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a large collection of the Jaina manuscripts for the Royal Library at Berlin. This collection was the basis of the first comprehensive and epoch-making accounts of the literature of the Jains by Weber. Weber's book was also the basis of later writers like E. Windisch, A. Guérinot, Helmuth von Glasenapp and others. U.D. Barodia's book, History and Literature of Jainism, Bombay, 1909, has little value for the history of Jain literature.
As far as I know this English version of Weber's Jaina Literature did not see the light of the day in a book form, though Hermann Jacobi in his introduction to the translation of the Uttarādhyayanasūtra published in the Sacred Books of the East series Vol. XLV (1895) said that the reprint of this article was published separately in a book form from Bombay in 1893.. As I have not personally seen the book in any library, sometime in 1957 I gave a proposal to Sri Srichand Rampuriya to publish this Weber's Sacred Literature of the Jains in a book form for the benefit of the Jaina scholars. Sri Rampuriyaji readily agreed and accepted my proposal. He started typing Weber's Sacred Literature of the Jains from the Indian Antiquary and completed in 1958. For a long time, over thirty years, the typed copy of the Weber's book was lying unattended. In the mean time, Sri Rampuriyaji handed over this typed copy to Sri Ganesh Lalwani, the then editor of the Jain. Journal. Sometime in 1988 I again gave this proposal to Ganesh Lalwani for printing this book in his Jain Journal. It was he who then told me that the typed copy of this book was lying with him for a long time, and he didn't dare publish it, because of its difficulty in printing in a book form. I then gave him a proposal to reprint Weber's article on Jain literature in Jain Journal. The book was then published in several issues of the Jain Journal XXVI (1992) - XXVIII (1994) and subsequently some reprints were kept to publish it in a book form. It took 4 years to complete the book. In 1995 the printing of the book was completed. In the mean time, Ganesh Lalwani expired on the 4th of January 1994. Though we both were editing the text his death was a bolt from the blue and naturally it took 4 years to organise the reprint of the book before it saw the light of the day. This then is the background of how the reprint of this book came into existence.
As far as we know, Weber's Sacred Literature of the Jains was the first account of the Jaina āgama texts. Weber has critically assessed each of the agama texts and has valued the Jaina agama texts from the historical and social point of view. The critical acumen which Weber has shown in analysing the Jaina agama texts is unparalleled, particularly some 100 years ago, when there were no printed Jaina āgama texts. After a long time, Winternitz's English translation of the second volume of the History of Indian Literature was published in
