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FLÜGEL : JAINISM AND THE WESTERN WORLD
not contain all the sacred scriptures of our religion, then you have not been shown everything. For all our community libraries must contain the 45 Angas." That was enough for me. I went to Thakur Juvansingh and told him seriously, that the Jaina committee wanted to make a fool of me. It would be all the same to me, whether the books would be shown. But I would report to the Government follow what would. Likewise I asked the minister to come to me and told them the same, only adding that, if the government authorities would come, they could lose their posts. This, at last, had an effect. One of the ministers, who was himself a Jaina and a member of the committee, began to work on his colleagues, and after various turbulent meetings it was decided to show us the real library, since it couldn't be helped. But first one more trick was tried. The entrance to the real library, a large door made of stone, was painted over, and it was decided to guide me into the next vault, where the books were kept which I had seen already, in order to cinvince me that nothing else was there. All these pleasant things were reported to me by the Shripuj. He advised me to be very careful and not to step into the vault. But in case I had to do it, he provided me with a detailed plan of all the vaults under the Parishnath temple. Finally the day arrived when we were called again to the temple, it was January the 28th. The committee received me the solemnly, led by the Jaina minister, and the latter spoke exactly as predicted by the Shripuj. I decidedly refused to enter the vaults, to check whether there was still something there. Likewise I forbad my agents to go down and always repeated that the masters of the house would know best where the things were. When the minister saw that I could not be tempted, he stood up with a deep sigh, remarking that he wanted to look around down there himself. He stayed away for about half an hour. Then he returned with three servants, which carried large sacks full of manuscripts. He said, he had opened a door, which usually would not be opened, and found yet more, we would presumably have work for still some time. Then he took leave smilingly. Now the inspecting and cataloguing set about afresh, and the manuscripts that were now brought to light contained even more precious treasures than the earlier ones. We still had to work in the temple daily for about six hours until February the 3rd, and could hand to the scribes more than 50 works, which all contained something new or very rare from the brahmanic, Jaina- and Buddhist literature, for copying. One old catalogue of the library from the year 1780 proved to us that we had now seen everything. It contained several hundred manuscripts on palm leaves and some more on paper. The opening of this carefully concealed library was however not the only success which I had. I received many other lists from private libraries and acquired about fifty original manuscripts" (Bühler 1883:530-32).
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