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MAURICE BLOOMFIELD,
THE FIRST AMERICAN SCHOLAR
OF JAINISM
JOHN CORT ANALYSES THE PIONEERING CONTRIBUTION OF A UNIQUE ACADEMIC
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note of W. Franklin, H. T. Colebrooke and H. H. Wilson were involved in the establishment of
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imperial control over India. Their interests were social, thus their studies of Jainism focused primarily on the Jains as comprising a set of related castes within the broader framework of Indian society. Their writings also included a smattering of loosely connected observations concerning Jain history, architecture and literature. The Presbyterian missionary Reverend J. Stevenson, who lived in Gujarat, translated several Shvetambara scriptures into English. James Burgess had perhaps the best understanding of the Jains of the early British authors; through his extensive work he documented Jain temples for the Archaeological Survey of India.
It was in Germany that the intellectual foundations for Jain studies were laid. In the period from the middle of the nineteenth century through the first one-third of the
vitas gilt dumb retwentieth century, Albrecht Weber, Georg Bühler, Hermann Jacobi, A. F. Rudolf Hoernle, Ernst Leumann and Helmuth von Glasenapp provided Western scholarship with an invaluable outline of Jain history, and particularly an understanding of the early Shvetambara scriptures. Other scholars on the Continent, such as F. L. Pullè, Luigi Suali and Luigi Pio Tessitori in Italy, A. Guérinot in France and J. Charpentier in Sweden were important collaborators with the Germans in this early exploration of Jain literature.
The absence of any American scholar in this roster is noteworthy. Virchand Gandhi. had come to the United States in 1893 to attend the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. He was one of a handful of Asian speakers who contributed to the historical importance of that gathering. Gandhi went on a speaking tour in the Midwest and East of the United States before returning to India, but his visit made no lasting impact upon American study of the Jains. Even though his address to the Parliament was easily available in the printed proceedings, there is no evidence of American scholars using it in their scholarship. Americans came rather late to the study of the Jains. While the past two decades has seen a flurry of North American scholarship on Jainism, this is a decidedly recent phenomenon. It is not built upon any sustained earlier tradition of American Jain studies.
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HISTORY
Jain Education International 2010_03
The early study of the Jains took place in Great Britain, Italy, France and especially Germany. British studies were made largely within the context of the imperial rule
The first American scholar to turn his attention to the Jains was the Sanskritist and Linguist Maurice Bloomfield. He was born in Central Europe in 1855, and his family migrated to the United States four years later. He studied at the University of Chicago and Furman University before going to Yale to study Sanskrit under William Dwight Whitney. Whitney was one of the American pioneers in Sanskrit studies and generations of American students have relied on the two textbooks he wrote in the 1880s: Sanskrit
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