U-PARL Cooperative Research in Asian Studies Series “New and Rare Words” Collected by Helen M. Johnson from Hemacandra’s Triṣaṣṭiśalākāpuruṣacaritra

This book is a monograph that was published as part of the research results of “A Pilot Study for the Creation of a Jaina Hybrid Sanskrit Dictionary,” a project carried out in fiscal 2020–21 under the auspices of the Cooperative Research in Asian Studies program of the Uehiro Project for the Asian Research Library (U-PARL) of the University of Tokyo Library Systems.
 
It is well known that the Sanskrit language used by Jains frequently deviates from normative grammar and often employs special vocabulary that does not exist in Hindu or Buddhist texts or examples of which can be found only in indigenous dictionaries. The eminent scholar Ernst Leumann, who assisted in the publication of A Sanskrit-English Dictionary (Oxford, 1899), compiled by Sir Monier Monier-Williams and still used today as the standard Sanskrit dictionary, supplemented the dictionary with words gathered from Jaina texts written in Sanskrit, and since then several renowned researchers have continued to collect Sanskrit vocabulary and grammatical items peculiar to Jaina sources. However, when compared with the substantial body of research on so-called Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, a form of Sanskrit used by Buddhists that similarly deviates considerably from normative Sanskrit, research on the Sanskrit language used by Jains—so-called Jaina Hybrid Sanskrit—has made very little progress. Since early times, Jains have produced a vast number of texts across all manner of fields, but many of these texts have still not been made the subject of basic philological research on their vocabulary and grammar. As a reflection of these circumstances, regrettably there still does not exist a grammar or a dictionary devoted to Jaina Hybrid Sanskrit.
 
This publication was planned as a first step towards overcoming such a state of affairs. The Triṣaṣṭiśalākāpuruṣacaritra is a work of more than 30,000 verses that was written by Hemacandra (1089–1172), a monk of Śvetāmbara Jainism who was known as the “Omniscient of the Kali age” (Kalikālasarvajña), and it was translated by the American scholar Helen M. Johnson (1889–1967) in six volumes, each of which included an appendix of “New and Rare Words,” made up of distinctive Sanskrit terms used in the Triṣaṣṭiśalākāpuruṣacaritra. The present publication brings together in one volume the Sanskrit terms collected in each volume of the English translation, and it also adds information from important primary and secondary sources published since then and corrects any errors. The additions and corrections come to just under 900 in number. It also includes an appendix consisting of a list of verses in Hemacandra’s Yogaśāstra and his auto-commentary that tally with verses in the Triṣaṣṭiśalākāpuruṣacaritra.
 
It is to be fervently hoped that undertakings similar to this publication will be carried out for other texts written in Jaina Hybrid Sanskrit.
 

(Written by KAWASAKI Yutaka, Assistant Professor, The University of Tokyo Library System / 2022)