________________
244
Mahāvira's Words by Walther Schubring — Appendix 2 I have described Mahāvira's sense for realia, which is touched upon by Schubring at the bottom of p. 18/23, as a special trait of his personality in my booklet Buddha und Mahāvīra (Leumann 1922). In a historical survey of the Jaina canon, as I would like to add here finally, the great and interesting textual reference to the Buddhist canon which I discovered in 1881 and presented through short translations in the Actes ... (Leumann 1885b), should have also been mentioned and discussed. Of lesser importance is what Padalipta alludes to about the canon of his time in his Nonne (my translation pp. 98f. (Leumann 1921) = Kleine Schriften, pp. 671f.).
The main content of Schubring's valuable book now, however, are the critical translations from the Jaina canon. All of them evince a complete mastery over the material and a most careful regard for the tradition. Everything significant has been drawn from Angas 1 and 2, namely, we find a complete translation of the main part of the first Anga which Schubring edited in 1910 in an excellent way with a glossary, and translations of about half of all the chapters of the second Anga.
A peculiarity of these ancient components of the canon is that they often display short sentences of metrical composition within the prose, and also that in individual places the text seems to give occasion for minor transpositions. In his striving for order and clarity Schubring has all over provided a full insight into the circumstances. Whether one could always follow his general interpretation of the mixture of prose and verse pieces, and in each and every case the possibilities of transposition, I do not know quite for certain, but cannot enter into a discussion here because it would require much too much space. I may be allowed to single out only a few small details.
On p. 40/48 and fn. 3/80 the translation "powers" (=dependent people) may be strange, as also the expression "in logical development” on p. 41/49. On p. 42/51 I have to defend the traditional classification of the “13 Cases (Fälle) of Action" (Schubring thinks that the tenth case (Schubring uses the German word Arten/ways) would belong to the first five; these, however, have always to do with a violent deed, the tenth with the enormous severity in punishment). On p. 118/134 paliya-tthāna is rendered as "workshop (Werkstätte)", as already in the glossary (of his 1910 ed. p. 89); but paliya is a certain puña (or rāśi or samcaya), which is why palióvama denotes an enormous duration (a kāla-punja). We can move from the somewhat indefinite notion puñja towards the more definite notion, which Schubring distilled from the commentary, under the assumption that paliya strictly speaking would mean "magazine"
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
