Created: 23-05-2026 · Last updated: 24-09-2026

title: ABCH — Abhidhānacintāmaṇi (Hemacandra)

ABCH — Abhidhānacintāmaṇi (~12th c.)

The classical Sanskrit synonymic kosha by Hemacandra (~12th century CE), the Jain scholarly tradition's great nāmaliṅgānuśāsana. This page is a data chapter: every count and chart below renders from generated data built on the kośa macrostructure schema, with AMAR and ARMH alongside for contrast. ABCH is also the most-cited kosha in PWG — cited 17,337 times as H. (Hemacandra), making it the single most-referenced source in the entire Großes PW.

Source: csl-orig v02/abch/abch.txt · ABCH GitHub

Trust Block

Evidence: the CDSL v02 abch.txt digitization (revision f4c08c5), measured by the kośa macrostructure builder m10_kosa_macrostructure_model.py (H5328) and reshaped for this page by build-kosa-chapters.mjs (H5329); field inventory from data/parse-rules/abch.json.
Limitations: synonym-set boundaries (<eid>) and gender tags are the annotators' reading of the verse, not marks in the verse itself (methods §2); counts of sets carry their own denominator per source artifact and are never mixed.
Validation: npm run validate-kosa-chapters (arithmetic + cross-artifact reconciliation) and node --test test/kosa-chapters.test.mjs (mutations prove the validator can fail); page renders checked by npm run build.
Owner repo: csl-atlas (handoff H5329, epic E014; model and measures H5328).
Next use: cite the counts as the ABCH row of the kośa macrostructure type; drill into any division via the table below.

At a glance


Genre	Classical Sanskrit synonymic kosha (Jain)
Author / date	Hemacandra, ~12th c.
Digitization model	grouped — one `<L>` record per verse-group
Records	verse-groups
Divisions	kāṇḍas · sections (kāṇḍa 4, tiryak, has 10 upavargas)
Synonym-sets	( synonym-sets + indeclinable-sets)
Word forms (members)
Full verses	in verse-groups ( in the file)
Mean synonyms per set	(max )
PWG citations of ABCH	17,337 (as `H.`) — plus 9,771 as `H. an.` (Anekārthasaṃgraha)

The macrostructure, counted

Hemacandra orders the universe hierarchically: gods, mortals (martya), animals and plants (tiryak, ten upavargas from earth to five-sensed beings), hell-beings, and a common section, closing with indeclinables. The chart shows full verses per section; the table carries the full counts.

Verse numbering never restarts. ABCH's verse numbers run continuously through all section boundaries ( restarts) — the mark of a text read as one continuous composition. The Amarakośa does the opposite: its numbering restarts at every one of its varga boundaries. Same genre, different text-shaping habit — visible only because both are measured by the same model.

Sets and gender

Across the sets that mix genders, each gender holds together in one run % of the time against a % permutation baseline — gender organizes the verse line, but far less tightly than in the Amarakośa (% vs %). Alphabetical adjacency among members is — chance level, confirming the kośa carries no alphabetical device.

Chart Trust Block

Claim: Hemacandra's Abhidhānacintāmaṇi is an onomasiological, versified kośa whose macrostructure — kāṇḍas, the tenfold tiryak upavarga tier, continuously numbered verses, <eid> synonym-sets, liṅga tags — is countable from the CDSL digitization and comparable, device by device, with AMAR and ARMH.
Evidence label: derived — every number is a deterministic reshape of committed generated artifacts (kosa model instances + measures, H5328) and the ABCH parse rules; nothing on this page is hand-counted.
Source files: src/data/kosa-chapters/kosa_chapters.json with provenance sidecar kosa_chapters.source.json; upstream csl-orig v02/abch at revision f4c08c5.
Generated by: npm run build-kosa-chapters
Validation: npm run validate-kosa-chapters (totals re-derived from divisions, instance totals reconciled against parse-rules record_count — 1,965 verse-groups, honesty checks that ARMH's absent devices stay absent) and node --test test/kosa-chapters.test.mjs (9 tests including four mutations).
Known false positives: none — no detection happens on this page.
Known false negatives: set counts use the instances' per-division denominators; the <eid> tag count in the parse rules (4,619) counts markup occurrences, not the same unit — both are labelled and never summed.
Review status: machine-reviewed (deterministic validator); underlying measures reviewed in H5328 (class-verifier PASS).
Owner repo: csl-atlas.
Next action: none open; the ARMH counterpart chapter and this page's AMAR comparison land together (H5329).

ABCH beside AMAR and ARMH

Why ABCH is in the atlas

Most-cited source in PWG. H. (Hemacandra = ABCH) appears 17,337 times in PWG's <ls> apparatus — more than Amarakośa (14,473), Medinīkośa (13,055), or any Vedic text. ABCH is the highest-impact single source in the European philological tradition as represented in CDSL.
What MW's L. hides. MW inherits kosha senses via WIL, then suppresses their individual attributions behind the anonymous <ls>L.</ls> hedge: 17,337 named Hemacandra attributions reduced to a single anonymous marker.
Jain lexicographic tradition. Hemacandra's hierarchy of beings reflects the Jain scholastic tradition, distinct from the Brahmanical cosmological kāṇḍas of Amarakośa and Halāyudha — the same word in both sources may carry different register.

The four CDSL koshas

CDSL repo	Title	Author	Date
ARMH	Abhidhānaratnamālā	Halāyudha	~10th c.
ABCH	Abhidhānacintāmaṇi	Hemacandra	~12th c.
ACPH	Abhidhānacintāmaṇi-pariśiṣṭa	Hemacandra	~12th c.
ACSJ	Abhidhānacintāmaṇi-śiloñcha	Hemacandra (attr.)	~12th c.