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"Manuscripts, Sanskrit"
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Aspects of Manuscript Culture in South India
This volume deals with South Indian Sanskrit manuscripts, predominantly on palm leaf and rarely older than three to four centuries, and their role in a manuscript culture that had a significant impact on Indian intellectual history for around two millennia.
eBook
Of Gods and Books
India has been the homeland of diverse manuscript traditions that do not cease to impress scholars for their imposing size and complexity. Nevertheless, many topics concerning the study of Indian manuscript cultures still remain to receive systematic examination. Of Gods and Books pays attention to one of these topics - the use of manuscripts as ritualistic tools. Literary sources deal quite extensively with rituals principally focused on manuscripts, whose worship, donation and preservation are duly prescribed. Around these activities, a specific category of ritual gift is created, which finds attestations in pre-tantric, as well as in smārta and tantric, literature, and whose practice is also variously reflected in epigraphical documents. De Simini offers a first systematic study of the textual evidence on the topic of the worship and donation of knowledge. She gives account of possible implications for the relationships between religion and power. The book is indsipensible for a deeper understanding of the cultural aspects of manuscript transmission in medieval India, and beyond.
eBook
Rudra Kavi and the Mughal Elite: A Codicological Reappraisal
This essay offers a codicological analysis of three manuscripts—Bühler 70a (Ms. 7089), Bühler 70b (Ms. 7304) and Bühler 70c (Ms. 7303)—of the British Library, which contain some panegyrics composed by Rudra Kavi (fl. 1570s–1650s). Based on a critical appraisal of handwriting, colophons, watermark and other textual attributes, this essay shows that the three Bühler manuscripts constitute a composite volume of an incomplete anthology of Rudra's panegyric poems. Furthermore, it corroborates how deftly and faithfully all three manuscripts were copied by just one scribe sometime between 1840 and 1880. His exemplar, however, was a draft edition of a few unfinished panegyrics that the poet had been composing simultaneously in praise of some prominent members of the Mughal elite. These findings about the material production and reception history of the Bühler manuscripts illuminate both the craft of an adept scribe and the creative imaginings of a court-poet. For want of a rigorous codicological analysis, previous scholarship has held the scribe responsible for the ‘fragmentary’ and ‘corrupt’ condition of these manuscripts and applauded the Brahmin poet for his literary prowess. This essay distances itself from such unwarranted privileging of a court-poet and marginalisation of a skilled scribe. Instead, it seeks codicological and textual evidence in determining the roles played by poets and scribes in the production of literary manuscripts. This essay ultimately reaffirms the value of codicological reflections in the fields of South Asian historiography and literary studies.
Journal Article
Buddhist Homiletics on Grief
Abstract
The study first introduces a hitherto completely unstudied anonymous work, for which I reconstruct the title *Saddharmaparikathā. This substantial text is a Buddhist homiletician's guidebook with sample sermons in Sanskrit on a rich variety of topics. I argue that it dates from the 5th century and that it was possibly authored in a Saṃmatīya environment. I first discuss the unique manuscript transmitting the text, the structure and contents of the work, what information it can provide for the tradition of preaching and its importance for Buddhist studies. In the second half, I provide a sample chapter 'On Grief' with an annotated translation.
Journal Article
Automatic damage identification of Sanskrit palm leaf manuscripts with SegFormer
Palm leaf manuscripts (PLMs) are of great importance in recording Buddhist Scriptures, medicine, history, philosophy, etc. Some damages occur during the use, spread, and preservation procedure. The comprehensive investigation of Sanskrit PLMs is a prerequisite for further conservation and restoration. However, current damage identification and investigation are carried out manually. They require strong professional skills and are extraordinarily time-consuming. In this study, PLM-SegFormer is developed to provide an automated damage segmentation for Sanskrit PLMs based on the SegFormer architecture. Firstly, a digital image dataset of Sanskrit PLMs (the PLM dataset) was obtained from the Potala Palace in Tibet. Then, the hyperparameters for pre-processing, model training, prediction, and post-processing phases were fully optimized to make the SegFormer model more suitable for the PLM damage segmentation task. The optimized segmentation model reaches 70.1% mHit and 51.2% mIoU. The proposed framework automates the damage segmentation of 10,064 folios of PLMs within 12 h. The PLM-SegFormer framework will facilitate the preservation state survey and record of the Palm-leaf manuscript and be of great value to the subsequent preservation and restoration. The source code is available at https://github.com/Ryan21wy/PLM_SegFormer.
Journal Article
Introducing a Commentary: A Translation of the Introductory Verses to Illumination on Sense and Meaning in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa
The Bhagavata Purana (c.900-1000 ad) is a well-known Sanskrit text consisting of twelve books, divided into just over three-hundred and thirty chapters, and covering ancient myth and dynastic history, as well as an analysis of various philosophies, theologies, and cosmologies to support the argument that Krishna is the supreme deity over and above other deities in the Hindu pantheon like Vishnu and Rama. The first known manuscript is dated at 1124-1125 ad, the earliest known references to it are from Vopadeva (c.1300 ad) and Madhva (c.1238-1317), and it remains an important scripture in contemporary Hinduism. Shridhara Swami (Sridharasvamin) may have lived in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth-century ad in modern-day North and Northeast India, and he may have served as an abbot of the Govardhan Math Peeth monastery in the coastal city of Puri, modern-day Odisha, a place devoted to the study and practice of Sankara's teachings on non-dualism that still survives today.
Journal Article