JAINA Convention 1993 07 Pittusburgh

Author(s): Federation of JAINA
Publisher: USA Federation of JAINA

Page 44

the local indigenous scholars who gave those western scholars their information. In the earliest days scholars and observers like Colebrook and Buchanan acknowledged their help. In the middle. period Dr. Margaret Sinclair Stevenson speaks with affection of the women and "pandits" and instructors who taught her so much with generous patience. At the end of the period Schrubring rejoices in the company of his Jain colleagues and at joining in community events.
Another point to bear in mind is that learning about Jainism between 1793 and the present is like trying to hit a moving and changing target. "Jainism" is a living corpus, an organic, growing, changing, adapting being with an enseeded program of self-understanding. The local scholars all became affected by European and American intellectual and social history. As an example one can cite the Reformation and Luther's turning from an ancient flowing tradition to the authority of a carefully defined, now printed, Book. Another example is the effects on European and thence Indian religious thinking as a result of the European power struggles and wars of religion, not only in Germany 1618-1648 or Britain from around 1640-1688 and onwards but between Religion and Philosophy and Religion and Science. In addition there was the relentless destruction in British India of the old social, economic, industrial, and ecological structures. As Jains studied with foreign scholars, they came not only to be informants but they produced their own traditions of origin and development as well as books and editions and critical texts. Lively academic discussions in North Indian, Maharashtrian, the Karnatican languages, Gujarati and the languages of Tamilnadu arose.
The Development of International Jain Studies, 1870-1914
The story of the development of international Jain studies especially tex
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tually has been told elsewhere or can be assumed from annotated bibliographies which are readily available. 16 It is rewarding to see how this study developed and how India, Germany, France, Britain communicated with each other 17 and with U.S.A. and Canada. Direct communication between India and North America before the end of World War II seems to have been at times intermittent or slow even after the great schools of Indology were built up at places like Harvard or individuals like Professor Maurice Bloomfield and Professor William Norman Brown did their work. We shall return to that later, but at this juncture to enflesh a little the bare bones of the account of the work of the Germans let us glance briefly at two thumb-nail biographies." Dr. Georg Buehler (1837-1898) was an outstanding German scholar in a brilliant generation. He taught at Elphinstone College, Bombay, from 1863 to when his health broke down in 1878. He served actively in giving general education advice to the government of India and in getting the Jain grantha bandkhanas (places where books were safeguarded) to begin to open up their store of manuscript riches. (Since 1947 these have been augmented by displaced works from Pakistan). This kind of work produced superb collections of Jain manuscripts in London, Berlin, Leipzig and Strassburg. Generation after generation of western scholars cut their milk-teeth on them. He proved the antiquity of the Jain ascetic lines of spiritual and teaching descent from inscriptions and egged on a reluctant and ill-financed Government Archaeological service to find more inscriptions. In this he may (alas) with all good will have caused many an inscription, for instance at Muttra, to be irretrievably detached from its archaeological accompaniments and strata. He was drowned in an accident in Lake Constance. It is said that the Guru parampara of those great German scholars lasted on to Walther Schubring and to Professor
Colette Caillat of Paris who is still active in Jain studies.
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Dr. Herman Jacobi (1850-1937) was the scholar who conclusively proved Jainism's true place and seniority to Buddhism. He travelled in India in 1873 and 1913-1914. He had the distinction to write two volumes in Max Mueller's famous fifty volume Oxford University Press series, Sacred Books of the East, which were soon installed in every decent library from Oxford, to Harvard, to Tokyo. His two volumes were devoted to Jain sutras." Though better editions and translations of the texts have appeared, they continue to give western non-specialist readers a very good, readily available, introduction to the attitude, content, method and approach of a great part of Jain literature and admiringly respectful Introductions by Jacobi himself. Together with Jacobi's excellent article in the Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, Mrs Margaret Sinclair Stevenson's articles therein and her Heart of Jainism these have remained the basic and main fare of English-reading readers seeking knowledge of Jainism world-wide down to the end of the 1980's.20
Some Notable American Scholars of Jain Studies
In Dr. Singhvi's previously cited article the work of three American or American-related scholars was described. The following is to add a few details. Maurice Bloomfield who was probably of Jewish background was born in Austria and moved to Milwaukee at the age of four. He studied at Chicago, Furman University (South Carolina) and Yale. He came as a Fellow to the young John Hopkins University where Lanman, the doyen of Sanskrit studies in the U.S.A., was founding a school of Sanskrit. Bloomfield took his Ph.D. in 1879 and went off to Berlin (not India) and Leipzig for more study. He became Professor of
"What will be the condition of the Indian Sanskrit literature if the contributions of the Jains are removed? The more I study the Jain literature the more happy and wonderstruck I am."
-Dr. Hertel, Germany
7TH BIENNIAL JAINA CONVENTION - JULY 1993 For Private & Personal Use Only