Gourt Home::Gourt :: Hemachandra
Hemachandra Surī ({{lang-sa|हेमचन्द्र सूरी) (1089–1172) was an Indian Jaina scholar, poet, and polymath who wrote on grammar, philosophy, prosody, and contemporary history. Noted as a prodigy by his contemporaries, he gained the title Kalikāl Sarvagya, (all-knowing of the Kali age).
He was born in Dhandhuka, Gujarat (about 50 km south west of Ahmadabad), to Chachadev (father) and Pahini (mother), who named him Chandradeva. The Jain temple of Modhera Tirtha is located at his birthplace. As a young man, Candradeva was initiated as a monk at a Jain temple, and he took the name Somacandra. He was trained in religious discourse, philosophy, logic and grammar. In 1110 he was ordained into the Shvetambara (White-robed) sect of Jainism and was given the name Acharya Hemachandra.
At the time, Gujarat was a large, stable kingdom under the Solanki dynasty. Hemachandra rose to prominence under the reign of 'Siddharaj' Jaysinh I, and was an advisor to his successor Kumarapala (1143–1173), during whose rule Gujarat became a reputed center of culture. Starting 1121, Hemachandra was involved in the construction of the Jain temple at Taranga. His influence on Kumarapala resulted in the Jain religion becoming the official religion of Gujarat, and animal slaughter was banned.
Works
A prodigious writer, * wrote grammars of Sanskrit and Prakrit, texts on science and logic and practically all branches of Indian philosophy. His best known work, the epic poem Tri-shashthi-shalaka-purusha-charitra (Lives of Sixty-Three Personages), is a hagiographical treatment of the sequence of teachers and their pupils who were instrumental in defining the Jaina philosophical position, their ascetisicism and eventual liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth, as well as the legendary spread of the Jaina influence. It still serves as the standard synthesis of source material for the early history of Jainism, and has been translated into English as The Lives of the Jain Elders by Richard Fynes (Oxford University Press, 1998). The appendix to this work, Parishista-parvan, contains his own commentary and is in itself a treatise of considerable depth.
Hemacandra, following the earlier Gopala, presented what is now called the Fibonacci sequence around 1150, about 50 years before Fibonacci (1202). He was considering the number of cadences of length n, and showed that these could be formed by adding a short syllable to a cadence of length (n−1), or a long syllable to one of (n−2). This recursion relation F(n) = F(n−1) + F(n−2) is what defines the fibonacci sequence.
See also
External links
1089 births | 1172 deaths | Indian mathematicians | 12th century mathematicians | Indian philosophers | Indian historians | Jain Acharyas | History of Gujarat | Fibonacci numbers
"Hemachandra"