Pinault1997 Bibliographie Renou (original) (raw)
The Invisible World of the Rigveda
The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature, 2019
The Rigveda is one of the most influential religious texts in the history of the world, but is it world literature? This chapter examines what is really at stake when we translate the Rigveda, and how much we miss when we force the text to conform to our aesthetic world rather than its own. This chapter examines how the poets of the Rigveda conceive of literature, of the world, and of the relationship between the two, in an attempt to better understand what the creators of the Rigveda would consider a graceful translation.
In Defense of the Book Rivers of Rgveda
In Defense of the Book Rivers of Rgveda, 2022
Dr Shrikant Talageri had taken the time to make a critical review of my book Rivers of Ṛgveda. This paper is in the defense of my book Rivers of Ṛgveda
Reading Religion, 2018
Translating a Sanskrit text is a highly challenging task. The difficulty only gets compounded if it is a Vedic text, because the Vedas use a Sanskrit that is quite different from the Sanskrit used in other literature. To translate the Rig Veda into English requires great patience and great scholarship. Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton have successfully achieved this mammoth task. The earlier English translation of Rig Veda by Ralph T. H. Griffith was done without taking into account the innumerable nuances of the tradition within which the Vedas originated. Jamison and Brereton make it clear that Griffith’s translation “conceals rather than reveals the wonders” of the Rig Veda (1.3).
Stephanie W. Jamison, Joel P. Brereton — The Rigveda (3 Volume Set) - 2014 .pdf
he Rigveda is the oldest Sanskrit text, consisting of over one thousand hymns dedicated to various divinities of the Vedic tradition. Orally composed and orally transmitted for several millennia, the hymns display remarkable poetic complexity and religious sophistication. As the culmination of the long tradition of Indo-Iranian oral-formulaic praise poetry and the first monument of specifically Indian religiousity and literature, the Rigveda is crucial to the understanding both of Indo-European and Indo-Iranian intellectual and aesthetic prehistory and of the rich flowering of Indic religious expression and Indic high literature that were to follow. This new translation represents the first complete scholarly translation into English in over a century and utilizes the results of the intense research of the last century on the language and the ritual system of the text. The focus of this translation is on the poetic techniques and structures utilized by the bards and on the ways that the poetry intersects with and dynamically expresses the ritual underpinnings of the text.
Sanskrit and reality: the Buddhist contribution
Ideology and Status of Sanskrit: Contributions to the …, 1996
2 For mantras in general, see Alper, 1989. This book contains, besides a number of valuable articles, an extremely useful Working Bibliography (pp. 327-443) and Bibliographical List (pp. 444-530). 3 RV 10.71.1 reads, in the translation of Louis Renou (1956: 71): "O B®haspati, ce fut là le premier commencement de la Parole, quand ils (i.e. the first poet-seers, referred to by the word dh¥ra in the next stanza; J.B.) se mirent en branle, donnant une dénomination (nåmadhéyaµ dádhånå˙) (aux choses)." See further Renou, 1955.
A SURVEY OF THE SPIRITUAL MASTERS OF THE 20 TH CENTURY
Among the most important pillars of spiritual wisdom in the 20th century, Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998) and Sri Râmana Maharshi (1879-1950 clearly occupy a prominent place. Both were "universalists", that is, they believed in and, in the case of Schuon, explicitly taught, the "transcendent unity of the religions"; both expounded the purest (and also the most intrinsically orthodox) form of perennial gnosis, but each in his own way; both attracted admirers from all the major religions. Schuon in fact was a sage in the double capacity of a pure metaphysician-in the lineage of Shankara, Pythagoras, and Plato-and of an "extra-confessional", sapiential spiritual guide, with a profound love for all authentic religions, but without attachment to their more "formalistic" and "nationalistic" aspects. Schuon was a teacher of the Uncolored Truth, of the Truth beyond form. There are of course distinctions to be made in the scope, completeness, and universality of the metaphysical doctrines which Schuon and the Maharshi expounded, and in the methods of spiritual realization which they advocated. We shall consider these distinctions in what follows.
Inching Toward the Rgveda - Tools Necessary for an Elementary Analysis of the Nāsadīya Sūkta
2018
This paper explores the question of how to approach the Rigveda, a central Vedic text, before delving into the context necessary for examining one of its hymns, the Nāsadīya Sūkta. An analysis of foundational concepts, translations and commentaries surrounding the Rigveda and its supplementary material within the Vedic corpus provides an initial lens for reading the Rigveda. A linguistic approach to the Rigveda’s structure is briefly looked at in this paper. An examination of the scholarship surrounding Vedic traditions at surface-level reveals the Western academic focus on text and Christian influence on the field of religious studies. Scholars’ colonially affected approach throughout history the history of the academic study of religion is critiqued, and its consequences in the Vedic setting are perused. The lenses of those that have provided commentaries on Vedic rituals from imperialist-rooted and Indian nationalist perspectives are compared and critiqued in order to synthesize a more impartial perspective. The history of the Vedic corpus as “living text” into the modern day is analyzed to highlight its variable application though time and read the Rigveda with these different interpretations in mind. Ethnographically-collected materials are reviewed to depict the experience of Vedic ritual and practice. The problems of approaching Vedic tradition as a philosophy compared to viewing it as a religion are also looked at in this paper prior to firsthand examination of the text. The social and political context of the era in which the Vedas were composed is reviewed and added on to the framework this paper compiles throughout its course to approach the Rigveda. The lenses accumulated from the reviewed materials and sources are used to contextualize the Rigveda, which is then further utilized to approach the Nāsadīya Sūkta, a metaphysical creation hymn. Scholarly interpretations and commentaries on the Nāsadīya Sūkta are compared, critiqued, and used to aid in this paper’s own approach to the text. The nondualistic, monistic interpretation of the Nāsadīya Sūkta is more closely analyzed and framed using this paper’s accumulated materials, and an especially preliminary approach to the hymn is briefly conducted. The paper continues its constant critique of the tools determined to be useful in approaching the Nāsadīya Sūkta, and its critique of the approach conducted within itself. This paper concludes with questions on further potential materials for an informed approach to the Nāsadīya Sūkta following a review of the paper’s objectives and inquiry into how effectively they were achieved.
Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient (Monographies, n° 195), 2017
Speculations about buddhas and bodhisattvas flourished with a remarkable dynamism between the 1st and the 6th century CE. This so-called “Middle Period” of Indian Buddhism is, for instance, characterized by the growth of the Bodhisattvayāna, the movement promoting the path to perfect Awakening (samyaksambodhi), understood as a realisation far superior to that the achieved by arhants. The present book aims at tracing these “buddhological” developments within the literature of the Mahāsāṅghika-Lokottaravāda, a lineage that was influential in Magadha and in the Northwest of South Asia during the period considered. This historical enquiry is rooted in a philological praxis, and, in particular, it is achieved by scrutinising the formation and the vicissitudes of an integral part of the school's Vinayapiṭaka, namely the Mahāvastu. The latter work, dealing with the lengthy bodhisattva career and the last birth of the Buddha Śākyamuni, is vast and composite. The reconstruction of distinct phases in its composition necessarily entails a close examination of the witnesses transmitting the work and, in particular, of its earliest copy, being a 12th century CE palm-leaf manuscript preserved in Nepal. The study, which forms the first part of this book, is therefore grounded on the new annotated edition and French translation of carefully selected sections of the Mahāvastu, featuring as part two. The close study of these key sections allows to uncover the editorial and rhetorical practices of Mahāsāṅghika milieux, as well as some of their core doctrines. This book therefore contributes to furthering our understanding of the monastic lineages, the canonical corpora, and the soteriology of Indian Buddhism. This monograph, recipient of the Collette Caillat Prize in Indology at the Institut de France (2018), has been reviewed by G. Ducoeur in the Revue de l'Histoire des Religions (2021/4): https://doi.org/10.4000/rhr.11617 and by N. McGovern in Religions of South Asia (2021/15.1): https://doi.org/10.1558/rosa.20913\. A detailed review article by O. von Hinüber further appeared in the Indo-Iranian Journal (2023, 66/1): https://brill.com/view/journals/iij/66/1/iij.66.issue-1.xml.
H-Net Reviews, 2022
Reviewed by Rolf Scheuermann (Heidelberg University) [Preprint] H-Buddhism (June, 2022) Commissioned by Lucia Galli The Third Karmapa Rangjung Dorje: Master of Mahāmudrā When one enjoys reading a book, it is usually because either one is interested in the subject or it is well written. This groundbreaking account of the life and intellectual legacy of Rangjung Dorje (Rang byung rDo rje, 1284-1339) falls in both categories, provided that one is interested in Tibetan Buddhism and this crucial phase in the history of the Karma Kagyü (Karma bKa' brgyud) tradition of Tibet. Like other volumes within Shambhala Publications' Lives of the Master Series, the Third Karmapa Rangjung Dorje. Master of Mahāmudrā
Journal of Yoga Studies, and the Traditional Physical Practices of South Asia, 2023
Abstract: The tradition of Turco-Persian wrestling, including its programme of physical education based at dedicated gyms known as zurkhāneh (literally “houses of strength”), contains elements that would appear to merge Turkish, Iranian, Central-Asian, and Indian influences within a mystical (Sufi) Islamic framework potentially affected to a certain degree by Buddhism. The chapter discusses the relations and interaction between the Turco-Persian athletic tradition and the one existing in India on the basis of a parallel reading of four key textual sources, two from each tradition. On the Indian side we will draw on the analysis of the Mallapurāṇa and of the Mānasollāsa, while the Persian documents that inform our discussion are the Tumār-e afsāneh-ye Puryā-ye Vali and the Gol-e koshti of Mir-Nejāt Qomi known as Esfahāni. The chapter will first survey the evolution of the tradition of Turco-Persian wrestling from the middle of the 13th through to the end of the 16th century, and then make a comparative analysis of the connections between Turco-Persian wrestling and the Indian tradition of the jyeṣṭhī-mallas of Gujarat. Based on these observations it will then proceed to ask how one might explain the commonalities between the two traditions. Attention will be brought to the consideration that certain physical practices gain recognition thanks to being performed at royal courts, and, in India, also at temples, due to the intellectualisation, and hence legitimisation, of these borrowed practices by learned representatives of the dominant schools of thought present at the seats of political and/or spiritual power.
2018
Les débuts de l'étude du bouddhisme comme « discipline académique » en Occident peuvent être situés précisément avec l'arrivée à Paris de vingtquatre manuscrits sanskrits le 20 avril 1837. Ceux-ci avaient été offerts par Brian Houghton Hodgson (1800-1894), administrateur colonial britannique en Inde puis résident au royaume du Népal, mais également polymathe pratiquant avec autant d'aisance l'ethnologie, la philologie, l'ornithologie ou encore l'histoire naturelle-et figure illustre de la transmission et, moindrement, de l'étude des textes bouddhiques 1. La connaissance de cette religion allait devenir une discipline à part entière grâce aux efforts du « père des études bouddhiques » Eugène Burnouf (1801-1852), notamment par
Gleanings from the Mahāvastu (II)
ARIRIAB, 2020
A metrical version from Gandhāra of the 'Miracle at Śrāvastī' (Text from the Split Collection 4) [two figures] Petra KIEFFER-PÜLZ: Some thoughts on Niḥsargikā Pātayantikā 27 (26) of the Sanskrit Sarvāstivāda Bhikṣuprātimokṣasūtras Katarzyna MARCINIAK: Gleanings from the Mahāvastu (II) Jonathan A. SILK: A Dunhuang Tibetan Aspirational Prayer for Rebirth in Amitābha's Pure Land James B. APPLE: Diplomatic Edition of the Dunhuang Tibetan Version of the Vīradattaparipṛcchā (dpa' sbyin gyis zhus pa) LI Xuezhu: Diplomatic Transcription of the Sanskrit Manuscript of the Abhidharmasamuccayavyākhyā-Folios 35v1-40r6-Péter-Dániel SZÁNTÓ: A Sanskrit Fragment of Daśabalaśrīmitra's Saṃskṛtāsaṃskṛtaviniścaya (Ch. 29 & 30) Peter ZIEME: Buddhist pāramitās as seen from Old Uygur texts [two figures] Haiyan HU-von HINÜBER: The Suspended Crossing (śaṅkupatha) in the Gorges of the Indus River as described by Chinese pilgrims Faxian, Dharmodgata and Xuanzang [one figure] Peter SKILLING: Buddhism in Southernmost Maharashtra: The Brahmapuri Relic Coffer and Its Inscription M. NASIM KHAN: Studying Buddhist Sculptures in Context (III): The Case of the Stair riser relief panels from the Buddhist Site of Aziz Dheri, Gandhāra-Pakistan [46 figures] Katsumi TANABE: The Origin of the Amida Buddha-The concept of the Amitābha/Amitāyus Buddha arose from Gilt Śākyamuni Buddha Images of Gandhara [20 figures] Brief Communication Noriyuki KUDO: A Newly Identified Sanskrit Manuscript of the Karmavibhaṅga preserved in the