Jainas in History of Indian Literature

Author(s): Jinvijay
Publisher: ZZZ Unknown

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JAINAS IN INDIAN LITERATURE
That was all,--but it was more than later writers on Indian Literature had to say about the Jainas. The brilliant and much-read book on the Literature and Culture of India by Leopold von Schroeder, published in 1887, devotes half a page to the sect of the Jainas without even mentioning anything about Jaina literature. Professor A. A. Macdonell in his useful History of Sanskrit Literature, published in 1900, has a few stray remarks on Jaina religion, without saying anything about the literature of the Jainas. He gives the titles of Hemachandra's grammatical and lexicographical works without even mentioning that Hemacandra was a Jaina. A. Baumgartner in his learned compilation “Die Literaturen Indiens und Ostasiens" (forming part of a voluminous “Geschichte der Weltliteratur," third and fourth edition, 1902) devotes four pages to the Jainas and their literature, winding up with a quotation from E. Washburn Hopkins' “Religions of India,” where it is said that the Jainas have no literature worthy of that name. H. Oldenberg in his Essays on the Literature of Ancient India ( Die Literatur des alten Indien) published in 1903 disposes of the Jainas in three lines. R. W. Frazer in his “Literary History of India” (1898) has well pointed out (pp. 310 f)
1 Weber has well made up for this deficiency of his book
(which was not his fault, but simply due to the state of knowledge at his time); for he was the very pioneer of Jaina studies by his account of Jaina literature in the “ Indische Studien” Vols. 16 and 17 (1883-85) and in his Reports on Jaina Manuscripts in the Royal Library at Berlin (1888-91 ).