Albrecht Weber’s Indische Studien
Filed under: Research history
This is a DjVu bundle of the whole journal, refined by postprocessing of the scans and equipped with a browsing sidebar Nos. 6 & 7 are not included (Aufrecht’s edition of Die Hymnen des Ṛigveda has more or less become obsolete after the second edition came out in 1877), and also nos. 11 & 12 are left out (Weber’s edition of the Taittirīyasaṃhitā is done already, but I am going to share that otherwise), 6922 pages.
Briefly on Albrecht Weber as a background of the Indische Studien
The silesian Friedrich Albrecht Weber [1] was born on the 17.2.1825 in Breslau (Wrocław). 1841 he began to study at the local University and decided to devote himself mainly to Sanskrit studies under the tutelage of Adolf Friedrich Stenzler (1807-1887), who had become Extraordinarius (associated professor) there in 1833, and who was a friend of the family. In 1844 he studied in Bonn with Christian Lassen (1800-1876) and Johannes Gildemeister (1812-1890, Weber learned Hebrew in the cloister school). In 1845 he spended one semester in Berlin at Franz Bopp (1791-1867), and there he also listened to the famous classicists Karl Lachmann and August Boeckh [2]. In Berlin he became friend to Theodor Aufrecht, Adalbert Kuhn and Rudolf von Roth; namely with the latter (who became Extraordinarius in Tübingen in 1848 and Ordinarius in 1856 as the successor of Heinrich Ewald) a close relationship began these days (later Weber contributed to the Petersburger Wörterbuch towards Brāhmaṇas and Sūtras). 1845 Weber returned to Breslau and finished his dissertation Yajurvedae specimen cum commentario – as far as I know that’s the first edition of a Yajurvedic text (9th Adhyāya of the VS). After that, like it was compulsory for these days, he travelled to London, Oxford and Paris to work with the manuscripts there. He made transcriptions for the planned edition of the White Yajurveda, and in Paris he also met Eugène Burnouf (1801-1852). 1848 Weber moved to Berlin and made his habilitation and became Privatdozent. Berlin was the place to be for the forming up new discipline of Vedic studies in Germany after the acquisition of the famous Chambers Collection of manuscripts for the Königliche Preußische Bibliothek in 1842 (see below), which was outstanding rich even of Vedic texts. In the same year Weber got married. 1849 he begans to publish the Indische Studien (IS) [3]. It took a while until Weber became Extraordinarius of altindische Philologie in 1856, and later in 1867 he was appointed professor for indische Altertumskunde [4]. In Berlin he spended always a diligent, extremely productive academic life. In the last years Weber got almost blind [5], and he died 30.11.1901 in Berlin. His pupil Richard Pischel succeeded him on the chair. Weber educated a whole generation of Indologists and among his students there were Berthold Delbrück, Julius Eggeling, Angelo de Gubernatis, Alfred Hillebrandt, Hermann Jacobi, Julius Jolly, Hendrick Kern, Franz Kielhorn, Ernst Kuhn, Ernst Leumann, Alfred Ludwig, Ivan Pavlovič Minaev, Hermann Oldenberg, and William Dwight Whitney. He is certainly to be considered being one of the greatest Indologists of the 19th century.
Bendall writes that “as a writer no man has explored so many new fields“. Weber is renown for his immane workload and the range of topics he has covered is really impressive [6]. He was a pioneer on many fields of Indology, but it’s right to say that his special subjects were Vedic studies and Jaina literature. Towards the Veda the contribution which has be mentioned first definitely is his edition of the whole White Yajurveda in the Mādhyandina recension in three parts which appeared from 1852 on [7]. Weber also edited the Taittirīyasaṃhitā in IS 11 (1871) & 12 (1872), and these editions remained standard to this day (reprinted several times, see Parpola). In vol. 4 of the IS he published also the Pratiśākhya belonging to the VS, and in IS 13 there is a detailed study of the Padapāṭha of the TS to be found. Weber contributed much to the founding period of Vedic studies, in IS 1 there is a translation and a edition of a survey of Vedic literature from the 16th century by the Vedāntin Madhsūdhana Saravatī. In IS 3 there is a examination of the Caraṇavyūha, an important text on the Vedic schools. A survey of Sāmaveda literature appeared already in IS 1. I’ve got the feeling that Weber also was the first ever to write on Kāṭhaka in IS 3. There are also several pieces on Vedic history, on specific legends, a couple of translations of parts of texts also as articles next to several articles on specific Vedic issues which mostly appeared in a series of Vedische Studien in the Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. From Weber’s deep knowledge of the Vedic ritual as a Yajurvedin he also published a treatise on the Vājapeya in the Sitzungsberichte of 1892, and another one on the Rājasūya in the Academy’s Abhandlungen of 1893. In the IS 10 & 13 there already was a survey of Vedic ritual. He published also a lot towards other Vedāṅgas (Metrics, Astronomy etc.), and there are some articles and editions of Upaniṣads [8] – it would by far go to far to get into more detail (…. hey that’s only a blog posting here).
The development of Weber’s research is closely related to the history of the manuscript stocks in Berlin. Like said above, the acquisition of the Chambers Collection in 1842 brought many unique items even of Vedic literature from Bengal [9]. In 1851 Weber began to compile a manuscript catalogue which appeared 1853 [10], and which is more or less a catalogue on the Chambers Collection. In the semester 1851/52 Weber delivered his first lecture on Indian literature history which appeared as book in 1852, and which could be seen as a kind of supplement to the manuscript catalogue [11]. To obtain a relative chronology of Indian literature is also the background of many of Weber’s articles, for example also of the one on Pāṇini (IS 5), and the one on the Mahābhāṣya (IS 13). Weber was one of the first people in Europe which wrote on Jaina literature, a treatise on the Śatrunjayamāhātmya appeared 1858, and another one on the Bhagavatī in two parts in 1865 and 1866. In the year 1868 a huge manuscript raid began in India and in the years 1873-78 Georg Bühler sended a lot of items to Berlin – among them a whole Śvetāmbara canon. Weber compiled another manuscript catalogue of the growths which appeared 1886-91 in three fascicles as second part of the catalogue of 1853 [12]. This time again as a kind of supplement Weber wrote a survey Über die heiligen Schriften der Jaina in IS 16 & 17. In many articles Weber contributed as a pioneer of Jaina studies as much as of Middle Indo-Aryan literature – up to this time only the Prākṛt passages of the plays have been known. For example he worked intensively on the Sattasaī, Hāla’s compilation of erotic verses in Māhārāṣṭrī [13].
Notes
[1] Obituary in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland January 1901, 228 sq. (previously appeared in *Athenaeum 3867 (1901)). Another one by M. Winternitz is to be found in the Kleine Schriften, Part 2, 919 sq. (originally: *Bibliographisches Jahrbuch und Deutscher Nekrolog 6 (1901), 346 sq.). The obituary of Pischel in the Abhandlungen der Königlich-Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften of 1903 I haven’t got at hand (as always: in the Hamburg state library even this volume is missed). See also W. Morgenroth’s article on Weber in the Altorientalische Forschungen 5 (1977), 97 sq. (shorter forerunner of this article in *Indologica Taurinensia 3/4 (1975/76), 321 sq.). The incorrect “Albrecht Friedrich Weber” obviously goes back to Brockhaus’ Conversations-Lexikon, see Parpola’s bibliography, fn. 1.
[2] He remained close to the “Bonn school” of Indology which was somewhat opposing the “Berlin school” these days (the opposition surely is rooted in the respectful enmity between August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Bopp; it seems the term “Bonn school” was introduced in the research history by Windisch in his Geschichte der Sanskritphilologie, although he writes that Burnouf coinined that term). Weber’s dissertation is dedicated to Lassen, Stenzler (also Schlegel’s student) and Gildemeister, and furthermore Weber also took the side against Hoefer [the rivalry of the both schools erupted after Bopp's pupil Albert Hoefer (1812-1883, appointed in Greifswald 1840) attacked Lassen's Anthologica Sanscritica from 1838 in a malice and dimissive tone (Sengupta 33) in the Berliner Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik of 1840, as if would have been in vengeance of Lassen's review of Bopp's Sanskrit grammar (Windisch 217: "wie in Vergeltung von Lassens Anzeige der Boppschen Sanskritgrammatik") in the Indische Bibliothek of 1830. Obviously in return, in the same year Gildemeister published the pamphlet Die falsche Sanskritphilologie am Beispiel des Herrn Dr. Hoefer in Berlin aufgezeigt. The attacks on Hoefer continued after came up with his Chrestomathie in 1850 which was crushed by Weber in the ZDMG 4 (1850), 399 sq. It didn't came to an end, a rejoinder followed and a re-rejoinder, furthermore there was a rivalry between Hoefer's and Lassen's Prākṛt grammars etc. Although Hoefer played an intrumental role in the acquisition of the Chambers Collection (see his remark in the Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft der Sprache 2 (1850), 437) and Weber possibly made use of preliminary works on that collection made by him (see Morgenroth, fn. 4), Hoefer isn't even mentioned in the introduction of his manuscript catalogue of 1853. On that all see Sengupta's excellent work From salon to discipline (Heidelberg 2005), 27 sq.; and Windisch, 216 sq. on Hoefer].
[3] The Indische Studien (which were first planned to be titled Vedische Studien) were mend as follower of the Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, which was edited by Christian Lassen (last volume is no 7. in 1850), see Morgenroth fn. 9 and Parpola 193. The journal contains also very useful indices.
[4] Which was a new chair next to one of Bopp’s for “Sanskrit und vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft”, see Alsdorf’s Die Indologie in Berlin von 1821-1945 (Kleine Schriften, 2nd ed., Hamburg 2001), 723 sq. and Morgenroth, 100. Towards the political background of Weber’s appointment see Sengupta, 68 sq. By the way, Webers inaugural speech is available here. The establishment of a new chair in Berlin definitely played a role for the emancipation of Sanskrit resp. Vedic studies from Comparative linguistics resp. Indogermanistik which happened that time.
[5] Eye complaint surely is the Berufskrankheit of philologists, for example also Christian Lassen suffered extreme low vision in his last years. So Weber tells already 1891 that his eyesight had become deteriorated substantially in the introduction to the third part of his second manuscript catalogue (XVII: “Es ist ein mühsames Werk, das ich hiermit abschliefse. Ein gut Stück meiner Sehkraft liegt darin begraben“), but after some accident in 1897 (hard to find out something more specific) it got even worse.
[6] Windisch treats Weber’s (and the related) research in detail in his encyclopaedic Geschichte der Sanskrit-Philologie und indischen Altertumskunde, see there 319 sq. (chapters 46-50: Yajurveda, Katalog und Literaturgeschichte, Abhandlungen, Prākṛt-Studien, Jaina-Literatur). The task of compiling a bibliography was undertaken by Parpola (Remota relata. Essays on the History of Oriental Studies in honour of Harry Halén. Ed. by Juha Janhunen and Asko Parpola (Helsinki 2003), 189 sq.), it also containes a short, rich bibliographical sketch.
[7] The Vâjasaneyi-Sanhitâ in the Mâdhyandina- and the Kâṇva-çâkhâ with the Commentary of Mahîdhara. Berlin: Dümmler / London: Williams and Norgate 1852; *The Çatapatha-Brâhmaṇa in the Mâdhyandina-Çâkhâ with extracts from the commentary of Sâyaṇa, Harisvâmin and Dvivedaganga. 1855 (Parpola 1855:1); *The Çrautasûtra of Kâtyâyana with extracts from the commentaries of Karka and Yâjnikadeva. 1859 (Parpola 1859:1).
[8] There is no collection of his kleine Schriften up to today, but Weber himself collected several articles and particularly reviews in the Indische Skizzen (1857), and in the three volumes of the Indische Streifen (1868-1879).
[9] On the Chambers Collection see Morgenroth: Indische Hanschriften (AoF 5 (1977)), 276 sq.; Schmieder-Jappe: Die Sammlung der orientalischen Handschriften der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (Berlin 2004), 10 sq.; Sengupta 126 sq. Sir Robert Chambers (1737-1803) was Chief Judge of the Supreme Court at Fort William in Kolkata and a friend of Sir William Jones (1746-1794).
[10] Verzeichnis der Sanskrit- [und Prākṛit-]Handschriften [1]. Berlin: Nicolai 1853 (Handschriften-Verzeichnisse der Könglichen Bibliothek; 1), see Janert’s Annotated bibliography of the catalogues of Indian manuscripts (Wiesbaden 1965), 30 (no. 20). Aufrecht in the Catalogue Catalogorum (Leipzig 1891), IV: “This is a pattern of what a Catalogue ought to be, and it deals with MSS. which in their bulk are not surpassed in value by any other collection in Europe“. With this catalogue Weber created the foundations of the “Berlin school” of manuscript cataloguing (text beginning and end are recorded, shorter texts are given in little editions, etc.) to which also the Verzeichnis der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland (VOHD) belongs – probably one of the most refined series of catalogues of oriental manuscripts worldwide. Before the Chamber Collection came the Königliche Bibliothek possessed only 31 pieces, see Morgenroth, Indische Handschriften.
[11] III: “… als deren Resultat ein ausführlicher Catalog ziemlich gleichzeitig mit diesen Vorlesungen, die etwa als ein Commentar dazu gelten können, erscheint“. An ebook is available here. The second edition with supplemental additions appeared in 1878 (ebook here), and was the basis for the English translation of the same year (French translation 1859). In comparison to the work of F. Adelung (Versuch einer Literatur der Sanskrit-Sprache. St. Petersburg 1830), which was grounded mainly on secondary literature, Weber wrote completely out of the manuscripts. For that Weber is considered to be the founder of modern Indian history of literature, see Morgenroth 103. It must be emphasized that the catalogue and the history were completed in a period of approx. two years!
[12] Verzeichnis der Sanskrit- und Prākṛit-Handschriften 2. Berlin: Schade / Asher 1886-91 (Handschriften-Verzeichnisse der Königlichen Bibliothek; 5), see Janert loc. cit. This catalogue played a fundamental role for early Western Jaina research (see Leumann, ZDMG 45 (1893), 455).
[13] Edition from a single manuscript of the commentary of Kulanātha with translation and extensive introduction in 1870 (Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes; 5,3), additions to that in ZDMG 26 (1872) and 28 (1874). A more complete edition appeared in 1881 (Abhandlungen; 7,4). On Bhuvanapāla’s commentary in the Sitzungsberichte of the Academy of 1882, and then in IS 16. Weber also published a few translations in the Deutsche Rundschau of 1885 (because that one could be pretty rare I’ve uploaded it here). On the Sattasaī see Hinüber’s Das ältere Mittelindisch im Überblick (2nd ed., Wien 2001), §53.
Two new publications on the research in Marburg
Filed under: Research history
Jürgen Hanneder: Marburger Indologie im Umbruch. Zur Geschichte des Faches 1845-1945. Antrittsvorlesung von Jürgen Hanneder. München: Kirchheim 2010 (Indologica Marpurgensia; 1). ISBN 978-3-87410-140-0.
Viele der kleinen Indologien in Deutschland waren wissenschaftliche Schwergewichte, welche die internationale Forschungslandschaft dominierten. Mit den idealen Betreuungsverhältnissen von “Elite -Universitäten”, welche geringe Studentenzahlen ermöglichen, konnten sie die nächste Forschergeneration ausbilden, die enorme Fortschritte in der Erforschung der Geschichte des indischen Kulturraumes erzielten. Dennoch mussten sie immer wieder um die Besetzung der meist einzigen Stelle in einem Institut bangen und sich für die kleine Zahl von Studenten oder ihr vermeintlich unbedeutendes, ineffektives Fach rechtfertigen – daran hat sich bis heute nichts geändert. Marburger Indologie im Umbruch erzählt die Geschichte eines dieser Standorte von seiner Gründung im Jahre 1845 bis zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs, jedoch mit einem kleinen Ausblick auf jüngere Entwicklungen. Besonders berücksichtigt wird dabei die Entwicklung der Indologie und ihre Inanspruchnahme für ideologische Zwecke im Nationalsozialismus.
Margot Kraaz / Martin Kraaz: Carl Cappeller, Moriz Winternitz, Theodor Zachariae – drei berühmte Indologen. München: Kirchheim 2010 (Indologica Marpurgensia; 2). ISBN 978-3-87410-141-4.
Die hier erstmals vollständig publizierten Biographien belegen als solche die Kontinuität indologischer Forschung und Lehre in Marburg. Sie entstanden als Referate von Studenten in den Jahren 1962–64 unter dem auch fachgeschichtlich interessierten Ordinarius Wilhelm Rau. Von drei dieser berühmten Indologen zeichnen sie Leben, Werk, wissenschaftliche Verdienste und heute noch aktuellen Wert nach. Carl Cappeller (1840–1925) haben vor allem seine Wörterbücher neben den Schriften über indische Kunstdichtung bekannt gemacht. Aus dem riesigen Werk von Moriz Winternitz (1863–1937) ist die immer und auch heute unverzichtbare Geschichte der indischen Literatur hervorzuheben. Sein Werksverzeichnis umfasst über 50 Jahre reichster Veröffentlichungstätigkeit. Auch Theodor Zachariaes (1851–1934) hauptsächliches Forschungsgebiet ist die Lexikographie. Seine ,bedeutendste Publikation’ Die indischen Wörterbücher erschien 1897 in Band 1 des Grundriß der Indo-Arischen Philologie und Altertumskunde.
A new Indological forum
A short notice: after it has been discussed and suggested by Elisa Freschi on her blog (see here and here), Adrian Cîrstei now provided a new Indological discussion forum here. Let it be successful!
Indus Valley Civilization feature on German TV
Because my harddrives have become full lately I’ve begun to convert all the old television recordings into MPEG4. Among them there is a little feature on the Indus Valley Civilization which run on German television in 2008 and which now has become small enough to upload: it’s now to be found here. I’ve been told that the Americans do not agree with the manner facts are presented here, among other things it is claimed again that the Indus people used a script with remained undeciphered so far. At this point the makers of the documentation presumably followed Michael Jansen from the Stadtbaugeschichte at the RWTH Aachen where a project on Mohenjo-Daro was going on and with whom it seems they have worked together mainly. The position that the Indus Culture most probably not possessed no writing at all – deciphered nor undeciphered – was neglected throughout although the producers have been in Harvard and Michael Witzel and the others emphasized that point in the interviews. The documentation with its staged footage is certainly directed to a wider audience and so we may suppose that the story of the mysterious undeciphered script has been considered to be just more exiting. Anyway, I can’t remember another instance of Indology being in prime time television that way and on the following day there were several friends and siblings congratulating me for studying such an interesting and relevant subject – an unforgettable (and suppposingly single) affair.
Buddhist Text Information (reupload)
Filed under: Bibliography
The Buddhist Text Information (BTI, ISSN 0360-6112) is a cumulative bibliography of Buddhist literature which was compiled at the Institute for Advanced Studies of World Religions (IASWR) of the SUNY. The series, edited by Richard Gard and Nora Larke, is very refined and a trustworthy companion for bibliographers as much as a Fundgrube for researchers. Furthermore, the research reports which are included in the later issues are relevant for the history of Buddhology. I’ve provided scans of the BTI on my old personal page before, but a brand new combined DjVu bundle of the whole journal [1 (1974) - 78 (1993), approx. 196 MB] equipped with a navigation sidebar now could be found here (mirror). Enjoy!
Debian Squeeze: Nouveau runs with 2.6.32-5
To run Nvidia display hardware on Debian GNU/Linux – really not a minor issue even for the end user – always was quite inconvenient: the proprietary driver is full-featured and mature but unavailable in the first install pack nor in the repository naturally due to license conflicts and furthermore must be reinstalled after each kernel update. Nvidia has provided also a limited free version of their Linux driver which was included into Debian (nvidia-glx), but a couple of months ago the company announced that they are not going to maintain it any longer (see here). After that the end user has to look out for another solution if he has used this driver so far. If able to give up acceleration and 3D support for Google Earth etc. the simple VESA driver (xserver-xorg-video-nv) is a reliable alternative, but users which are employing Nvidia should really take a look at times the new Nouveau driver. Nouveau was created through reverse engineering and is going to be a full fledged free driver for Nvidia hardware. There was some struggle about including Nouveau, but Linus Thorvalds finally accepted it for the experimental 2.6.33 kernel (see here). The X server driver (xserver-xorg-video-nouveau) became available a couple of days before for Testing and since the latest update to kernel 2.6.32-5 also the corresponding kernel module (/etc/X11/xorg.conf must contain Driver “nouveau” instead of nv or nvidia). So now Debian Squeeze (which is 6.0 and is planned to get frozen in August, see here) has finally caught up to Ubuntu which made Nouveau available already for Karmic Koala (see here). The driver is still marked as experimental but seems to work already pretty fine.
A “coffee-break” conference on Asian studies
Lo studio dell’Asia fra antico e moderno – giornate di studio, Rome, 10.-12.06.2010
To hold a conference which leaves behind the more stiff formulations of established and untouchable conclusions, and favours an open minded exchange of ideas, suggestions, criticisms in Italy was suggested by Elisa Freschi on her blog in March (here), and it really did not take long until that “coffee-break” conference took place a few days before at the Sapienza University of Rome in the Facoltà di Studi Orientali.
The presentations were held in six panels on linguistics and texts, manuscriptology and literature, on Development studies, and Asian history of art. To regroup the contributions of the English spoken panels without the Development studies on the basis of the discussed fields of study in matters of languages resp. literatures here (in order of appearance at the conference):
- Arianna D’Ottone (Rome) presented the Arabic Manuscript Vaticano 368, Elisabetta Benigni (Rome) Arabic literature and western canon.
- Michela Clemente (Rome) spoke on the Search of stylictic models for the identification of Tibetan xylographs, Illona Manewskaya (Manchester) on Tibetan medical didactic poetry.
- Mark Schneider (Hamburg) introduced the project Manuscript Cultures in Asia and Africa and its sub-project on Japanese manuscripts, Luca Milasi (Rome) spoke on historical fiction in Meiji Japan.
- Kengo Harimoto (Hamburg) presented the oldest Nepalese manuscripts of the NGMCP, Alessandro Graheli (Vienna) spoke on the textual sources of the Nyāyamañjarī, Adheesh Sathaye (Vancouver) on the Mahābhārata, Elisa Ganser (Leiden) on the Nāṭyaśāstra and related texts, Artemio Keidan (Rome) on layers in the Aṣṭādhyāyī, and Rosaria Compagnone (Naples) on the Pādmasaṃhitā.
- Sara Kaczko (Rome) spoke about textual criticism in Classical philology, Carlo Vesella (Rome) on Late Classical Greek phonology.
- Luca Alfieri (Rome) presented on the adjectives in Vedic literature, Leonid Kulikov (Leiden) on the history of the PIE case system, Frank Köhler (Tübingen) on RV 1,60 (Dīrghatamas cycle), Paola Rossi (Milano) on śakti and Luca Picardi (Naples) on triḥ sapta and ekaviṃśa/ti in the Veda
(the abstracts are available on the conference’s web site). The conference was very interesting and it can be seen that there was a broad range of relevant presentations which the organizers were able to bring together. A whole panel was dedicated to contributions towards Development studies (see the bundled panel abstracts here). Although there were some concerns it could be too boring for the majority of the present philologists the presentations in that panel were very interesting and I’ve learned that the discipline is relatively new in Italy and follows some very own approaches. The panel inspired to get somewhat deeper into that and the conference proceedings which are going to appear are planned to contain a separate survey of the recent Development studies in Italy. Seen how well the conference was convened it could be supposed that the proceedings are going to appear very soon (given that everybody is sending in his paper punctual). Because the majority of contributions on the whole conference was held by Italian scholars the event was also an unique opportunity even for the foreign guests to meet the Asian research in Italy. I am very glad to hear that the next Italian “coffee-break” conference is already planned for next year and maybe there is always enough demand to let this turn into a series.
I’ve made some pictures of the event, the gallery is here, and an archive of them could be found here (if the presenters that do not appear would please excuse – at the end the batteries have gone empty).
A workshop on Indian logic and epistemology
Modern formalisms for Pre-modern Indian logic and epistemology – interdisciplinary workshop, Hamburg, 04.-06.06.2010
On the past weekend a worshop on classical Indian logic and epistemology took place at the University of Hamburg which was convened by the Asien-Afrika-Institut (AAI) and the Department of Mathematics and was sponsored by the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Natural Sciences (MIN). The event brought together a bunch of experts from different fields of Classical Indian philology as well as of Logic. In the experimental nature of this gathering the organizers of the workshop saw a chance to generate a new momentum for the research of both involved disciplines could benefit from – the, let’s call it “western tradition” of research in logics has great interest to get also into the Old Indian philosophical systems which requires the cooperation of philologists while Indology naturally has limits to interpret the old texts also in regards to the latest research in fundamental exact sciences (I hope this is the right term) and could also benefit from an exchange. I think the conference indeed brought a lot interesting insights from each the other discipline and I would say everyone would agree that such a cooperation couldn’t be other than fruitful for both sciences, Indology could gain an advance in legitimation (things like Buddhist logic in the latest generation of Blue Ray players could be ultimate fundraisers) while the modern systems of logic and epistemology have the chance to get new challenging objects from the extremely rich and deep Indian culture for developing themselves. That concepts like the differentiation of research and subject matter as well as the notion of “the modern age” and its advance dissolves under this approach is another issue which for me this workshop brought up again.
If at all possible to group the contributions that took place completely, to begin with that a large part of the conference was dedicated to the field of research in Jainism, namely the presentations of Piotr Balcerowicz (Warsaw), Melanie Barbato (Munich) and Marie-Hélène Gorisse (Lille). Needles to say, Jainism definitely plays an important role in the history of Indian philosophy and so philosophical resp. logical or epistemological concepts also from that tradition like the saptabhaṅgī, the “sevenfold predication” and the anekantavāda doctrine of the immanent multiplicity of viewpoints are challenging objects in order to penetrate them throughout. Also the lectures on Buddhism have managed to problematize significantly the things that are to be found in this philosophy. So Birgit Kellner (Heidelberg) spoke about the cognitive predicated in the inferences from non-perception in the works of the Pramāṇa scholar Dharmakīrti (approx. 600-660 AD), while other lectures were dedicated to the Madhyamaka teacher Nāgārjuna (approx. 150-200 AD) – namely the ones of Laurent Keiff (Lille) and Graham Priest (Melbourne). Priest spoke about the problems of penetrating the catuṣkoṭi as it is implied in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikās formally adequately in terms of paraconsistent logics which demonstrated how challenging Old Indian philosophy could be even for the most advanced in “modern” non-classical logic.* The necessity of such an approach was confirmed also by the presentation of Sara Uckelman (Amsterdam), who is researching into Medieval logics and the challenge of their modelling. The pre-modern Indian logic shows certain similarities to that tradition which also is very challenging to understand them in terms of modern formal logic: some medieval systems need to be described with – again – even the latest contemporary science like Dynamic epistemic logic, Dialogical logic, etc. Finally, the talks of Claus Oetke (Stockholm) and Klaus Glashoff (Lugano) even deepened some the problems of modelling resp. formalization Classical Indian logic, while Wilfrid Hodges‘ (London) talk about the Ibn Sīnā’s philosophical comments on and additions to Aristoteles broadened the historical logic as it was already presented in the workshop – all that here only to highlight a very few of what was presented.
A few slides and presentations already appeared on the page of the workshop and hopefully more are going to be found here soon. At the end of the conference it was attempted to establish further forms of cooperation and from events such as this may even some mixed projects may result. The organizers would like to see the workshop to be in a number of other events like this and hopefully some of the issue which were raised here are going to be further discussed.
* See L.R. Horn’s article on Contradiction in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The term “classical modern logic” denotes the systems up to Modal logic and PWS. On Non-classical logic see Priest’s An introduction to non-classical logic. 2nd edition. Cambridge (usw.): University Press 2008 (on FDE see chapter 22).
More lightweight PDF production: Docutils, Pandoc, Lout
Filed under: E-documenting
After the previous posting on Troff resp. Groff I want to continue pointing out some more of the various console based, end user oriented solutions that exist for producing PDF documents from plain text files next to the TeX family (certainly some of them generate TeX source for producing their PDFs). Whether the non-TeX systems are really contenders or not definitely depends heavily on what kind of input system they apply. The dinosaur Groff certainly is fascinating because of its antiquity. Furthermore it’s available everywhere, given its small size pretty versatile including even a bibliographical subsystem, and also the output is very tasteful. Unfortunately the input method is somewhat strange so it is not very common to really employ Groff for everyday’s work and it’s more or less pointless to consider a Troff renaissance. Of course input methods differ in their usability and these days there are in fact several different markup languages which compete. The Wiki markup which might be known from Wikipedia is to my experience one example for a pretty pleasant markup convention.
So let’s see now what other systems could be used on the console to produce papers, handouts and other pieces as PDFs (and alternatively also other publishing formats) from plain text files (like always with a view to Linux but generally more or less the same way also on Mac OS X with its Unix core, and mostly somehow also on Windows):
Docutils / reStructuredText
Next to Epydoc and other systems Doctutils is capable to generate the documentation for Python modules right from their source code (“in-line documentation” with Docstrings; Docutils is also written in Python), but it could be used also as a self standing lightweight text processing system [2]. Docutils employs an own markup system, reStructuredText (ReST) [3], which can be converted into several of the different heavyweight markup publishing formats resp. sources with different console tools which are shipped with it: XML/DocBook, the Open Document Format for OpenOffice.org’s Writer, HTML, and LaTeX (the programs are: rst2xml, rst2odt, rst2html, rst2latex). DocBook and LaTeX again are file formats from which PDFs could be processed easily on the console (also DocBook produces very classy documents). There is also the tool rst2pdf which generates PDF directly from the ReST source and that’s even without the need to install LaTeX. ReST is really intuitive and most of the times it uses plain text features the user more or less had made “naturally” for structuring: a tab indent is for quotes, “1) 2) 3)” etc. are for typesetting numbered lists and so on. It’s pretty simple: “*x*” is for marking italics, “http://”-hyperlinks are tagged automatically, etc. [5]. Unfortunately it seems that nothing is really Unicode capable here, so there is room for improvements. Anyway the ReST family is worth being followed what is going on here.
Pandoc / Markdown
Pandoc is a very useful converter for the most popular publishing markup formats [6]. It supports as input i.a. HTML, LaTeX, and again: ReST, next to a wide range of output formats: i.a. HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt [!], DocBook, Open Document Format, Rich Text Format, ReSt, and even Mediawiki markup. Pandoc is also able to convert to S5, a slide show system for presentations (see here). Another pretty interesting feature of Pandoc is that it is able to process the Markdown markup language, which is also very lean and effective [7]. Like at Docutils, a PDF document could be generated manually from the DocBook or the LaTeX sources which Pandoc puts out (it must be pointed out that the resulting files contain only the body text and Pandoc does not put in document headers), but the packet includes also the wrapper markdown2pdf for a full one-step Markdown source processing (that makes use of Pdflatex, so a LaTeX distribution has to be available). A big advantage here is that Pandoc is already Unicode capable and the software is also open to create own conversion extensions. It is also possible to run Pandoc as embedded filter for using Markdown with ConTeXt (see here) [8].
Lout
Well, for Indologists poor attestation is no indication that something is uninteresting or irrelevant – on the contrary. But if you ever thought that ConTeXt is a minority issue and Groff is probably the tip in terms of the fact that one can’t find much about it on the net you really haven’t dealt with Lout. Even the Wikipedia page (with the few meagre counterparts in German, French, and Vietnamese) is marked as probably not meeting the general notability guideline [!]. To google that term produces a similar result measly. But Lout really doesn’t deserves to dwell in the darkness of generally being unconsidered and is really an alternative that must be located somewhere between Groff and TeX. Lout is pretty versatile given its size, this surprisingly comprehensive, everything included document formatting system which consists mainly only of a single with the size of 655 kb is the work of Jeffrey H. Kingston of the School of Information Technologies at the University of Sydney [9].
Like LateX Lout uses different document types, the basic ones are doc, report, book, slides and picture, but there are also other ones like for pretty printing source code of different programming languages (for all see /usr/share/lout/include). If the end user wants to modify basic settings like indentation or inter paragraph space that has to be done by modifying the document type setup files or copies of them (see 4.1 sq. in the User guide) – this method has its advantages. Like Groff, Lout is a closed system which comes with its own stuff like fonts, hyphenation patterns etc. Also Lout is equipped with its own bibliographical database format while the appearance of citations and the reference list could be customized (see chapter 5 in the User guide). There is also an glossary and an indexing system, a diagram, a graph, and a pie graph function (see chapter 9-11) – by which that all really does not look trivial. Lout is Postscript software, the resulting file (lout mydocument.lout > mydocument.ps) can again be converted to PDF – as always – with ps2pdf (belonging to Ghostscript). There are a lot of symbols and diacritica available (see 1.4: characters), but unfortunately I couldn’t find combining overbar, under-/overdot, nor s-acute. As with Groff I think there might be hardly a chance to get Unicode fonts running, but maybe it’s worth to do the job to add another proper Postscript font to the system. Anyway, I’ve created a little showcase, the source is here, the resulting PDF is here. I think I am really going to play around with this a little bit longer!
Notes
[1] On the issue of markup (which nowadays is a subfield of Digital humanities and covers of course also HTML and particularly the omnipresent XML family): J.H. Coombs, A.H. Renear, S.J. DeRose: Markup systems and the future of scholarly text processing [Communications of the ACM 30,11 (1987), 933-47]; A. Witt, D. Metzing (Eds.): Linguistic modeling of information and markup languages – contributions to language technology. Dordrecht (usw.): Springer 2010.
[2] python-docutils on Debian (0.5.2 on Lenny, 0.6.4 on Squeeze; 0.6.3 on Ubuntu Lucid).
[3] On Doctuils and ReST from the viewpoint of XML see David Mertz’s XML matters: reStructuredText (the stuff on IBM developerWorks is generally quite informative). A special GUI frontend is also under development, DocFactory.
[5] See the primer and the specification. There is another introduction to ReST here and here. There also is a Vim module for highlighting ReST and also an Emacs extension for that next to doing some other stuff. By the way, the extension .rst hasn’t established yet as an official MIME type, but is not reserved for another application (see here).
[6] Recent release 1.5.1.1. Pandoc is for some reason not available as packet from the Debian repository even for Squeeze/Testing recently (see here), but for it is programmed in the functional programming language Haskell it could be fetched easily through the Apt-like Haskell source retrieving system Cabal: just install cabal-install (it will get also some crap like the Haskell compiler ghc6) and then do cabal update and cabal install pandoc (it takes a while to get and compile everything). After that the executable binary pandoc is available at ~/.cabal/bin (which of course could be copied out or softlinked to ~/bin, but more elegant is to add: if [ -d ~/.cabal/bin ] ; then PATH=~/.cabal/bin:”${PATH}”; fi to ~/.bash_profile) – easy lover! Pandoc is also available as a library for Haskell.
[7] Markdown (home) was originally developed for producing HTML. On recent Debian Testing for example there are several Markdown applications in the repository: the original HTML generator markdown, libraries for Perl and Python, and a special Emacs mode which is included in emacs-goodies-el. .mkd or .pdc would be proper extensions for Markdown files, but Pandoc itself uses simply .txt when converting into Markdown – the clou of the lightweight markup languages indeed is that files of them more or less could also function for the reader as plain text files.
[8] The Lua library Lunamark for conversion between markup formats also could be employed by the LuaTeX engine.
[9] The software is hosted at Sourceforge. There is development here, the version 3.36 is available for Lenny, 3.38 for squeeze (see here). There is the Lout-users mailing list. Kingston described The design and implementation of the Lout document formatting language [Software - Practice and Experience 23,9 (1993), 1001-41 (offprint)]. The software comes with an user guide (pdf here) and an expert’s guide (pdf here, packet lout-doc on Debian). There are even high class books created with Lout, see Mark Summerfield’s page. Some business task examples are collected here.
Dharmottaras Erklärung von Dharmakīrtis kṣaṇikatvānumāna
Filed under: Dissertations
Masamichi Sakai: Dharmottaras Erklärung von Dharmakīrtis kṣaṇikatvānumāna (Pramāṇaviniścayaṭīkā zu Pramāṇaviniścaya 2 vv. 53-55 mit Prosa). Dissertation. Wien: Universität Wien, Philologisch-Kulturwissenschaftliche Fakultät, Institut für Südasien-, Tibet- und Buddhismuskunde 2010.
Abstract:
Dharmottara’s (ca. 740–800 AD) Pramāṇaviniścayaṭīkā (PVinṬ) is the only Sanskrit commentary on Dharmakīrti’s (ca. 600–660) Pramāṇaviniścaya (PVin) preserved in its original language. Recently, photocopies of a codex unicus kept in Tibet have become accessible. The aim of this dissertation is twofold: First, to edit the codex unicus of the second chapter of the PVinṬ diplomatically and critically, and thereby to make the text available to readers. On the basis of the critical Sanskrit edition, an annotated German translation with a content analysis is presented. Besides the Sanskrit text, the Tibetan translation is critically edited as well. The critical editorial work focuses upon the PVinṬ on the PVin, second chapter, verses 53 to 55 with prose, where Dharmakīrti deals with the proof of momentariness (kṣaṇikatvānumāna). Second, to clarify Dharmottara’s philosophical achievement in the context of the proof of momentariness. Towards this second aim, the following two topics are taken up in the study. 1) Dharmottara’s two interpretations of the causelessness of destruction (vināśasya-ahetutva): They represent without any doubt the highlight of Dharmottara’s explanation of Dharmakīrti’s proof of monentariness, in which Dharmottara’s originality is clearly visible in many points. 2) The relationship between Arcaṭa (ca. 710–770) and Dharmottara: Despite the widespread acceptance that Dharmottara is the direct pupil of Arcaṭa, there have so far been no tangible proofs of the relationship between the two. In the PVinṬ, we can confirm Arcaṭa’s influence on Dharmottara. For the investigation of this relationship, selected passages of Arcaṭa’s Hetubinduṭīkā and Durvekamiśra’s (ca. 970–1030) Hetubinduṭīkāloka with their German translation are included. Moreover, in order to describe Arcaṭa’s and Dharmottara’s position more clearly by comparison with other philosophers, a text piece from Śāntarakṣita’s (ca. 725–788) Tattvasaṅgraha together with Kamalaśīla’s (ca. 740–795) Tattvasaṅgrahapañjikā with their German translations are attached. In the study, furthermore, an attempt is made to determine the sequence of Dharmottara’s Kṣaṇabhaṅgasiddhi and PVinṬ based on passages of similar content in these two treatises.