Prolegomena to Prakritica et Jainica

Author(s): Satyaranjan Banerjee
Publisher: Asiatic Society

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PROLEGOMENA TO PRAKRITICA et JAINICA
$2. The mentioned edition had been Weber's first attempt in Jain research, but years later it was actually his great study "Über ein Fragment der Bhagavati etc.” that was epoch-making. It appeared in two parts in the Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin 1865-66 and in a separate edition (1866-67), that is to say again twenty years after the first Jain text (s.a). Obsolete as it is now, yet it marks in our field the beginning of a philological and creative epoch. As to it, the reader may be referred to Windisch's precise description rendered in the Grundriss (Encyclopedia of Indo-Aryan Research). But the fundaments laid down by Weber in self-sacrificing zeal cannot be passed over here: his treatise “Über die heiligen Schriften der Jaina" in Indische Studien Vol. 16 and 17 (1883-85) based upon the Jain manuscripts acquired by the Royal Library of Berlin 1873-78, and his “Verzeichnis" of the same (1888-92), the latterla represented by two monumental volumes, being a most accurate description which even extends to literature and history. A work of that scope going beyond the usual limits of a catalogue was not out of place at that stage. The Jain manuscripts purchased in later years have been catalogued by the Author not earlier than in 1944.
Some time about those eighties the first prints of canonical texts (1880 ff.) came to Europe adding to foster Jain research work over there. Their inaugurator was Rāy Dhanpati Simha Bahadur at Azimganj or Murshidabad in Bengal. Those huge volumes served their purpose until they were replaced by more handy ones some thirty years after (s.b.).
12. “A good deal of my visual faculty has been buried therein”,
Verz. II, 3. p. XVIII. 13. Die Jaina-Handschriften der Preussischen
Staatsbibliothek, Neuerwerbungen seit 1891. Leipzig 1944. (1127 mss. on 647 pages)