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6 W. R. ANTARKAR

somcwhat unifonnly one theory about Śań.'s life-span, for whatever it may be worth. Those who, on the basis of ihcse works and ihe othcr Mutt records, take Sań.’s lile-span 509 B.C. to 477 B.C. as conclusively proved or settled are only begging the question.

Rcgarding JinaVijaya and the Jain works from which stanzas have been ąuoted in San. Can. we have lirst to remcmbcr that the person who quoted them for the tlrst limę was a very rcsponsible person and a great Sanskrit scholar and had no particular interest in proving any particular theory about the chronology of any person. Yet, it is very unfortunatc that he has given no further dctails about the sourccs of the stanzas quotcd by him.¹²

I have personally tried to asccrlain the identity of ‘Jina Vijaya’ from Jain sadhus as well as Jain scholars all of whom told me that Jina V. was the name of a person only and not the name of any work in Jain literaturę. The maximum I was ablc to galhcr about ‘Jina.’ was that the stanzas as from ‘Jina* were likely to have been from a magazinc (or a lortnightly) called Jina Vijaya which used to be published from Sangli from 1902 to 1911 A.D. (Shri Appashastri Rashivadckar died in 1913 A.D.) to be mei^ed iater into only one called Pragati and then joinlly called ‘Pragati and Jinavijaya. ’ I have contactcd personally the Sangli hcadquarters of the magazine but with no succcss.

As for the Jain works (Granthas) menlioned and quoted from by Shastri beyond the slalcment in the Bh&ratTya PrScTna AitihBsika Koia by Shri R.B. Godbole (Modem Period - Ar\'8cTna Khanda) that the Jain works were likely to be the Prabandha works in Jain literaturę, no further information was availab!e. At the instance of the great Jain scholar, Dr. H.C. Bhayani I went through a number of Prabandha works ¹³ but all to no purpose. And, once again, till the original sourccs of thcsc stanzas become available to us, no definile theory can be ba"scd on them. At the most, they may be said to corroborate independenlly the 6th cent. B.C. theory based on the Mult-records.

Rcgarding King Sudhanvan’s Coppcrplate also the same has not come to light so far. I had approached Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru for help in my research and at his instance, the then Central Education Ministry had inslructed the Bombay Govt. to do the nccdful in the matlcr. As, however, I was unable to furnish to them any further dctails than that the said copperplate was then said to be in the possession of the Bombay Govt., they exprcssed their inability to help me in the matter. Later, i.e., in 1961 A.D. 1 tried to get the details from Shri Manjulal Sevaklal Dave, the Dvłrakfl Mutt advocate who while giving them wrole to me to say that “The copperplate inscription might have been destroyed by the Court as the party producing it had not taken (it) away during the prcscribcd tune or it was not produced at all (which scems to be true from rcading the papers prcserved).“ At his instance