‘...not satisfied with the Mahābhārata…’ (śrutvā bhāratasaṃhitām atṛptaḥ): the function of the Vṛṣasārasaṃgraha in the Śivadharma corpus (original) (raw)
Related papers
A Few Notes on a Newly Discovered Manuscript of the Śivadharma Corpus
‘Verità e bellezza’ Essays in Honour of Raffaele Torella, 2022
1 research for this article was carried out as part of the erC Project Shivadharma (803624). the findings in this article owe much to conversations with members of the project. i may not be the first to express a number of thoughts, ideas, views, theories, etc., expressed in this article. there is a rapidly growing body of literature on the Śivadharma corpus. For an overview of the research history, see De Simini and Kiss 2021.
This panel focuses on topics that contribute towards a more differentiated understanding of the various Vaiṣṇava and Śaiva devotional communities and their interface in early medieval South-Asia (ca. 5th-12th centuries CE). One of the main objectives of these papers is to understand the emergence and process of the literary production of the Vaiṣṇavas and Śaivas and to identify religious groups and their motivations behind these texts. In particular, our focus is on relevant sections of the Mahābhārata, the collection of texts designed to provide social norms and systems of practices for their respective communities of devotees, such as the Viṣṇudharma or Śivadharmaśāstra, as well as texts of contemporaneous initiatory traditions, such as those of the early Pañcarātras. This panel thus hosts two kinds of papers: firstly, those on specific topics within each system, which can be used as a basis for comparison; secondly, papers that directly address the comparative aspects, including those dealing with textual relations, cases of reuse, and direct textual influence. By identifying points of convergence and divergence between these religious groups, the papers aim to bring into focus the boundaries and interface, or even levels of syncretism, regarding Vaiṣṇava and Śaiva communities in this dynamic period which saw the rise of devotional movements.
2016 Śivadharma Manuscripts from Nepal and the Making of a Śaiva Corpus
One-Volume Libraries. Composite and Multiple-Text Manuscripts, 2016
This article aims at examining the process of corpus formation from a codicological perspective in an early body of Śaiva literature for the laity. This collection, commonly known to specialists as the ‘Śivadharma corpus’, grew around two more ancient works, the Śivadharmaśāstra and the Śivadharmottara, until forming a fixed set of eight or nine texts that is widely attested in Nepalese multiple- text manuscripts (MTMs), both ancient palm-leaf and more recent paper copies. While the two earliest works have an independent and well documented transmission history in India, the formation of a ‘corpus’ as we know it seems to be an invention of Nepal. The Nepalese MTMs, the sole documents in which the Śivadharma corpus is attested, are responsible not only for the preservation and transmission of this innovation, but also for its own identity as a corpus. I am not aware of any strong evidence external to the manuscript tradition that could be used to confirm that these eight texts had in fact formed a closed collection, and very rarely do the works make explicit reference to each other (one case is examined in par. 3 of this study). It is therefore essentially on account of the features of the Nepalese manuscript tradition that one can rightly resort to the category of ‘corpus’ with reference to this collection of works. *
Indic Manuscript Cultures through the Ages. Material, Textual, and Historical Investigations, 2017
The tradition of the so-called Śivadharma corpus is still largely unexplored. Scholars have so far identified a large number of manuscripts, including some very early specimens, but the relationships between them, as well as the possibility of classifying these manuscripts into groups and families, still need to be systematically assessed. However, recent critical studies of some texts of the corpus have sparked interest in the topic of their transmission. On the basis of two case studies selected from the Śivadharmaśāstra and the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda, this article aims at presenting some of the advantages and limits of applying the genealogical-reconstructive method to the study of the manuscripts of the Śivadharma corpus.
2021. Śivadharmāmṛta. Essays on the Śivadharma and its Network
Studies on the History of Śaivism 2, 2021
Śivadharmāṃrta, ‘The Nectar of Śiva’s Religion’, is a collection of articles that present some of the initial results of the research on the Śivadharma carried out by the SHIVADHARMA and DHARMA projects. All the contributions in this book are based on the study of primary sources and cover topics that range from specific aspects of the Sanskrit texts of the Śivadharma corpus to their broad network of influence and from considerations of the early historical context in which the Śivadharma might have arisen to the early modern Tamil adaptations of the Śivadharmottara. This book should be of interest to all scholars working on the religious traditions of South Asia, especially those focussing on textual sources.
'Śivadharma manuscripts’ from Nepal and the Making of a Śaiva Corpus / conference abstract
This paper will focus on the study of a group of Nepalese palm leaf manuscripts transmitting a collection of hitherto critically unpublished Śaiva texts known by the name of ‘Śivadharma corpus’. The earliest dated manuscript belonging to this category dates back to the 11th century, although palaeographical reasons enable us to detect a few earlier manuscripts in the Nepalese collections. The number of works contained in each of these manuscripts may vary from three to a maximum of eight. In spite of the possible variation in number, the texts transmitted are always the same and their sequence is kept unaltered. Although some of the texts belonging to this collection circulated also in other regions of the Indian subcontinent, it was only in Nepal that they were arranged and transmitted as a ‘corpus’. On the basis of an analysis of the codicological features and of some issues raised by the texts themselves, we will investigate the reasons why the Nepalese manuscripts of the ‘Śivadharma corpus’ can be considered proper ‘corpus-organizers’. At the same time, we will try to understand the grounds underlying this arrangement and how the process of creating a corpus is reflected in the words of the texts.
2017
The status of the research on the Sanskrit (Skt) text of the Laṅkāvatārasūtra (LAS) is as follows. As is too often pointed out, this text is complicated. This is because first, Nanjio's (Nj) (1923) version has many errors. However, it is a product of its time, and we must be grateful to Nj for providing us with the whole text anyway 2. We should instead be embarrassed that no complete re-edition of this text has been compiled based on the original manuscripts (mss.) 3 , although more than 90 years have passed since the publication of Nj's version. Additionally, the text itself is difficult to understand: overly long compounds, enumerations of terms without explanation, unsystematic paragraph structure, great differences between texts (the Skt text and its translations) etc. However, in this case too, it is sometimes the problem with the understanding of scholars and not with the text itself 4. In 2015, Professor Jikido Takasaki and I published a work entitled Ryōgakyō (Ryōgaabatsutarahōkyō, T&H 2015), which is partly based on Takasaki (1980) that includes an annotated Japanese kundoku translation and studies on one-fourth to one-third of Guṇabhadra's Ryōgaabatsutarahōkyō (Sung, AD 443). Our work, on the other hand, constitutes one of the volumes of the Shinkokuyakudaizōkyō(新国訳大蔵経) series, whose body contains Japanese kundoku translation, headnotes, and supplementary notes on Guṇabhadra's whole text. In that book, we tried to read Sung-the oldest Chinese translation of the LAS-as a translation from the Skt. In doing so, we consulted the Skt side by side and took notes from it for every important term. We also consulted two commentaries preserved as Tibetan versions (Jñānaśrībhadra (Jś) and Jñānavajra (Jv) 5) to read the text in Indian and Tibetan contexts. Therefore, our text is not a regular translation of Sung as a Chinese text, but rather to some extent a mixture of different things 6. We did our best, and we believe that we made some progress. Of course, this was not without limitations and faults 7. What was especially frustrating was that Nj, the only edition based on mss., was sometimes unreliable. Therefore, we also consulted Tibetan translations (one from the Skt (T (1)), and the other, from Sung (T (2))) and Skt mss. However, because of the nature of the book (Japanese kundoku translation of a Chinese text) and the limitation of time, we could not consult it thoroughly. Strategy Toward the New Edition It seems like the right time to create a completely new edition of the LAS based on mss. However, the number of mss. found so far is so high that even if a scholar deals with them, he or she stops doing so on