Mahaviras Word

Author(s): Walther Shubring
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 16

Schubring's Foreword
Thanks to the highly valued cooperation of the Religionswissenschaftliche Kommission of the Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, and the Notgemeinschaft Deutscher Wissenschaft, critical translations from the Svetāmbara-Jaina canon can be presented in the following pages. They are based partly on my edition of the Bambhacerāim of the Āyāra of 1910. My view that one can approach this quite puzzling text only by differentiating it from the sources and by a regrouping is still the same. To a translation based on it, which was immediately suggested to me to undertake, but which was done only several years later, came other sections of the canon afterwards. Aspects of the Bambhacerāim partly appear in them, albeit to a lesser degree. My intention was to present a philological critique of these texts. The consequence of the aforementioned most kind help is that the venerable words of Mahāvira and his disciples can obtain the deserved value among the sources of the history of religions, and this in German and in a special garb. That the ancient works of the Jainas have been particularly subject to deterioration, and the fact that Hermann Jacobi chose from among them the most important (ones) for religious studies for his English translation in the Sacred Books of the East volumes XXII (1884) and XLV (1895), explains why here too, as in the above mentioned edition, I am following the same path which he as a pioneer prepared 42 and 31 years ago.
Whereas nothing was to be added to the new resources I had used already in 1910 for the Āyāra, for the Süyagada I received the cunni, which the Bhandarkar Oriental Institute in Poona kindly sent me together with other manuscripts presenting the tradition of the Dasão (1887-91, Nr. 1288). This is an old but undated transcript on paper, which unfortunately so
Schubring 1910.
My German rendering of the basic teachings of the Jainas in a systematic arrangement is to appear in 1927 in Religionsgeschichtliches Lesebuch (pp. iv-33, Kleine Schriften, pp. 71-107).
A pothi edition with the Ācārängacūrni of Jinadāsa was published in Ratlam in 1941 (WB).