Sanskrit Manuscripts : Corāsī bola kī bhāṣā

Hemarāj Pāṇḍe, Hemarāj Pāṇḍe

Sanskrit Manuscripts

<p style='text-align: justify;'> The <i>Corāsī bola kī bhāṣā</i> belongs to the tradition of polemic discussions between Śvetāmbaras and Digambaras. The author is the Digambara layman Hemarāj Pāṇḍe, who wrote it in Agra in Vikram Saṃvat 1709 (= 1653 CE), at the time of the Adhyātma movement. Among the main controversial issues are whether a woman can attain final liberation in that very life (<i>strī-mukti</i>) and whether an omniscient being takes food or not (<i>kevali-bhukti</i>). "Hemarāj Pāṇḍe's work contains eighty-four (<i>caurāsī</i>) points (<i>bol</i>) presented in a composition of ninety-one verses in different kinds of Hindi meters. The number eighty-four seems to have been deliberately chosen by him to match with the eighty-four hundred thousand varieties of <i>yoni</i>s into which a <i>jīva</i> may repeatedly be reborn in the course of <i>saṃsāra</i>. He is suggesting thereby that those who hold these views may not escape <i>saṃsāra</i>" (Jaini 2004: 376). Manuscripts of this work are available in the Rajasthan libraries (one of them was used by Jaini 2004), but, so far, none seems to have been known outside India. The Cambridge copy is therefore significant. This manuscript was copied in Palanpur (Gujarat) in 1822 CE like <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01266-00006/1'>Add. 1266.6</a>, like <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01266-00007/1'>Add. 1266.7</a> and <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01266-00009/1'>Add. 1266.9</a>. It is likely that it was meant, like the others in the group, to be read by Major Colonel William Miles (1760-1840). </p>