Harmless Soul

Author(s): W J Johnson, Dayanand Bhargav
Publisher: Motilal Banarasidas

Page 11

Preface
This book is a revised version of my thesis, 'The Problem of Bondage in Selected Early Jaina Texts', approved for the D.Phil. degree at Oxford University in 1990.
I am grateful to Wolfson College, Oxford, where the original thesis was written, for electing me Michael Coulson Research Fellow in Indology from 1991-1992, thus enabling me to begin work on the revised version. I am also most grateful for the support of the Boden Fund, without which I would have been unable to complete the original thesis, and which also made a grant towards the cost of producing the typescript. The Bhogilal Leherchand Institute of Indology, Delhi, provided me with a research scholarship to study in their library during the early stages of revision in 1990. I take this opportunity to thank Mr. Narendra Prakash Jain of Motilal Banarsidass, Mr. Raj Kumar Jain, and the administrators and staff of the Institute for their hospitality.
My intellectual and academic debts are many - to Alan Williams and Partha Mitter, who encouraged me as an undergraduate at Sussex to believe I could go on to do research, to Jim Benson who taught me elementary Sanskrit so intensively, and to Alexis Sanderson who taught me more Sanskrit and gave generous advice on many subjects. I should also like to thank the examiners of the thesis, Friedhelm Hardy and Roy Norman for their criticisms and suggestions, which I have attempted to incorporate into the revised version. My principal and overriding debt is to Richard Gombrich, who taught me Prākrit and gave me a level of encouragement, advice and support far in excess of the most rigorous standards of professorial responsibility. I could not have hoped for a better supervisor or to have worked under a more inspiring scholar.
My greatest personal debt is to my wife, Patricia, who has more than once suspended her own academic work to
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