Jainas in History of Indian Literature

Author(s): Jinvijay
Publisher: ZZZ Unknown

Page 18

WRITER'S THESIS
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the great influence the Jainas have exercised on the Dravidian literature of the South. “It was through the fostering care of the Jainas, that the South first seems to have been inspired with new ideals, and its literature enriched with new forms of expression". And he quotes the words of the great Dravidian scholar Dr. Pope who said that the “Jain compositions were clever, pointed, elegant, full of satire, of wordly wisdom, epigrammatic, but not religious.” But though he acknowledges the debt of Dravidian literature to the Jainas, he has nothing to say about Jaina literature and its place in the Sanskrit and Prakrit literatures of India.
$2) Statement of the Writer's Thesis When I began in 1913 to write the second volume of my History of Indian Literature it was clear to me from the beginning that I should have to devote a whole section to Jaina literature. I had to avail myself of the labours of A. Weber, H. Jacobi, E. Leumann, Ramkrishna Gopal Bhandarkar, A. Guerinot, Bühler, R. Hoernle, Joh. Hertel, and many others, and at least some of the most important text publications issued by the Jain community were accessible to me. And it is only due to the limited space at my disposal that I could not treat the sacred literature of the Jainas as fully as I should have liked to do, but had to content myself with devoting to it about 70 printed pages. But I have treated in these pages only the religious literature, while reserving the non-religious poetical and