Jinamanjari 1998 09 No 18

Author(s): Jinamanjari
Publisher: Canada Bramhi Jain Society Publication

Page 48

Obviously Bühler had been mislead about the real contents of the Jaisalmer library, which according to Muni Punyavijaya's New Catalogue of Sanskrit and Prakrit Manuscripts: Jesalmer Collection (Ahmedabad: L.D. Institute, 1972, Foreword) contains 2697 manuscripts, not 460 as Bühler was lead to believe. And of the 28 he asked to copy, only 4 were done (Johnson 1992:205).
Evidently the Pañcacayat and the Śripuj did not represent competing interests, as Bühler presumed, but decided together to sacrifice a significant part of the manuscripts to science in order to protect the bulk of the collection from outside interference. Dundas (1992) noted that, although the contents of the library are now known, "Even today, direct access to this material is difficult to gain, usually requiring the simultaneous presence of all trustees, a rare event. .. The conflict of interest here is obvious: for the European, the value of the manuscripts lay in their content by means of which Indian history could be reconstructed, while for the Jain their true worth lay in their role as sacred objects (p.72f.)."
But the conflict of interest was not merely confined to European scholars and the collectors of Jaina material culture. It manifested itself in various forms within the Jain community itself, as a conflict between conservatives, who wanted to keep the bhaṇḍārs locked and under their own exclusive control, and reformers, like Vijayvallabhsūri and the members of the Śvetāmbara Jain Conference, who were keen to publicise the content of the collections and to preserve the precious but sometimes already decomposing manuscripts. Sometimes the reformers were monks, sometimes laity.
Although in Jaisalmer the Pañc and not the Śripuj seemed to own the manuscripts, it was not unusual for the period of the 19th century that the yatis themselves were the actual owners of bhaṇḍārs, and there were frequent "lawsuits between lay sanghs and yatis concerning the possession of manuscripts (Cort 1995:81)," which mostly the yatis won. John Cort (p.81ff.) has shown how ownership patterns varied, and that there is still an ongoing trade in Jain manuscripts. The fact that Bühler bought manuscripts from a vati in Randol was therefore not coincidental, nor were the payments which Jinmuktisuri received for his sermon.
Bühler's queries, however, were met with different responses in each locality. In Surat, Cambay, Limbdi, and Ahmedabad, Bikaner and during his first visit to Patan, Bühler could overcome the resistance of the Pañcs, and was able to obtain copies of almost all the 45 canonical Svetāmbara scriptures already in 1872-1873 (cf. Johnson 1992:203,
For Private 42ersonal Use Only