Jatarupa's Commentary on the Amarakosa, pts. 1 and 2.

• Author: Van Der Kuijp, Leonard W.J.
• Position: Book Review

Edited by MAHES RAJ PANT. New Delhi: MOTILAL BANARSIDASS, 2000. Pp. x + 468, x + 512. Rs 1295.

Amarasimha's Namalinganusasana, better known as the Amarakosa, is surely the most famous and oldest extant lexicon of the Sanskrit language. The very large corpus of complete manuscripts of the text that has been handed down attests to its great popularity, yet next to nothing is concretely known about its author. Even an edition with a suitably critical apparatus is still outstanding. Writing in circa the sixth century A.D., Amarasimha begins the substance of his work not with one or the other Hindu deity, but with an enumeration of twenty-five different terms for the Buddha, from sugata to mayadevisuta. For this and two other reasons, namely that the first entry of its listing of trees is the Ficus religiosa (bodhivrksa), the tree under which the Buddha achieved his enlightenment, and that the opening stanza is suggestive of a Buddhist religious environment, he is usually considered to have been a Buddhist. The fact that the Amarakosa a is by no means obviously or stridently Buddhist in tenor must no doubt have contributed to its enormous popularity throughout the subcontinent. It is organized into three kanda-sections comprising twenty-five chapters (varga). The first two comprise ten chapters each. The third has five chapters, of which the last deals in forty-six stanzas with a grammatical summary of the rules of gender (lingadisamgraha). It is estimated that more than eighty commentaries were written on it. The well-known histories of Sanskrit lexicography by C. Vogel (1979) and M. M. Patkar (1981) list a good portion of this interpretive plenum, the vast majority of which remain as unstudied as they are unedited. The Amarakosa was also translated into a host of Indic languages, including Sinhalese. A Moggallana (ca. twelfth century) relied a great deal on it when compiling his Abhidhanappadipika, the earliest extant lexicon of Pali. It also exerted no uncertain influence beyond the subcontinent, for it was rendered into Burmese, Nevari, Tibetan as well as Mongolian.

The work under review, Mahes Raj Pant's study and edition of the oldest extant exegesis of Amarasimha's work, titled simply Amarakosatika, by the hitherto barely known Jatarupa, represents in every respect a milestone in the field of Amarakosa studies and Sanskrit lexicography in general. It is based on the author's discovery of two Sanskrit manuscripts that were copied in Nepal. One is housed in the Kaisher Library, Kathmandu, and is dated 1119 [= A]; the other forms part of the collection of the National Archives, Kathmandu, and is dated 1755 [= B]. They were filmed by the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project under, respectively, Reel nos. C 121/1 and A 1031/10 (and once again under B 266/15). Unfortunately...