|
Hemraj Pande
Hemraj Pande (Hemarāja/Hemrāj Pande) (17th century CE) was an Indian author belonging to the Digambara Jain Agrawal merchant caste[1][2] & Garg Gotra.[3] He was from Agra.[4] He had a daughter named Jainulade(Jaini) who came to be mother of another poet legend Bulakidas making Hemraj Bulakis maternal Grandfather.[5] He had written commentaries on numerous Jain texts.[6] Being a disciple of Rupchand Pande, a thinker who had settled in Agra in 1635 & delivered sermons on Gommatasara.[7][8] As a ‘pande’ – a vernacular form of the Sanskrit paṇḍitā – or ‘pandit‘, Hemraj could have been a lay Jain administering the temple, appointed by a Bhattaraka.[9] He wrote a commentary on Pravachanasara of Kundakunda in 1652 based on the commentary on Samayasara by Rajmall.[6] He also wrote the differences between Jain sects, Digambara and Śvetāmbara, in Chaurasi Bol (Eighty-Four Disputes) in the same year.[7] He wrote these texts on the request of Kanvarpal or Kaurnpal of Agra.[7] Many of his other works ,apart from the ones in the list, are also archived & can be found in some of the religious book archives of North India.[10] Hemraj was a close friend of Kaurapal or Kunvarapal, who is mentioned by Banarsidas in his autobiography, the Ardha-kathānaka.[11] Surprisingly, Banarsidas does not include Hemraj among the prominent Digambara scholars in Agra.[12] Hemraj is first mentioned by Hirananda, who describes him as ‘wise and cultivated’ in his Samavaraṇavidhāna.[13] He wrote some original works in Brajbhasha.[14] He also translated Bhaktamara Stotra, a sixth century Jain composition, of Manatunga.[14] This was done in the style of translation of Kalyanamandir stotra's by Banarsidas.[14] He seems to have specialised in writing commentaries on texts by other scholars. ReferencesCitations
Sources
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
