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ACCOUNTS OF THE JAINAS TAKEN FROM SIXTEENTH
AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURY AUTHORS
R. Williams
The title of this article is identicall with that given by the Viennese orientalist Theodor Zachariae to a paper which he contributed to the Festschrift Moriz Winternitz published in Leipzig in 1933. On the same theme he had, in the Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes2 for 1910, shown that, in the terminology of the earlier Europeans in India Vartia or Vertea was currently used of a Jaina monk. It is proposed here to summarise Zachariae's references and to discuss some others in greater detail.
Ludovico di Varthema, in India between 1505 and 1507, wrote an account of his eastern travels which appeared in Rome in 1510. Though his veracity was impugned by his contemporaries his picture of India is held to be reliable and based on firsthand evidence.3 “The Guzeratis," he says (meaning the Jainas), "are a certain race which eats nothing that has blood and never kills any living thing; if they were baptised they would be saved by their works, for they do unto others that which they would that others do unto them.”4
Duarte Barbosa, a Portuguese in India from about 1500 to 1515, describes the “banyans" (a designation often used restrictively of the Jainas) as "great merchants who eat neither fish nor flesh, slay nothing and will witness no slaughter . . . they do not eat, or even light a lamp, by night.”
1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Berichte ueber die Jarnas bei Autoren des 16 und 17 Jahrhunderts. Vertra, eine Bezeichnunger Jainas reprinted in Kleine Schriften Bonn 1922. See the translation by C. Schefer Paris 1883 pp. XXXV-xxxvii trans. J. W. Jones Hakluyt Society, London, 1863 p. 108 trans. M. L. Dames Hakluyt Society, London, 1918 Vol. 1, p. 110
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