Jain Spirit 2004 03 No 18

Author(s): Jain Spirit UK
Publisher: UK Young Jains

Page 52

50 HISTORY
Grammar and Roots, Verb-Forms and Primary Derivatives of the Sanskrit Language.
Bloomfield did not stay at Yale. He transferred to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. For many years Johns Hopkins was a centre of Sanskrit teaching and scholarship in the United States. There he studied under Charles R. Lanman, another of the founding fathers of the teaching of Sanskrit in America. Lanman's 1884 Sanskrit Reader is also well-known to American students of Sanskrit. Bloomfield received his Ph.D. in 1879 for a dissertation on noun formation in the Rig Veda. He then went to Germany, where he engaged in advanced studies in classical Indian languages for two years in Berlin and Leipzig. Among his teachers was Albrecht Weber, one of the leading European scholars of the Jains.
Bloomfield returned to Johns Hopkins in 1881 to take up the position of Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology. In addition to teaching Sanskrit, he also taught Pali, the language of the earliest Buddhist scriptures. Further, Bloomfield was perhaps the first American to teach Jain Maharashtri Prakrit.
Bloomfield's early work was in the fields of Vedic studies and comparative linguistics. He is still recognised as one of the leading Western scholars of Vedic language and religion. His 1906 Vedic Concordance remains an indispensable resource in the field. He published three substantial studies of the Atharva Veda that are essential starting points for any study of this 'fourth Veda! His 1897 translation of Hymns of the Atharva Veda appeared in the prestigious Sacred Books of the East series. Two years later he published a critical edition of the Atharva Veda in the Grundriss der indo-arischen Philologie und Altertumskunde, one of the leading Continental series of Indological scholarship. Finally, in 1901 he and Richard Garbe of the University of Tübingen published a three-volume critical edition of the Pippalada recension of the Atharva Veda.
Later in his career Bloomfield developed an interest in what he called 'Hindu fiction', by which he meant all of the literatures of traditional India. The early twentieth century was the time of the rise in both Europe and North America of folklore studies, and for Bloomfield the study of Indian literature was a way to study folklore. This interest brought him into Jain studies, for the medieval Jain narrative literature is one of the principal repositories of Indic stories. Between 1913 and his death in 1928 he published over a dozen lengthy studies of various motifs in Indic story literature. Some of these appeared in scholarly books of essays in honour of other scholars, while most of them were published in leading scholarly journals. These included The American Journal of Philology: The Journal of the American Oriental Society; The Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society and The Transactions of the American Philological Association.
Each of these articles included material from Jain sources. Bloomfield knew all of the European scholarship on the Jains, which were mostly translations and studies of Jain texts. While European scholars focused on the earliest Shvetambara
scriptures, some of them also published lengthy studies on medieval philosophical and narrative texts. He also had access to Jain texts published in India. This was a period when several Shvetambara Murtipujak monks such as Acharya Vijay Anandsuri (1837-1896, better known as Atmaramji) and Acharya Vijay Dharmsuri (1868-1922) were encouraging their monastic disciples to study and edit many Jain texts, which were not as yet well known, and also encouraging their lay followers to fund the publication of the resulting critical editions of the texts. Bloomfield never travelled to India - nor did most of the Western scholars of Sanskrit at that time - but he was thoroughly abreast of scholarly activities on Jainism there.
In his interlinking studies, he investigated the permutations of a series of distinct folklore motifs in a wide range of Brahmanical, Buddhist, Jain and folk narrative literature. Among the analyzed literary motifs were talking birds, the consequences of accidentally overhearing conversations, entering another person's body, women's pregnancy cravings, stealing, organised brigandage and false ascetics and nuns. In many stories, a parrot or other bird that can mimic human speech overhears what a human character thinks is a confidential message. The plot of the story takes a radical turn when the bird repeats the message in the hearing of another human character. Closely related to this is the motif of an accidentally overheard conversation, which can result in similarly unexpected outcomes. A third way in which stories take a dramatic turn is when one character enters the body of another. Stories involving women's pregnancy cravings can involve the husbands undertaking actions they would normally shun as they seek to satisfy their pregnant wives' requests for unusual food. Many Indian stories describe the activities of organised brigands, reminding us that travel has not always been as safe as it is nowadays. These stories sometimes overlap with many stories that describe the mischievous deeds of false monks and nuns. Such stories served as valuable social function for teaching people of the need always to test whether or not someone who appears to be a monk or nun is really who he or she claims to be. While the majority of renouncers in Indian history have been legitimate spiritual seekers, every generation has seen its fair share of rogues and fakes.
In these studies Bloomfield did not treat Jain literature as separate or distinct from Hindu, Buddhist and folk literatures. Instead, he saw them all as overlapping parts of a pan-Indian 'ocean of story: Jain literature occupies a central place in such a study, for, as the German scholar Johannes Hertel observed in 1922, "during the middle ages down to our days the Jains were the principal story tellers of India."
An important result of Bloomfield's research into medieval Indian narrative literature was in 1919 'The Life and Stories of the Jaina Saviour Parsvanatha', published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. This was the very first book on Jainism published in the United States. It has been reprinted only once, in 1984 by a small publisher in Delhi. As a result, today it is
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