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JAINA GAZETTE. [June & July through the kind help of Indian as well as of European scholars, I procured a great mass of manuscripts from private libraries too. After having brought my stadies to a certain conclusion, I think it now advisable to publish my results in a work written in German and bearing the title : “ The Panchtantra, its history and its geographical distribution”!
My researches on the history of the Panchtantra have given a result which neither I nor any European or Indian scholar could have expected. They have shown me how enor mously the literature of the Jains, and especially that of Shvetambars of Gujrat, has influenced the Sanskrit as well as the Vernacular literatures of India, and in the meantime they have given me the proof of the unexpected fact, that one Jain work, the Shukasaptati, has, as a whole book, been translated into Persian and has been propagated, and, lastly, brought to Europe by the Mohammedans.
As perhaps anybody might suppose that I have arrived at these results through a certain predilection for the Jains or for their religion, or through the circumstance that I used only Jain sources for my research, let me state here first, that when I began my Panchtantra studies, I had but a very scanty idea of what the Jains and their literature were, and, secondly, that during all these years I have tried my best to collect all the Panchtantra manuscripts available, writing hundreds of letters and spending a great deal of money. What I expected at the beginning of my work, was to see confirmed Benfey's results. If quite the contrary took place, this effect has been arrived at not by any predilection whatsoever, nor by any negligence in my endeavours to find the truth, but by the fact that the Jains, and especially the Shvetambars of Gujarat, not only in Hemachandra's days, but long before and after this great scholar, exercised a most powerful and beneficial influence on the civilization of their native country. They not only promoted their religion, which taught their codutrymen a pitiful behaviour towards men and animals, and their rulers justice towards, their subjects, but they promoted learning and literary cultarc, in Sanskrit, as well as in Prakrit
Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
