Asia and Africa Institute, Abteilung Indien und Tibet

This publication expands, though only rather slightly, on one section of the presentation (i.e. "A Tantra's Dependent Origination: The Sources and Transformations of the Hevajratantra") I gave at the Evolution of Scriptures, Formation of Canons conference convened by Orna Almogi and Chizuko Yoshimizu in Tokyo, September 2018. A more detailed discussion of the subjects treated in other sections of that presentation (including: the textual sources which have been drawn on in the composition of the Hevajratantra, the mūlatantra of the Hevajratantra, and the ways in which the scripture itself can be seen as an auto-commentary) will have to be postponed till (hopefully) another occasion. What is focused on here mainly concerns the transmission of the Hevajratantra. It is therefore more directly related to the evolution of the text than to its origin. But origin and evolution I see as being in any case intertwined, so that, in the case of scriptures as well as of anything else (textual, material, or other) a better understanding of origin requires a better understanding of evolution.

​The present doctoral dissertation collects materials pertinent for the text-historical evaluation of several unpublished commentaries on the Kirātārjunīya, a classical Epic Poem in Sanskrit. Although the collected data deal primarily with a single poem, their analysis presented in the current thesis can be considered exemplary for the study of other texts belonging to the same genre — namely, the Sanskrit epic poetry. In this way, the current dissertation contributes to the broader field of study of classical Indian literature.

The first chapter of my doctoral dissertation is concerned with general methodological issues. I commence my work by laying out the method of structural analysis of the commentaries on mahākāvya and subsequently deal with several questions pertaining to the composition of these texts. The second chapter comprises an examination of several important unpublished commentaries on the Kirātārjunīya. In dealing with each of these texts, I provide a detailed description of its manuscripts first and, in the following step, survey and evaluate all the relevant historical information pertaining to the author and the composition of the respective work. The third chapter briefly examines various procedures adopted by individual commentators, by means of which the texts of their predecessors were integrated into their own works. The analysis of textual reuse described in this chapter can be applied, on the one hand, in order to examine other similar works and, on the other hand, in order to evaluate the manuscript transmission of individual texts, a problem that is dealt with in the subsequent chapters of my dissertation. In the fourth chapter, I describe the available manuscripts of a single commentary on the Kirātārjunīya, the Laghuṭikā by Prakāśavarṣa. In the fifth chapter, I attempt a detailed analysis of the data about the author's life and works available to us so far. In the sixth chapter, I finally turn to a text-historical analysis of the available versions of the Laghuṭikā. In so doing, I pay particular attention to highlighting various difficulties involved in the attempt to compare these versions with each other. In a short conclusion, I, therefore, propose possible strategies, which could aid in solving the problems thus described.

The present article looks at several potentially rewarding strategies of employing structure analysis to the study of Sanskrit commentaries on mahākāvya-. The introductory section gives an overview of the actual methodology and touches upon general issues pertaining to the composition of the examined literary genre. Drawing upon examples from Sanskrit commentaries on the Kirātārjunīya, the main body of the article considers the practical application of the structure analysis. It discusses its implications for the text-historical enquiry into individual texts, as well as their comparative study.

Original publication is here: https://indianmedicine.nl/article/view/37385

This article presents a detailed introduction to the study of three Nepalese manuscripts of the Suśrutasaṃhitā, one of which happens to be the oldest verifiably dated Sanskrit manuscript preserved in the region. The article consists of three larger sections. The first part provides a thorough critical survey of research that has been done on this material to date. The second section provides a detailed description of the manuscripts, translates and discusses their colophons and deals extensively with various problems involved in their dating. The final section of the article looks at characteristic features of the Nepalese version of the Suśrutasaṃhitā by focusing on its structure, selected structural elements and selected elements of content.