Jain Journal 1970 01

Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

Page 47

JANUARY, 1970
giving him the good news. I replied that I was about to send the news by airmail. "I thought you would send a cable" he said. After some days Frau Fera gave a dinner in her house, to which my Professors and personal friends were invited and in which Schubring made the principal speech.
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In Germany one is not entitled to use the Doctor's degree so long as his Dissertation is not published in printed form and therefore one gets it printed as soon as possible which of course means expenses because of the high charges of printing although the Doctoral Dissertation is much less bulky in Germany than its British counterpart. Schubring informed me, wholly on his own initiative, that he would obtain a grant from some scientific society for meeting the printing costs for my Thesis and arrange matters with a Press he knew at Wuerzburg.
As the winter semester was about to end, I heard in February 1936 from Professor Lesny who held the chair of Sanskrit at the Charles University (Czech) of Prague, to the effect that I was appointed Lecturer in Bengali at the Oriental Institute, Prague. Lesny was at Santiniketan and I used to be of some help to him in his translations from Bengali. I left for Prague on 1st April but shortly before that Schubring's monumental work Die Lehre der Jainas had appeared in the Grundriss Series to our great joy. I then understood why he had smiled indulgently at Professor Schrader's suggestion to me.
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I spent two years in Prague and immediately after arrival there met Professor Winternitz, the great savant, who had retired several years earlier from the chair of Sanskrit at the German University (Prague had two universities; the Czech University mentioned earlier, where Lesny held the Chair was called the Charles University), succeeded by Otto Stein. I worked with Winternitz privately on some problems relating to the history of Sanskrit literature including also Jaina literature. Although he had a magnificent library of his own, I found him sometimes at the University-cum-State Library where it was very inspiring to see him seated at a table not far from mine. Unfortunately he died shortly after. I feel proud to think that I was the last man to have had the privilege of sitting at his feet. I found him in disagreement with Schubring in respect of a matter connected with the literary style of the prose compositions in the Jaina Canonical literature and I communicated it to Schubring who replied to say that he had some correspondence with Winternitz many years ago over the point but it was obvious now that he had failed to convince the latter.