Prolegomena to Prakritica et Jainica

Author(s): Satyaranjan Banerjee
Publisher: Asiatic Society

Page 44

A BRIEF HISTORY OF JAIN RESEARCH
WALTHER SCHUBRING
$1. It was in the year 1807 that in the Asiatick Researches (Calcutta and London), Vol. IX, there appeared three reports published under the title “Account of the Jains" and collected by Major (later Lieutenant Colonel) Colin Mackenzie supplemented by an abstract from his diary of 1797 and from that of Dr. F. Buchanan', the latter containing some notes of a Jain gentleman. These publications were immediately followed by H. Th. Colebrooke's "Observations on the Sects of the Jains"? They were based upon those researches as well as on Colebrooke's own, and it was in them that, apart from bare descriptive recording, some scholarly spirit first made itself felt by a critical standpoint taken and by facts being combined. Jain research thus dates from somewhat more than 150 years ago.
In H.H. Wilson's "Sketch of the Religious Sects of the Hindus" we find some stray notes about the Jains, but no details are given, though, on the other hand, the author dwells upon Vol. I of the Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society (1827) which contained an essay by Delamaine
1. Buchanan published “A Journey from Madras through the
countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar" (Lo. 1807, 2nd ed. Madras 1870, comp. Guérinot JAs. 1909, p. 55). In this work the Jains are often mentioned. Buchanan's Journal kept during the Survey of the Districts of Patna and Gaya in 1811-12”, ed. by V.H. Jackson, Patna 1925, contains a description of his visit to the place where Mahāvira died. Comp. Jacobi Spaw 1930, p. 561. Printed in Colebrooke's Miscellaneous Essays, 2nd ed., (1872) vol. II, 191-224.