degambaras, Sthanakvasi and Terapanthis, then I expect the book of Siddharashi will again exercise its beneficent influence in forming the character and improving the moral state of the coming generations.