About Getting Back Home
A full, one-volume English edition of the Sthaṅāṅga Sūtra still seems to be playing hard to get. Over the past century, scholars have chipped away at it, offering partial renderings rather than an all-you-can-eat banquet.
• Hermann Jacobi’s work in the late 1800s (volumes of Sacred Books of the East) includes translations of several aphorisms drawn from chapters on epistemology and logic.
• More recently, academic journals have published individual sections—Pramāṇa (means of knowledge), Hetu (reasoning), and so on—often accompanied by glosses from Hemachandra’s Sanskrit commentary.
• A handful of PhD dissertations (University of Madras, Banaras Hindu University) present line-by-line English translations of specific Sthānaṅgas, though these rarely circulate beyond specialized libraries.
• Digital initiatives such as the Jain e-Library provide Devanāgarī scans and romanized text, but English glosses remain limited to footnotes and abstracts.
It’s a bit like assembling a jigsaw puzzle one piece at a time: plenty to admire, but no single picture yet emerges. For anyone keen on seeing all eleven “places” (Sthānas) of this Agamic text in English, it may be time to don the scholar’s mantle and fill that gap. Meanwhile, those curious can dip into available extracts—each slice offers its own flavor of Jain logic, ethics and enumeration—while looking forward to a someday comprehensive translation.