Vincenzo Vergiani | University of Cambridge (original) (raw)
Papers by Vincenzo Vergiani
De Gruyter eBooks, Apr 4, 2022
This Nepalese manuscript of a Sanskrit treatise on horse-medicine, with a Newar colophon, provide... more This Nepalese manuscript of a Sanskrit treatise on horse-medicine, with a Newar colophon, provides an example of the interaction between Sanskrit as a learned, universalising language and the regional vernaculars spoken by those who embraced and disseminated Sanskrit literary culture throughout the South Asian world.
Bilingual discourse and cross-cultural fertilisation: Sanskrit and Tamil in medieval India, 2013
In this article I will look at one episode in the long history of the interaction between the San... more In this article I will look at one episode in the long history of the interaction between the Sanskrit and Tamil grammatical traditions and draw from it some — largely tentative — conclusions in the hope that they may help to cast some light on larger processes at work. The episode in question is quite a clear-cut case of conceptual borrowing. It consists in the adoption of a semantic classification of the grammatical object, first formulated by the Sanskrit author Bhartṛhari (probably 5th ce..
Critical Edition, Translation and Other Contributions
Journal of Indian Philosophy, 2014
Examining the function and style of the references to grammatical literature found in a substanti... more Examining the function and style of the references to grammatical literature found in a substantial section of Helārāja's Prakīrṇaprakāśa on Bhartṙhari's third book of the Vākyapadīya, the article argues that the likely ideological motive of this commentary was to establish its mūla work firmly within the Brahmanical canon and should therefore be seen in the context of the appropriation of Bhartṙhari's ideas on the part of the roughly contemporary Pratyabhijñā philosophers of Kashmir. Incidentally, it also touches upon the making of the Pāṅinian tradition and the relation between Helārāja and Kaiyat˙a, the Kashmiri commentator of Mahābhāṣya.
Critical Edition, Translation and Other Contributions
Critical Edition, Translation and Other Contributions
Verità e bellezza. Essays in Honour of Raffaele Torella, by Francesco Sferra and Vincenzo Vergiani (eds.), 2022
Vincenzo Vergiani 73 cf. Vr¢ ṣabhadeva's second interpretation of arthapravr¢ ttitattvānām: artha... more Vincenzo Vergiani 73 cf. Vr¢ ṣabhadeva's second interpretation of arthapravr¢ ttitattvānām: arthaś ca pravr¢ ttiś ceti vā dvandvaḥ. artho dravyaṃ pravr¢ ttiḥ kriyā tayos tattvāni teṣāṃ śabdo nibandhanam (Sph 44.8−9). 74 This corresponds to Si 1.45.6−7, which however shows some major variant readings: aparo 'rthaḥ. kevalaṃ vastu tyadādīnāṃ vastūpalakṣañānāṃ viṣayamātram. tasya pravr¢ ttitattvaṃ saṃsargaḥ. saṃsr¢ ṣṭo hi kriyāsv artho guñabhāvena pradhānabhāvena copādīyate.
Vincenzo Vergiani 73 cf. Vr¢ ṣabhadeva's second interpretation of arthapravr¢ ttitattvānām: artha... more Vincenzo Vergiani 73 cf. Vr¢ ṣabhadeva's second interpretation of arthapravr¢ ttitattvānām: arthaś ca pravr¢ ttiś ceti vā dvandvaḥ. artho dravyaṃ pravr¢ ttiḥ kriyā tayos tattvāni teṣāṃ śabdo nibandhanam (Sph 44.8−9). 74 This corresponds to Si 1.45.6−7, which however shows some major variant readings: aparo 'rthaḥ. kevalaṃ vastu tyadādīnāṃ vastūpalakṣañānāṃ viṣayamātram. tasya pravr¢ ttitattvaṃ saṃsargaḥ. saṃsr¢ ṣṭo hi kriyāsv artho guñabhāvena pradhānabhāvena copādīyate.
Rivista degli Studi Orientali, XCII, 3-4, 2019
In the article I argue that the post-Vedic grammatical scholarship that culminated in the composi... more In the article I argue that the post-Vedic grammatical scholarship that culminated in the composition of Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī was made possible by writing, which had been introduced in Gandhāra in the wake of the Achaemenids’ conquest of north-west India in the late 6th century BCE. I present and discuss some of the structural and terminological features of Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī which suggest that it originated in a literate milieu. Moreover, I argue that Pāṇinian grammar constituted an epistemic rupture in the culture of ancient India as it marked a major shift towards the secularisation of knowledge. Perhaps of even greater historical consequence is the fact that Pāṇini’s early grammatisation of Sanskrit was arguably one of the key factors in the emergence of Sanskrit as the dominant language of culture in South Asia and beyond for centuries to come.
“Around Abhinavagupta. Aspects of the Intellectual History of Kashmir from the Ninth to the Eleventh Century”, edited by Eli Franco and Isabelle Ratié, LIT Verlag, Berlin., 2016
In the late first millennium CE, approximately at the same period that saw the rise of the Pratya... more In the late first millennium CE, approximately at the same period that saw the rise of the Pratyabhijñā school of non-dualist Śaivism on the Indian philosophical scene, Kashmir was also home to Helārāja's composition of a complete commentary, consisting of two distinct works, 1 on Bhartṛhari's Vākyapadīya (henceforth, VP). 2 Only one of these survives, the Prakīrṇaprakāśa (henceforth, PrPr) on the third kāṇḍa. 3 As I have remarked in a recent publication, 4 it * I touched on some of the issues discussed here in the paper I read at the conference "Around Abhinavagupta. Aspects of the Intellectual History of Kashmir from the 9 th to the 11 th Centuries," held in Leipzig in June 2013. I wish to thank the organisers, Eli Franco and Isabelle Ratié, for inviting me to that very stimulating event and for their warm hospitality. I also wish to express my gratitude to Raffaele Torella, Daniele Cuneo and Hugo David, who have provided helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article, and, in the case of Torella, also suggested an emendation to one of the passages I quote below. Needless to say, I alone am responsible for all remaining faults.
“Scribbling in Newar on the Margins of a Sanskrit Manuscript (Add.2832, University Library, Cambridge)”, in M. Ni Mhaonaigh and M. J. Clarke (eds.), Medieval Multilingual Manuscripts. Studies in Manuscript Cultures, 24. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 199-208., 2022
This Nepalese manuscript of a Sanskrit treatise on horse-medicine, with a Newar colophon, provide... more This Nepalese manuscript of a Sanskrit treatise on horse-medicine, with a Newar colophon, provides an example of the interaction between Sanskrit as a learned, universalising language and the regional vernaculars spoken by those who embraced and disseminated Sanskrit literary culture throughout the South Asian world.
R. Torella (ed.), Italian Scholars on India, vol. I (Classical Indology). Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2021
Pāṇini’s grammar does not provide a formal definition of the sentence (vākya), but some sūtras se... more Pāṇini’s grammar does not provide a formal definition of the sentence (vākya), but some sūtras seem to admit that a sentence may contain several finite verbs. However, a definition describing vākya as centred upon a single finite verb is found in the work of Kātyāyana, Pāṇini’s earliest commentator. Thus, it is not surprising that the problem of how to consider complex (i.e. multi-verbal) utterances should draw the attention of Bhartṛhari, the grammarian and philosopher who advocated akhaṇḍapakṣa, the view that the sentence is a unitary entity, both formally and semantically. This article offers a preliminary examination of some passages in the Vākyapadīya devoted to complex utterances and how one should construe the semantic and syntactic relation between the verbs therein.
Indic Manuscript Cultures through the Ages, 2017
Despite the recognised centrality of grammar in South Asian intellectual history, much of the exi... more Despite the recognised centrality of grammar in South Asian intellectual history, much of the existing scholarship on the history of the various grammatical traditions consists of lists of names, works and relative, approximate chronologies. Little is known of how their fortunes related to the socio-political changes that affected a given region in the course of time, and even less about the social history of grammar. This article is an attempt at reconstructing the history of the three main schools of Sanskrit grammar-Pāṇinīya, Cāndra and Kātantra-in medieval Nepal through the survey of the grammatical works listed in the catalogues of the Nepalese-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project (NGMCP) and the small but important Cambridge collections. The study of the colophons (where available), as well as the assessment of other indicators of age and provenance such as the material (palm leaf/paper) and the script, can throw light on the social and cultural conditions that made the various systems flourish or decline at different times. 1 Here I will mostly rely on the Descriptive Catalogue (wiki) of the Nepalese-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project (http://134.100.29.17/wiki/Main_Page) and the Sanskrit Manuscripts catalogue in the Cambridge Digital Library (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/sanskrit).
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2016
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2016
De Gruyter eBooks, Apr 4, 2022
This Nepalese manuscript of a Sanskrit treatise on horse-medicine, with a Newar colophon, provide... more This Nepalese manuscript of a Sanskrit treatise on horse-medicine, with a Newar colophon, provides an example of the interaction between Sanskrit as a learned, universalising language and the regional vernaculars spoken by those who embraced and disseminated Sanskrit literary culture throughout the South Asian world.
Bilingual discourse and cross-cultural fertilisation: Sanskrit and Tamil in medieval India, 2013
In this article I will look at one episode in the long history of the interaction between the San... more In this article I will look at one episode in the long history of the interaction between the Sanskrit and Tamil grammatical traditions and draw from it some — largely tentative — conclusions in the hope that they may help to cast some light on larger processes at work. The episode in question is quite a clear-cut case of conceptual borrowing. It consists in the adoption of a semantic classification of the grammatical object, first formulated by the Sanskrit author Bhartṛhari (probably 5th ce..
Critical Edition, Translation and Other Contributions
Journal of Indian Philosophy, 2014
Examining the function and style of the references to grammatical literature found in a substanti... more Examining the function and style of the references to grammatical literature found in a substantial section of Helārāja's Prakīrṇaprakāśa on Bhartṙhari's third book of the Vākyapadīya, the article argues that the likely ideological motive of this commentary was to establish its mūla work firmly within the Brahmanical canon and should therefore be seen in the context of the appropriation of Bhartṙhari's ideas on the part of the roughly contemporary Pratyabhijñā philosophers of Kashmir. Incidentally, it also touches upon the making of the Pāṅinian tradition and the relation between Helārāja and Kaiyat˙a, the Kashmiri commentator of Mahābhāṣya.
Critical Edition, Translation and Other Contributions
Critical Edition, Translation and Other Contributions
Verità e bellezza. Essays in Honour of Raffaele Torella, by Francesco Sferra and Vincenzo Vergiani (eds.), 2022
Vincenzo Vergiani 73 cf. Vr¢ ṣabhadeva's second interpretation of arthapravr¢ ttitattvānām: artha... more Vincenzo Vergiani 73 cf. Vr¢ ṣabhadeva's second interpretation of arthapravr¢ ttitattvānām: arthaś ca pravr¢ ttiś ceti vā dvandvaḥ. artho dravyaṃ pravr¢ ttiḥ kriyā tayos tattvāni teṣāṃ śabdo nibandhanam (Sph 44.8−9). 74 This corresponds to Si 1.45.6−7, which however shows some major variant readings: aparo 'rthaḥ. kevalaṃ vastu tyadādīnāṃ vastūpalakṣañānāṃ viṣayamātram. tasya pravr¢ ttitattvaṃ saṃsargaḥ. saṃsr¢ ṣṭo hi kriyāsv artho guñabhāvena pradhānabhāvena copādīyate.
Vincenzo Vergiani 73 cf. Vr¢ ṣabhadeva's second interpretation of arthapravr¢ ttitattvānām: artha... more Vincenzo Vergiani 73 cf. Vr¢ ṣabhadeva's second interpretation of arthapravr¢ ttitattvānām: arthaś ca pravr¢ ttiś ceti vā dvandvaḥ. artho dravyaṃ pravr¢ ttiḥ kriyā tayos tattvāni teṣāṃ śabdo nibandhanam (Sph 44.8−9). 74 This corresponds to Si 1.45.6−7, which however shows some major variant readings: aparo 'rthaḥ. kevalaṃ vastu tyadādīnāṃ vastūpalakṣañānāṃ viṣayamātram. tasya pravr¢ ttitattvaṃ saṃsargaḥ. saṃsr¢ ṣṭo hi kriyāsv artho guñabhāvena pradhānabhāvena copādīyate.
Rivista degli Studi Orientali, XCII, 3-4, 2019
In the article I argue that the post-Vedic grammatical scholarship that culminated in the composi... more In the article I argue that the post-Vedic grammatical scholarship that culminated in the composition of Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī was made possible by writing, which had been introduced in Gandhāra in the wake of the Achaemenids’ conquest of north-west India in the late 6th century BCE. I present and discuss some of the structural and terminological features of Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī which suggest that it originated in a literate milieu. Moreover, I argue that Pāṇinian grammar constituted an epistemic rupture in the culture of ancient India as it marked a major shift towards the secularisation of knowledge. Perhaps of even greater historical consequence is the fact that Pāṇini’s early grammatisation of Sanskrit was arguably one of the key factors in the emergence of Sanskrit as the dominant language of culture in South Asia and beyond for centuries to come.
“Around Abhinavagupta. Aspects of the Intellectual History of Kashmir from the Ninth to the Eleventh Century”, edited by Eli Franco and Isabelle Ratié, LIT Verlag, Berlin., 2016
In the late first millennium CE, approximately at the same period that saw the rise of the Pratya... more In the late first millennium CE, approximately at the same period that saw the rise of the Pratyabhijñā school of non-dualist Śaivism on the Indian philosophical scene, Kashmir was also home to Helārāja's composition of a complete commentary, consisting of two distinct works, 1 on Bhartṛhari's Vākyapadīya (henceforth, VP). 2 Only one of these survives, the Prakīrṇaprakāśa (henceforth, PrPr) on the third kāṇḍa. 3 As I have remarked in a recent publication, 4 it * I touched on some of the issues discussed here in the paper I read at the conference "Around Abhinavagupta. Aspects of the Intellectual History of Kashmir from the 9 th to the 11 th Centuries," held in Leipzig in June 2013. I wish to thank the organisers, Eli Franco and Isabelle Ratié, for inviting me to that very stimulating event and for their warm hospitality. I also wish to express my gratitude to Raffaele Torella, Daniele Cuneo and Hugo David, who have provided helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article, and, in the case of Torella, also suggested an emendation to one of the passages I quote below. Needless to say, I alone am responsible for all remaining faults.
“Scribbling in Newar on the Margins of a Sanskrit Manuscript (Add.2832, University Library, Cambridge)”, in M. Ni Mhaonaigh and M. J. Clarke (eds.), Medieval Multilingual Manuscripts. Studies in Manuscript Cultures, 24. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 199-208., 2022
This Nepalese manuscript of a Sanskrit treatise on horse-medicine, with a Newar colophon, provide... more This Nepalese manuscript of a Sanskrit treatise on horse-medicine, with a Newar colophon, provides an example of the interaction between Sanskrit as a learned, universalising language and the regional vernaculars spoken by those who embraced and disseminated Sanskrit literary culture throughout the South Asian world.
R. Torella (ed.), Italian Scholars on India, vol. I (Classical Indology). Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2021
Pāṇini’s grammar does not provide a formal definition of the sentence (vākya), but some sūtras se... more Pāṇini’s grammar does not provide a formal definition of the sentence (vākya), but some sūtras seem to admit that a sentence may contain several finite verbs. However, a definition describing vākya as centred upon a single finite verb is found in the work of Kātyāyana, Pāṇini’s earliest commentator. Thus, it is not surprising that the problem of how to consider complex (i.e. multi-verbal) utterances should draw the attention of Bhartṛhari, the grammarian and philosopher who advocated akhaṇḍapakṣa, the view that the sentence is a unitary entity, both formally and semantically. This article offers a preliminary examination of some passages in the Vākyapadīya devoted to complex utterances and how one should construe the semantic and syntactic relation between the verbs therein.
Indic Manuscript Cultures through the Ages, 2017
Despite the recognised centrality of grammar in South Asian intellectual history, much of the exi... more Despite the recognised centrality of grammar in South Asian intellectual history, much of the existing scholarship on the history of the various grammatical traditions consists of lists of names, works and relative, approximate chronologies. Little is known of how their fortunes related to the socio-political changes that affected a given region in the course of time, and even less about the social history of grammar. This article is an attempt at reconstructing the history of the three main schools of Sanskrit grammar-Pāṇinīya, Cāndra and Kātantra-in medieval Nepal through the survey of the grammatical works listed in the catalogues of the Nepalese-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project (NGMCP) and the small but important Cambridge collections. The study of the colophons (where available), as well as the assessment of other indicators of age and provenance such as the material (palm leaf/paper) and the script, can throw light on the social and cultural conditions that made the various systems flourish or decline at different times. 1 Here I will mostly rely on the Descriptive Catalogue (wiki) of the Nepalese-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project (http://134.100.29.17/wiki/Main_Page) and the Sanskrit Manuscripts catalogue in the Cambridge Digital Library (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/sanskrit).
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2016
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2016