Jain Spirit 2004 03 No 18

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

Page 53

unfortunately only available in specialised research libraries. In this book Bloomfield gave a detailed synopsis of the fourteenth-century Parshvanatha Charitra of the Shvetambara monk Bhavadevasuri. In medieval times the telling of the life of Parshvanatha expanded to include the telling of the previous lives of both Parshvanatha and his foe Kamatha. This extended biographical frame allowed Bhavadevasuri to explain in great detail the workings of karma. Deeds, words and thoughts in one life are shown to bear karmic fruit over many future births in hellish and heavenly realms, as animals and as humans. Many of the stories in the biographies of Parshvanatha are distinctively Jain, and not found in any other literary milieus of medieval India. But many other stories are shared with other literary traditions in India. They are found in Hindu and Buddhist literature and folk literature. Bloomfield well understood that the study of Jain narrative literature is essential for an adequate understanding of medieval Indian literature. Bloomfield accompanied his 155-page digest of the text with detailed notes on the various literary motifs, proverbs and linguistic issues raised by the text.
In 1923, four years after The Life and Stories of the Jaina Saviour Parsvanatha, Bloomfield published another study devoted exclusively to Jain literature. This was a lengthy synopsis of the thirteenth-century Shalibhadra Charitra by the Shvetambara monk Dharmakumara, which he published in the Journal of the American Oriental Society. This is a well-known story of the karmic fruits of donation (dana) of food to a monk. Due to such auspicious karmic fruits, the merchant prince Shalibhadra was able to renounce the world during the lifetime of Mahavir and attain liberation. As Bloomfield pointed out, donation is one of the four virtues of a pious Jain householder, and Jain texts in particular focus on the donation of food to a monk. This should not surprise us, especially when one remembers that most of these stories were told by educated monks to their lay followers, on whom they depended for their daily food.
These studies were all part of what Bloomfield proposed to be a vast Encyclopaedia of Hindu Fiction. He envisioned a collaborative project modelled on the 13-volume Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, which was published between 1917 and 1927. Bloomfield explained his plan in an essay he published in 1927, near the end of his life. He argued that the study of fiction 'must develop into science! But before the outlines of this science would become visible, Bloomfield said, it was first necessary to collect, organise and interpret motifs and themes from throughout what he called 'the titanic mass of Hindu fiction themes. His own essays, as well as those of some of his students, were only 'haphazard and tentative', but he was confident that the outlines of his proposed science were beginning to emerge.
Bloomfield's planned encyclopedia never materialised. In the seventy-five years since his death, scholars have continued to read, study and analyze Indian literature (including Jain
HISTORY 51
literature). But the massive scope of Bloomfield's proposal doomed it from the start, as the sheer quantity of Indian literature its 'titanic mass' - means that it is impossible ever to see the whole of it in the way Bloomfield had hoped.
Maurice Bloomfield retired from Johns Hopkins in 1926, at the age of 71. He moved from Baltimore to San Francisco to be near his son, Dr. Arthur Bloomfield, who was Professor of Medicine at the University of California. He passed away on 13 June 1928.
One of Bloomfield's students, Franklin Edgerton, who was Professor of Sanskrit at Yale University, had the following to say of his teacher in an obituary published in the Journal of the American Oriental Society in 1928. Edgerton surveyed Bloomfield's extensive contributions to scholarship on India, and then turned to Bloomfield as a teacher. He wrote, "Bloomfield by his own example taught his pupils nothing if not independence and a critical attitude, first of all towards himself and his own ideas." Edgerton went on to explain Bloomfield's teaching method: "It was not his habit to prepare in advance schematic dissertations for presentation to a class. On the contrary, he admitted his students to the workshop of his mind. The great educational value of his courses lay not in the facts he expounded, but in the insight gained by watching the operations of his thought." Edgerton explained that Bloomfield was ever ready to revise his thoughts and so, by his own example, he taught his students how to apply the scientific method to the study of language, literature and religion. Edgerton concluded, "No man was ever freer from any tendency to stick to what he had said because he had said it. With this power of self-criticism he combined an imaginative faculty which could often carry him quickly and surely to the heart of a problem, around which an equally careful but less inspired explorer might grope for long in vain."
Bloomfield did not found any 'American School of Jain Studies! Only two of his students continued with any scholarship on Jainism. These were W. Norman Brown, Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies for many years at the University of Pennsylvania, and Helen Johnson, an independent scholar whose six-volume translation of Hemachandra's The Lives of the Sixty-Three Illustrious Persons is one of the masterworks of Jain studies. Nor did Johns Hopkins become a centre for Jain studies; today Sanskrit is not even offered there, nor has it been for many years. But Bloomfield's scholarship continues to be a valuable source for our understanding of Jain literature. He showed conclusively that any study of Indian literature is incomplete if it does not include Jain literature. His book and articles also give us insight into the fascinating world of medieval Jainism, and so remain an invaluable source for the study of the Jains.
John Cort is Associate Professor of Religion at Denison University, Ohio and a member of the Advisory Board of Jain Spirit. He has published widely on Jainism. For Private & Personal Use Only