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who adopted the academic structure at all levels of institutionalized acquisition of knowledge.
The richness of the Indian literature has been captured in numerous manuscripts, some over a thousand years old that are scattered in museums, libraries, temples and private collections throughout the world. In the field of Jainism an earliest effort was made in the sixties of nineteenth century. A German scholar, George Buhler and other scholars in service who served the then Indian government, were sent out to collect manuscripts. Jain manuscripts were preserved in abundance at Jaisalmer, Patan and Moodbidri by various Jain institutions. It is interesting to know that Jains have preserved fine pieces of artwork such as painted wooden boxes and book covers of manuscripts. These painted covers of books on religious topics were commissioned in commemoration of an ascetic, for a presentation of manuscripts.
Hermann Jacobi a German Indologist joined Buhler and they together went to a famous fort of Jaisalmer where, there was a good storage of Jain manuscripts belonging to swetamber sect. George Buhler while collecting manuscripts obtained permission from the Indian Government to collect duplicates, purchase manuscripts at government costs and hand them over to the Berlin library, where Albert Weber has taken care of those rare manuscripts. He prepared a magnificent catalogue of those manuscripts. With the help of that catalogue he gave the first summary of the canonical Agams and initiated Jain studies in Germany. Weber was a genius par excellence and almost unbelievably diligent. During that period when editions of Indian texts were still very rare, he read innumerable manuscripts and contributed more than any other western scholar to the early knowledge of Indian literature. Later on Ernest Leumann and Ludwig Alsdorf worked on manuscripts without the help of many printed books, particularly on Apbhransh and Nijjuti's literature.
Leumann made some very good text editions but could only begin this work. He had to leave unfinished when he died in 1930. Sanskrit department in Hamburg University, Germany preserves all the papers left by him. During my visit to Germany in 1982, I saw many of them already used and still more waiting to be taken out of the big almirahas, filled completely by them. One of his life events shows his remarkable achievement and aptitude in the field of manuscripts. In the first years of twentieth century, Sir Auraulstein explored in Eastern Pakistan and brought from the sands of the desert, block prints and manuscripts partly of the Sanskrit work of the highest value for the literary history of India but partly also of manuscripts and block prints in an Indian scripts in Brahmi, a totally unknown language. There was then the International congress of Orientalists in Copenhagen and Stein made a brief report to that conference about his discoveries and findings and Leumann asked him to lend him some of these manuscripts in unknown language. In one single night he succeeded in deciphering enough to prove that this was the new Aryan language and he could even make the first
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