Jinamanjari 1998 09 No 18

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

Page 51

the just punishment for their deeds. That one can love the people and do good, without thinking about one's own ego and believing in one's soul as a thing that is eternally alive, as I maintained, he seemed not to understand (Winternitz 374f.).
I had, throughout these days, when I participated in the many ceremonies, often the feeling, that in all this ceremonial there is endless ritualism involved, outward show, joy of pomp and not very much true religious sentiment. In which religion is it any different ? But nevertheless in this wonderful moonlit night it was to me an endlessly touching sight to see all these good and pious people, offering their reverence to their great teacher, the monk who entered into nirvāņa. All these people, who lived in the world, most of them as merchants, traders etc., united nevertheless here in the veneration of a man, who did not want to have anything to do with worldly goods, but who took upon himself the hard life of a wandering monk, in order to teach and preach what he held to be the highest truth and wisdom (Winternitz 375).
Today the direction of travel has reversed. Even Jain religious functionaries are now moving out of India both to be educated in scientific research and to proselytise, since due to the efforts of Vallabhvijaysūri and other reform-minded monks the Jain community has incorporated the ideals of scientific research as far as Indological studies are concerned. Apparently before he became a monk Muni Jina Vijay, for example, went to see Hermann Jacobi in Bonn:
When I went to Germany in 1928 with a view to acquiring firsthand knowledge of the methods of research and with a view to establishing close contact with the German scholars working on indological subjects and especially on Jain literature, the great scholar, Dr. Hermann Jacobi immediately came from Bonn specially to meet me in Hamburg and invited me with great affection to come there and stay with him for some months (Preface by Jina Vijaya Muni, in Jacobi 1946:11).
The 'opening' of Jain libraries and the revival of interest in the study of Jainism by European Orientalists is today merely a footnote in the history of the Jain renaissance in the late 19th and 20th century, if only by virtue of the fact that much of the task of critically editing and commenting the literary tradition of the Jain heritage has been taken over by secular Jain research institutions like the L.D. Institute and others,
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