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being the wording of the text of the Council of Valabhi of the year 980 (or 993) after Mahavira. Ever so often in his later years he stressed the necessity of/editing the complete cannon of the Svetambaras.
His training under Leumann proved to be an ideal one : Leumann himself possessed a sharp intellect, stupendous reading in the whole field of Indology (as understood in the West), and the highest acumen. He succeeded in passing on these gifts and his learning to his pupil. In 1904 Schubring submitted as a thesis for the Ph.D. degree a critical edition of the Kalpa-sūtra with a German translation and glossary (s. Bibliography no. 1). In 1910 he edited the 1st Srutaskandha of the Āyāra as a Prize Essay of the Max-Müller Bequest (Bibliography no. 2).
From 1905 to 1920 he served as a librarian at the Königlich Preu'ssische Staatsbibliothek (Royal Prussian State Library) at Berlin. The work a librarian had to perform in those years was much different from the duties of a librarian of to-day, at least in this country. At any rate Schubring was able, as he told me, to devote much of this time to his Prakrit studies, which led him in 1918 to submit a thesis to the Philosophical Faculty in Berlin which gained him the Venia legendi (teaching faculty) (Das Mahānisiha-sutta, Bibl. no. 4). It does not appear that in those disturbed times—it was at the end of the World War I, and the break-down of the monarchy in Germany, combined with difficulties in every-daylife, there have been many students while he was teaching Indology in Berlin as a "Privat-Dozent" (which, roughly speaking, somehow answers the "Reader" in England).
In 1916 the University of Hamburg had been founded, and the first professor of Indology there was Sten Konow who however soon left for his native Norway. The Faculty in Hamburg elected Schubring to become Konow's successor in 1920. Schubring accepted the offer and remained as Head of the Department (Seminar) of Indology for thirty years to come, until his retirement in 1950. In 1924-25 he was elected to the Dean of the Philosophical Faculty. His successor to the chair of Indology is his own friend and former pupil, Prof. Dr. Ludwig Alsdorf.
During these 30 years of patient and laborious work several books appeared from Schubring's pen. Two of them have proved to be real standard works for many years to come, viz., Die Lehre der Jainas, (Bibl. no. 23) which in 1962 was translated into English (Bibl. no. 41), and his Catalogue of the Jaina Mss in the Prussian State Library (Bibl. no. 31).
