Homage to Sarasvatī

Sarasvatī, the Hindu goddess of learning and the arts, is worshipped by Jains as well. She is often represented at the beginning or end of manuscripts. Here she rides her traditional vehicle, the swan – haṃsa.

This is the first page of a manuscript of the Abhidhāna-cintāmaṇi – Stone-Jewel of Words. Another title given to it is Nāma-mālā – Garland of Words – which appears in the final colophon. It is one of the main works of the scholar monk Hemacandra (1089-1172 CE). The Abhidhāna-cintāmaṇi is a thesaurus of Sanskrit synonyms written in verse and organised in six chapters on the following themes or headings:

Hemacandra’s work belongs to the rich tradition of such texts. The most famous is the Amarakoṣa, a fundamental work for traditional education in Sanskrit. Such books owe their existence to the fact that Sanskrit is a language with a very abundant vocabulary, where a given entity – for example ‘water’ or ‘lotus‘ – can be referred to by numerous words. In such works, the idea is to provide all these alternative terms. In some cases, all of them have the same meaning but in other cases they refer to different realities. The Abhidhāna-cintāmaṇi is obviously influenced by its predecessors. It is a comprehensive storehouse of Sanskrit words of all kinds, many of them unknown from other sources.

But it is also a dictionary of all topics that relate to the foundations of Jainism and specific notions of the Jain conception of the world. For example, the first two sections list information about the Jinas and gods, going into great detail about the Jinas, including details such as their parents’ names and their emblems – lāñchanas. With a more cosmological orientation, the fourth section classifies living beings by number of sense organs while the fifth section contains names of and figures relating to the seven hells. The wealth of vocabulary in section IV, in particular, is remarkable, as it is in several Jain texts. The influence of local languages is felt in several animal names with no equivalent in Sanskrit. Thus, in many ways, this work amounts to a manifesto of Jain doctrine, which echoes the beginning of the author’s Tri-ṣaṣṭi-śalākā-puruṣa-caritra – Life Stories of the 63 Great Men. This also skilfully combines general vocabulary and Jain terminology.

The Abhidhāna-cintāmaṇi was one of the first Jain texts printed, “made by order of H. T. Colebrooke” and published in 1807–08. It was instrumental in establishing Jainism as a distinct tradition in Western scholarship, for it contains a list of the names of the 24 Jinas and the Jain conception of the universe and time.

This famous thesaurus has generated many commentaries, the first by Hemacandra himself. The present manuscript contains the one known as Nāma-sāroddhāra – A Compendium of Words. It is written above and below the main text in smaller script. The commentary was composed by Śrīvallabhagaṇi, a disciple of Jñānavimala-upādhyāya, in the year 1667 of the Vikrama era – 1610 CE – in Jodhpur in Rajasthan, under the reign of King Sūrasiṃha (1594–1619) and the joint spiritual rule of Jinacandra-sūri and Jinasiṃha-sūri. Even though this manuscript has no date, the commentary was completed in year 1667 of the Vikrama era (1610 CE) in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, in the reign of King Sūrasiṃha (1594–1619) and under the joint spiritual rule of Jinacandra-sūri and Jinasiṃha-sūri. It was written by Śrīvallabha-gaṇi, a disciple of Jñānavimala-upādhyāya. At the end of the commentary, the author gives full details about his monastic lineage, namely the Kharatara-gaccha.