The Doctrine of the Jainas, Described after the Old Sources c5.6

c5.6

We abstain from cataloguing here which was printed after 1827, since this can be found in GUÉRINOT's Bibliography (s.b.). We must confine ourselves to mention that "Sketch" of WILSON, because it represents the most important treatment of the subject at that time. He gives a report on the numerable Jain manuscripts both privately owned by him and by the Calcutta Sanskrit College. His "Descriptive Catalogue of the Mackenzie Collection"² dealt with 44 South Indian Jain manuscripts that had come to the East India Company in London. But even the earliest essays were partly based upon texts as was COLEBROOKE'S first one in that it concerned Hemacandra's Abhidhānacintāmani and the Kalpasūtra of the Jain Canon. Still he made use of both in a selective manner only and was far from editing or translating them completely, and twenty years had to pass until the first Jain text was published. Again it was Hemacandra's work that was edited by BÖHTLINGK and RIEU with a German translation in 1847 (St. Petersburg), whereas the Kalpasūtra, along with the Navatattvaprakarana, appeared in 1848 in STEVENSON's English rendering³. That this was a rather imperfect performance⁴ is easily explained by the fact that STEVENSON was the first European scholar to be confronted with the canonical Prakrit¹. The Abhidhāna-cintāmaṇi in 1858 was followed² by WEBER'S edition of Dhaneśvara's Śatruṃjayamāhātmya³ with a detailed preface. So, then, the textual basis was rather narrow for LASSEN'S sketch of Jainism⁴ in his "Indische Altertumskunde" 4, 755-787 (1861).⁵