Granthinām

The “racial evidence” of the Ṛgveda consists of certain words and expressions in the Ṛgvedasaṃhitā understood in a racial sense. As shown by Thomas Trautmann in 1997, the racial reading of the Ṛgveda was established by the famous Oxford scholar Friedrich Max Müller (1823-1900) in 1854 [1]. In his contribution Max Müller finds historical evidence for the existence of two distinct human races in the prehistory of the Indian subcontinent in what is the oldest transmitted text of this region (346):

All these epithets [ánagnitrā-, kravyā́d-] seem to apply to hostile, and most likely aboriginal races, but they are too general to allow us inference of any ethnological conclusions. The Vaidik Rishis certainly distinguish between Arian and non-Arian enemies. […] But there is no allusion to any distinct physical features such as we find in later writings. The only expression that might be be interpreted in this way is that of “susipra,” as applied to Arian gods. It means “with a beautiful nose.” As people are fain to transfer the qualities which they are most proud of in themselves, to their gods, and as they do not become aware of their own good quality except by the way of contrast, we might conclude that the beautiful nose of Indra was suggested by the flat-noses of the aboriginal races. Tribes with flat or even no noses at all, are mentioned by Alexander’s companions in India, and in the hymns of the Rigveda Manu is said to have conquered Vi-sisipra (Pada-text, visi-sipra), which may be translated by “nose-less.” The Dâsa or barbarian is also called vrishasipra in the Veda, which seems to mean goat or bull-nosed, and the “Anâsas” enemies who Indra killed with his weapon (Rv. V, 29, 10), are probably meant for noseless (a-nâsas), not, as the commentator supposes, for faceless (an-âsas) people.

This passage already shows that the text already was examined where it proves the presupposition, and it could be seen that in the case of ambiguous passages a racial interpretation has been favoured as the just most plausible one. A condition for the assumption of two clearly distinct human races in Early India has been that the homogeneity of the non-Indoaryan languages of India – like it was the leading opinion of that time – was understood as implying the homgeneity of the aboriginal population prior to the arrival of the Āryas, like Max Müller called them the “Niṣādas”. This idea was brought forward in the 1840s and 50s mainly by Brian Houghton Hodgson (1801-1894) and Reverend John Stevenson (1798-1858) like Max Müller draws upon both. This remained the state of research until Robert Caldwell (1814-1891) rejected the thesis of the aboriginal unity in recognizing the homgeneity of the Dravidian language family in distinction to Indo-Aryan but as much to the Munda and Austro-Asiatic languages in the Indian subcontinent in his Comparative grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian family of languages from 1856. Throughout, language groups and ethnicity have been understood as equivalent in this epoch of research [2]. Max Müller’s contribution had a significant impact on the ethnographer and 1901 census commissioner Herbert Hope Risley (1851-1911), who established nasal anthropometrics as a basic ethnographic category for India [3]. In the article The study of ethnology in India of 1891 Risley presents his ethnographical program, and writes (249 sq.):

It is believed that a tall, fair-complexioned dolicho-cephalic and presumably lepto-rhine race, whom we have now Professor Sayce’s authority for calling them Aryans, entered India from the north-west and slowly fought their way, conquering and colonizing down the valleys of the great rivers. At an early stage of their advance they came into collision with a black snub-nosed race, who were driven away into Central and Southern India, where we find their descendants at the presents day […] No one can have glanced at the literature of the subject and in particular at the Vedic accounts of the Aryans advance, without being struck by the frequent references to the noses of the people whom the Aryans found in possession of the plains of India. So impressed were the Ayans with the shortcoming of their enemies’ noses that they often spoke of them as “the noseless ones”.

Contrary to the claim that “noseless” appears often, solely only one, maybe two instances of anās- are to be found in the text of the Ṛgveda (see below), and also the other terms which have been considered to have a racial sense are actually pretty rare. Nevertheless, the “racial evidence” became a true success story. In the translations and in secondary literature there is actually hardly anything else to be found when it comes to the characteristics of the opposing and hostile Dāsas and Dasyus in the text, which are beyond the vivid socio-religious [4] markers such as ápavrata- / anyávrata- / avratá- (“beyond/having another or no proper conduct” [5]), ayajñá- (“without sacrifice”), aśraddhá- (“without devotion”), māyā́vant- (“having sorcery”), śiśnádeva- (“having a phallus as god”), like they occur frequently in the text of the Ṛgveda. As a matter of fact the racial evidence provides a consistent explanation for the remainder of expressions related to the Dāsas and Dasyus in the text of the Ṛgveda which do not unambigously refer to the socio-religious sphere, and which are in comparison rather difficult in exegesis.

However, a racial reading of these expressions and hence the “racial evidence” as a whole stands on vague grounds because phrases that have been marked to have a racist sense could very well be read differently. This could be demonstrated easily with regards to the verse 1,100,18, where the poet praises the war god Indra: “The often-called (puruhūtáḥ), as always (évaiḥ), killed (hatvā́ the Dasyus and Śimyus (dásyuñ chímyūṃś ca), and conquers (sánat, inj.) the area (kṣétram) together with the white companions (sákhibhiḥ śvitnyébhiḥ)”. In the Altindisches Leben of 1879 Heinrich Zimmer sen. (1851-1910) writes (113 sq.):

[...] waren die arischen Stämme von weißer Hautfarbe: am grellsten wird der Unterschied gewesen sein in den ersten Zeiten der Einwanderung, als das Klima Indiens auf die Farbe der Arier noch nicht viel eingewirkt hatte. […] er erkämpfte das Land mit seinen weißen Freunden (sakhibhiḥ śvitnyebhiḥ) […] Rv. 1,100,18. [6]

The same interpretation is given in the Vedic Index [7]. However, it could very be well be that the Maruts – a class of gods who are commonly assisting Indra in his battles [8] – were meant. This is what the medieval commentator Sāyaṇa understands when he explains here: “With the whitish (śvintyebhiḥ), white-coloured (śveta-varṇa-), those whose limbs (aṅga-) are shining (dīpta-) by ornaments (alaṅkāra-), the companions (sakhibhiḥ), the group of friends (mitra-bhūta-), together with (saha) the Maruts he divided (sanat meaning: samabhākṣīt) the ground (kṣetram meaning: bhūmim) of the enemies (śatru-) which had become his own (sva-bhūta-)” [9]. A further indication that it is the Maruts who are mend here is the refrain of the last line of verses 1-15 in this hymn, which goes: marútvān no bhavatvíndra ūtī́ – the whole hymn is evidently praising Indra’s connection with the Maruts. It must be emphasized that both lexemes, śvitnyá- and śvítna- (both: “white, light”) are hapax legomena, so their meaning cannot be determined with precision. The “reddish ones”, who are – most probably denoting the same – are said to be in the company of Indra in 3,31,21 (aruṣaír dhā́madbhiḥ, see below), should be grouped together with the “white companions” of 1,100,18 [10]. To my opinion, these passages and Max Müller’s exegesis of Indra’s epitheton suśiprá- (most likely untenable as “beautiful nose”, see below) fail even as possible topic of the discussion of a “racial evidence” in the text. The expression “Āryan colour” (ā́ryaṃ várṇam, see below) remains as the only point which could be discussed as racial indication of the Āryas, and is the only probably racial expression which could be found in relation to the self designation ā́rya- itself. So, it must be underlined that in the main the discourse is towards what is said in the text relating to the lexemes dā́sa-/dāsá- and dásyu-.

That the “racial evidence of the Ṛgveda” is not merly an issue for the history of Vedic studies and Aryanism of the 19th century could be seen on the fact that reference to a racial rendering of the relevant passages in the text of the Ṛgveda can be found even in present-day literature [11]. This especially is the case when it comes to what Trautmann calls the prevailing “racial theory of Indian civilization”, and also in the discourse towards the Aryan migration theory the question if a consistent reading of the oldest Indian text in a sense of two different confronted races – one of them supposed to be coming out of totally different plains – could be maintained or not plays a significant role for the remaining question if the spreading socio-religious setup of the people which called themselves ā́rya- came from outside the Indian subcontinent, or if it has been developed indegeniously – although the category of race already has already been abandoned in the scientific discourse towards the question how the sudden presence of Indo-European culture in Early Indian history could be explained [12]. Of course these are sensitive grounds, deeply affecting Indian identities. In the notion that a consistent racial reading of the Ṛgveda cannot be maintained – following the argumentation of Maria Schetelich (1991) [13], Thomas Trautmann (1997) [14], and Hans Henrich Hock (1999) [15] – I want to deepen the deconstruction of that faulty paradigm in this posting and I want to try to work out further arguments against it in re-reviewing the relevant passages . More than adjudicating upon an autochthonous Aryanism with this I am arguing from the position that human races are social constructions of the modern age and not essential fact.

dā́sasya vṛṣaśiprásya

In verse 7,99,4 Viṣṇu and Indra are flattered, when it is sung: “You have destroyed (jaghnathúḥ) the tricks (māyā́ḥ) even (cid) of Dāsa vṛṣaśiprá, men! (narā), in the battles (pṛtanā́jyeṣu)”. Towards the meaning of the compound vṛṣaśiprá- the first member vṛ́ṣan- does not make problems meaning „bull“ throughout. More problematic is śíprā-, and the interpretation of this word is uncertain: it denotes something in the face and on the head [16], so it is comprehensible that Max Müller has taken this word for also meaning “nose”. Frisk in his article of 1936 has assorted the different groups of possible meaning according to the gods who are refered to: related to the Maruts the śíprā- is a golden object which they put on their head [17], in 4,37,4 the compound áyaḥśiprāḥ occurs relating to the Ṛbhus, obviously meaning a copper/bronze helmet [18], but most of the times śíprā- occurs realating to Indra as a Soma drinker, obviously meaning something of the mouth [19]. A sound etymology is always preferable to the assumption of homonyms. Frisk understands śíprā- as “tailing and flowing object” like the mustache of Indra [20], so that vṛṣaśiprá- probably should be taken as “bull-mustache” following this approach. Following the alternative etymology of Schlerath [21] the word would mean “bull-lipped”, which would fit well to the personal name dáśaśipra- – the „ten-lipped“ of 8,52,2 – obviously another renowed Soma drinker. Anyway, the Ṛgvedic vṛṣaśiprá- is also regarded to be a personal name [22], and so does not typify the individual Dāsa which is meant here. This word of course came to the attention of scholars seeing a racial interpretation of the text, like Basham writes in The wonder that was India of 1954 (32):

[…] there is, underlying this intertribal rivalry, a sense of solidarity against the Dāsas or Dasyus, who evidently represent the survivors of the Harappā Culture, and kindred peoples of the Panjāb and the North-West. The Dāsas are described as dark and ill-favoured, bull-lipped, snub-nosed, worshippers of the phallus, and of hostile speech.

anā́so dásyūn

In verse 5,29,10 the word anā́s- appears when again Indra is praised: “With the weapon (vadhéna) you have crushed (amṛṇaḥ) the Dasyus, which are anā́s. Those who are having contemptuous speech (mṛdhrávācaḥ) you turned (ní āvṛṇak) into the grave (duryoṇé)”. It could be seen already in Max Müller’s contribution of 1854 towards the “Turanian language”, that anā́s- immediately got into the focus in the search for a “racial evidence” in the Ṛgveda: because read as a-nā́s- it would of course mean that the Dasyus are “noseless”, and not only Risley had taken this as a clear evidence for that the so-called “aboriginal population of India” was of a platyrhinic phenotype. The same reading could also be found for example in the translation of Ludwig [23], of course in the Vedic Index [24], and even in the Oxford History of India of 1958 [25].

Also the other possibile separation of this word as an-ā́s- – “mouth/faceless” is well attested in the translations and the secondary literature. Some exegets take it in the sense of “faceless” as meaning “misfeatured” [26], but also often one comes across the reading “mouthless” in the sense of “voice/speechless”, and such an understanding is also supported by Sāyaṇa [27]. Geldner for example translates it without further comment as “mundlos” (“mouthless”), Wilson translates it also taken as an ethnological marker as “not speaking Indo-Aryan” with “voiceless” [28], and Bollensen understands it as meaning “dumb” the same way [29]. Besides, the appositional mṛdhrávāc- was brought forward to support this to read anā́s- as “voice/speechless” like Sāyaṇa understands this word as “having defect organs of speech” [30]. To doubt such a meaning would of course favour a reading of a-nā́s-, maybe with the alternative connotation of untrustworthiness and falseness, like Levitt suggested (1989: 52 sq.).

As a matter of fact, a second instance of anās- in the Ṛgveda might exist depending on how the difficult rujā́nāḥ in 1,32,6 – the famous hymn of Indra’s fight against Vṛtra – is read, and it is most likely the evil demon which is designated by that word [31]. Due to its popularity the passage has been treated extensive: a participle rujānáḥ – “having been broken” would require an unacceptable emendation [32], and also the other previously raised proposals are untenable [33], so a reading of rujā́ ánāḥ has been suggested [34]. Thieme translates that “faceless by crushing”, and explains that this refers to the mutilation of the enemy’s body beyond recognition to impede his afterlife (loc.cit.). It is also possible to read rujā́nāḥ as “nosebreaker” here [35]. Anway, there is no reason to doubt that the poet alludes to the anā́s- of 5,29,10, which pulls dásyu- into the context.

aryaṃ várṇam

It could be called the “core” of the “racial evidence” that in verse 3,34,9 it is sung: “Indra, in slaying (hatvī́) the Dasyus, supported (prá āvat) the (literally:) ‘Āryan colour’ (ā́ryaṃ várṇam)”. This expression simply denotes the Āryan “group” or “party”, which is opposed to the dā́saṃ várnam [36], the “Dāsic colour” – “the group of the Dāsas”. It is comprehensible that this expression has been understood as having the connotation of skin colour, as Heinrich Zimmer writes in 1879 (113):

Der äußere Unterschied beider Stämme drückte sich deutlich in der verschiedenen Farbe des Gesichts und Körpers aus, daher [konnten] āryaṃ varṇam „arische Farbe“ und dāsaṃ varṇaṃ „dāsische Farbe“ concret zur Bezeichnung beider Nationen verwendet werden. [37].

Geldner translates ā́ryaṃ várṇam with “arische Rasse”, and the same could be found for example even in relatively recent publications like Hale’s Asura [38]. The question why “colour” in Early India refers to social groups is of course reasonable, but there are certainly alternatives to the view that it it skin colour what was mend. The discourse towards this passages is charged with the fact that várṇa- in later, unhieratical texts designates the classical system of social classes, while ārya- outside the Ṛgveda refers to the three upper ones, thus Brāḥmaṇa, Kṣatriya and Vaiśya [39]. Both is not the case in the Ṛgveda where the class system is solely mentioned in the comparatively late tenth book, in the Puruṣasūkta 10,90 (where ā́rya- and váṛṇa- do not even appear!). It is a diffcult problem that out of this context the system of social classes has been understood as having an implicit racial basis, as Max Müller writes in his essay Caste of 1858 (04/12):

At the time when this name of “varna” was first used in the sense of caste, there were but two castes, the Āryas and the non-Āryas, the bright and the dark race […]. This ancient division between Aryan and non-Aryan races, based on an original difference of blood, was preserved in later times as the primary distinction between the twice-born castes and the Sûdras.

That the Indian hierarchical system of social classes was established to preserve a superior Aryan biology could be found expressed very clear in the Vedic Index, “the end point and culmination of the formation of the racial theory of Indian civilization founded upon the study of the Veda” (Trautmann 1997: 206). Here it is stated (II, 268):

The race element, it would seem, is what converted social divisions into castes. There appears, then, to a large element of truth in the theory […] which explains caste in the main as a matter of blood, and which holds that the higher the caste is, the greater the proportion of Āryan blood.

That “race is the true basis of the [caste resp. class] system” has been considered already by Risley (1891: 240). It is comprehensible how this understanding of the text and its impact emerged in the colonial situation [40], but to our view the Ṛgveda actually does not support a notion of race, and does really not support the view of a racial basis of the caste system.

kṛṣṇā́n

The discussion of the connotation of colours in the language of the Ṛgveda continues with respect to the fact that the poets of the text had a concept of “blacks” in the sense of “people” or “folks”, which is quite subtle in appearance, and it is not that easy to collect instances for it. In the literature the passages which express a notion of the “blacks” are often treated indiscriminately together with the ones which include the expression the “black skin”, which I am going to treat next (see below). According to my results a collection of passages speaking of the “blacks” which could be discussed would be [41]:

• 1,101,1: “He aborted (niráhan) those who have blacks in their womb (kṛṣṇágarbhāḥ)”.
• 2,20,7: “The stronghold-breaker (puraṃdaráḥ) has broken (ví airayad) the Dāsic with blacks in their womb (kṛṣṇáyonīḥ)”.
• 3,31,21: “He steps (gāt, inj.) among the blacks (antáḥ kṛṣṇā́n) with the red ones (aruṣaír dhā́madbhiḥ, see above)”.
• 4,16,13: “He subdued (ní vapaḥ, inj.) fifty thousand strongholds (pañcāśát sahásrāḥ púraḥ) of the blacks (kṛṣṇā́ḥ) [42]“.
• 6,47,21: “He expels (ápa asedhat) those all identical black children (sadṛṣīḥ kṛṣṇā́ jā́ḥ) away (anyám árdham) from their domicile (sádmanaḥ)”.
• 7,5,3: “The black clans (víśa ásiknīḥ) went away (āyan) by fear (bhiyā́) of you (tvád), as (yád) you broke (daráyan) the strongholds (púraḥ)”.
• 8,73,18: “Crush (ā́ ruja) the tree (vṛkṣám in 17) like a stronghold (púraṃ ná), like the one besieged (bādhitáḥ) by the black clan (kṛṣṇáyā viśā́!”

It’s defnitely not against the facts to consider púr- – “stronghold” – like it is said to be commonly the possession of the “blacks” – to be the nucleus of these passages. Although the literal term is left out in both verses (in one of them it is brought in by the epitheton), the notorious hapax legomena kṛṣṇágarbha- and kṛṣṇáyoni- are best taken to be related to the púr- [43] in the sense that the “blacks” are entrenched in them, so that “black Dāsic women” (for example Geldner on 1,101,1) most probably could be discarded. A display of the whole sense cluster would be something like this:

	„the blacks“	púr-
3,31,21	kṛṣṇā́ṇ
6,47,21	kṛṣṇā́ jā́ḥ
7,5,3	ásiknīr víśaḥ	púraḥ
8,73,18	kṛṣṇáyā viśā́ḥ	púraṃ
4,16,13		púraḥ kṛṣṇā́ḥ
2,20,7		(púraḥ) kṛṣṇáyonīr dā́sīḥ
1,101,1		kṛṣṇágarbhāḥ

Considering who is meant by the “blacks” Gonda takes the term as a collective denomination of all Āryan enemies [44], but it is conspicuous that it is even dā́sa- which appears is this context in 2,20,7.

kṛṣṇā́m tvácam

To challenge the “racial evidence of the Ṛgveda” gets rather difficult when it comes to the “black skin” (kṛṣṇá-/ásita- tvác-) [45], which occurs three times in the text in relation to avratá- and dásyu-:

• In 1,130,8 it is said: “Indra subdued (arandhayat) the black skin (tvácaṃ kṛṣṇā́m), chastising (śā́sad) those without conduct (avratā́n) for Manu (mánave)”.
• In 9,41,1: “Those (yé) who drove away (ghnántaḥ) the black skin (kṛṣṇā́m tvácam)”, and in the following verse then again: “We, overpowering (sāhvā́ṃsaḥ) the Dasyu, who is without conduct (avratám) …”
• Finally, in 9,73,5 it goes: “They blow (ápa dhamanti) the black skin (tvácam ásiknīm), which is hated by Indra (índra-dviṣṭām) away from heaven and earth (bhū́mano divás pári), melting (saṃ dáhantaḥ) those without conduct (avratā́n)”.

These passages are not easy, and two of them occur in the ninth book of the Soma-Pavamāna songs which is generally rather difficult to penetrate. Schetelich treated these verses in her article and is led to the formula “the Dasyu is subjugated while the ‘black skin’ is driven away” [46]. Due to the difficulty of these verses I wouldn’t set me here regarding a simple statement like this, but it is certainly true that participles are to be found in every one of the three sentences, possibly expressing causal relations. To accept that “the ones without conduct” – most likely a paraphrase for the Dasyus – are not identical with the “black skin” would lead to the conclusion that this expression denotes something different, and should be taken as not denoting Āryan enemies in their visual appearance [45]. That kṛṣṇá-/ásita- tvác- is a metaphorical expression for „darkness“ is maintained by Schetelich, Hock, and others, and tvác- could be even taken as meaning “cover” in this context [48].

Concluding remarks

I agree with the view that “the Vedic evidence that has been brought forward has been subjected to a consistent overreading in favor of a racializing interpretation, and that the image of the ‘dark-skinned’ savage is only imposed on the Vedic evidence with a considerable amount of text-torturing” (Trautmann 1997: 208). My aim here was to demonstrate that the relevant passages are far from being clear, that a racial understanding of them is not without alternatives, and that it is quite likely a wrong interpretation of the text. For that I have grouped the relevant passages and sorted these groups towards how hard a rethinking would be. I think the racial interpretation of a number of passages could be casted into heavy doubt easily on philological basis, but the argumentation is difficult when it comes to the connotation of the “blacks”: it must be admitted that the “black skin to-be-battled” is mentioned quite clearly in the text, and this of course could be a stronghold for the advocates of Aryanism. The Ṛgveda certainly must be understood as a hierartical text, that means the vocabulary is used here in a different sense than it would be used composing other texts, and this might be true especially for the meaning of colours [49]. The idea of colours in the Ṛgveda is that they consist of different mixture relations of lightness and darkness which represents the categorical good/bad dichotomy. So “black” could be taken meaning “bad” throughout in the text, as Kuiper puts it (1991: 5 sq.):

The idea of hatred fostered against the non-Aryans was based on those RV passages that refer to Ārya as distinct from Dāsa, but the distinction was an ideological one, based on a dichotomy of the universe. ‘Aryans’ were in general those, who maintained the world order by means of sacrifices and gifts. In this dual world these ‘Aryans’ were on the side of light vs. darkness, of Devas vs. Asuras, etc.

However, unfortunately this cannot be the final argument on this matter. What is said in the Ṛgveda might be exclusively celestrial business, and Dāsas and Dasyus might be actually demons, but given the historical information which the texts transports [50] it must not be ignored that a historical situation and historical folks could be meant. In that way for example John Muir understood what is said about Dāsas and Dasyus (1860: 380):

There is no doubt that in many passages […] the word Dasyu and Dāsa are applied to demons of different orders, or goblins (Asuras, Rākshasas, etc.); but it is tolerably evident from the nature of the case, that in all, or at least some of the texts which have been hitherto adduced, we are to understand the barbarous aboriginal tribes of India as intended by these terms.

If “the blacks”, if the “black skin” or even “black blanket/cover” in the sense of “evil ones” or “darkness” denotes a specific historical group or not, if this group would have had a dark complexion or not – all that unfortunately cannot be judged from the text and a philological examination has its natural limits here. It must be admitted that this fact makes it difficult to argue against the paradigm of a “racial evidence of the Ṛgveda“, but in view of the heavy doubt that could be forwarded these difficulties can only serve as a defence because the notions of the “racial evidence” has been the established one.

Footnotes

[1] For the background of this contribution cf. Trautmann 1997 (194 sq.) and 1999 (being a forerunner of his book held as conference paper in 1996). Many authors refer esp. to this contribution towards a racial reading of anā́s-, e.g. Muir in the Original Sanskrit texts, cf. 1874: 394, and Wilson in his translation, cf. 1866-88 III: 276, fn. 3.

[2] Cf. Trautman 1997: 155 sq. However, in later works Max Müller has distanciated himself from attempts to draw ethnological conclusions on the basis of linguistic data: “I have declared again and again that if I say Aryas, I mean neither blood nor bones […]; I mean simply those who speak Aryan language. […] To me an ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood […] is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a doliocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar” (1888: 120). Towards the rivalry of Indo-European Linguistics and Ethnology in the 19th century cf. also Rabault 2004.

[3] Cf. Martini 2008: 10 sq., and Trautmann 1997: 198 sq.

[4] I’ve taken this expression from Erdosy 1989: 37.

[5] Lubin 2001, 565: “This paper distinguishes three aspects of the word’s meaning [...]: (1) ‘rule’ in the general sense of a fixed articulation of will or authority; (2) as the attribute of a god, it denotes the distinct natural and social laws that the god ordains and maintains; (3) in verses in which the god’s vratá is closely linked with specific rites […] it acquires the sense of ‘rule of ritual observance’”.

[6] “… the Aryan tribes have been of white compexion: most glaring the difference would have been in the early times of immigration, when the climate haven’t effected the colour of the Aryas … he won the land together with his white friends (sakhibhiḥ śvitnyebhiḥ) … Rv. 1,100,18″ (all translations are mine).

[7] Macdonell/Keith 1912 I, 356, fn. 6: “the ‘white-hued (śvitnya)’ friends who, in i,100,18, aid in the conquest of the Dasyu and Siṃyu are doubtless Āryans”.

[8] For example they also supported Indra in his fight against the demon Vṛtra, cf. Chakravarty 1991/92 and Oberlies 1998: 206 sq. (1.6.2.11: Marut). A monographical treatment of the Maruts is still a desideratum.

[9] Max Müller 1980-1892 I, 445: śvitnyebhiḥ śvetavarṇair alaṃkāreṇa dīptāṃgair sakhibhir mitrabhūtair [misprint: mitrabhūaitar] marudbhiḥ saha kṣetraṃ śatrūṇāṃ svabhūtām bhūmiṃ sanat. samabhākṣīt.

[10] Dhā́man-is a diffcult word in many contexts. Gonda 1967, 40: “by the agency of (the) reddish ones, i.e. of the representatives, ‘seats’ or impersonations (of the reddish colour), i.e. of light”. In the understanding of the Vedic poets white and red together reside on the light side of the light-dark dichotomy, which represents the good-evil difference, Elizarenkova 1994/95, 82: “One can see that in certain mythological contexts […] white and red can function as two variants of one invariant bright colour which is opposed to black”. A monographical treatment of colours in the Ṛgveda is also a desideratum.

[11] Furthermore, the general surveys of Early Vedic times based on the texts like Muir’s Original Sanskrit Texts, Zimmer’s Altindisches Leben, the Vedic Index, and the Oxford History of India were not only very influential in propagating racial interpretations, but as much like the translation of Geldner most of the contributions could not be replaced completely, and are still broadly in use.

[12] Cf. Witzel 2001: 8 sq. Bryant 2001, 60: “However, the quest for textual evidence of the Aryan invasion caused the racial interpretation to be favored, and it is this interpretation that has continued to surface up to the present day”.

[13] An English summary could be found in: Sen Gupta/Pathak (Eds.): M.M. Vidhuśekhar Śāstrī Commemoration Vol. II. Santiniketan 1990, 244-249.

[14] Cf. esp. 211 sq.

[15] A later version of the article appeared in: Bryant/Patton (Eds.): The Indo-Aryan controversy. Evidence and inference in Indian history. London, New York 2005, 282-308: Philology and the historical interpretation of Vedic texts.

[16] Cf. Mayrhofer 1991-2001 II, 636. I will leave out issues of accentuation in order not to overburden this posting with long philological digressions, although the accent is of course crucial for the comprehensive evaluation of words.

[17] 5,54,11 and 8,7,25: śíprāḥ hiraṇyáyīh, 2,34,3: híraṇyaśiprāḥ. A headdress (another alaṅkāra)?

[18] Towards the distinction of híraṇya- (precious metal) and áyas- (use metal) cf. Rau 1973, 18 sq.

[19] Uncompounded in the dual, five times śípre, and śíprābhyām in 10,105,5. Frisk 1936, 81: “offenbar ein Gesichtsteil dualischen Charakters” – “obviously a dualistic part of the face”. Indra carries also several related epitheta: śiprín-, śípravant-, śipríṇīvant-, háriśipra-, hiriśiprá-, suśiprá-.

[20] A “schweifender, wedelnder, wallender Gegenstand” – “tailing, wagging and flowing object” from the root *śip- – “tailing, wagging”, and so the (sides of the) mustache of Indra, and helm crests, meaning the helms of the Maruts and Ṛbhus themselves, cf. 1936: 85.

[21] Schlerath defines *śip- as “schnappen, schlürfen” – “to snatch, slurp”, and so śípre, etc. as “lips” or “jaws”, cf. 1955: 321. Futhermore, Schlerath puts *śipi- next to *śiprá- (along Caland’s -ra- > -i- rule), which would result in the meaning “catching with the lips/jaws” (with an active ta-participle) for Viṣṇu’s epithet śipiviṣṭá-.

[22] Cf. Mayrhofer 2003: 88 (2.1.483).

[23] 1876-88 II, 109 (no. 530): “die nasenlosen Dasyu”. In the commentaries he explains this with the flat-noseness of the Indian natives (V, 95 – not available to me, the reference is taken from Macdonell/Keith 1912: 347, fn. 7).

[24] Macdonnel/Keith 1912 I, 347 sq.: “… but the other rendering, ‘noseless’ (a-nās), is quite possible, and would accord well with the flat-nosed aborigines of the Dravidian type”.

[25] Smith 1958 I, 32: “From the Vedic hymns it has been possible to piece together a reasonably coherent picture [own italics] of the Aryan invaders on their first impact with the black, noseless (flatnosed) dasyus who comprised their native opponents and subjects”.

[26] Graßmann 1876-77 I, 181: “hässliche Dämonen” – “ugly demons”. Although the Peterburger Wörterbuch just states “ohne Mund, ohne Gesicht” – “without mouth/face” (cf. PW I: 189), it is refered to that meaning “misfeatured” by Macdonell/Keith (1912 I, 347, fn. 6: “‘misfeatured’, which seems that of Roth, St. Petersburg dictionary”) and Zimmer (1879, 115: “Roth im Wtb. sagt ,ohne Mund, ohne Gesicht’; er sucht wohl den Sinn ,missgestaltet’ darin” – “Roth in the dictionary … seems to seek a sense of ‘misfeatured’ with that”).

[27] Max Müller II, 549 sq.: kiṃ ca anāsa āsyarahitan. āsyaśabdena śabdo lakṣyate. aśabdān mūkān dasyūn asurān vadhenā yudhena vajreṇāmṛṇaḥ. – “Anāsaḥ are without (rahita-) a mouth (āsya-). With the word ‘mouth’ (āsya-śabda-) voice (śabda-) is denoted (lakṣyate). With the weapon (vadha-), the Vajra, you crushed the Asuras, the dumb (mūka-) Dasyus, which are without voice (a-śabda-)”.

[28] Wilson 1866-88 III, 276, fn. 3: “alluding possibly to the uncultivated dialects of the barbarous tribes, barbarism and uncultivated speech being identical, in the opinion of the Hindus”.

[29] Bollensen 1887, 496: “insofern die Dasyu die Sprache der Arier weder verstanden noch sprachen, nannten die Arier jene stumm (an-ās)” – “the Āryas called the Dasyus dumb because they did not spoke nor under-stood their language”.

[30] Hiṃsitavāgiṃdriyān, cf. Max Müller, loc.cit.

[31] “He couldn’t survive (ná atārīd, s-aor.) the clash (sámṛtim) of his (asya) weapons (vadhā́nām). The rujā́nāḥ, whose enemy is Indra (índra-śatruḥ), was completely crushed (sáṃ pipiṣa, med.)”.

[32] Geldner considers a rujá-anas- as “cartbreaker”, cf. 1957 I: 37. Lubotsky 1997 II, 1203: rujā́nā- follows Graßmann’s dictionary, cf. 1873: 1174.

[33] Bloomfield suggested a haplologic *rujā[ná]-nās- – “having a broken nose”, cf. 1896: 412 sq. Caland/Henry 1906 the same: “it ne put affronter la recontre de ses armes; les naseaux brisés, il fut broyé, celui qui avait encouru l’hostilité d’Indra” (311).

[34] With a root noun rúj- “crushing”, cf. Oldenberg 1909-12: 31 sq., and Thieme 1957: 89.

[35] “Trasá-Dasyu compound” *rujá-Hnas- – “nosebreaker”, cf. Mayrhofer 1992-2001 II: 452, already suggested by Geldner, loc.cit. It would fit that Vṛtra in 4,18,9 (mend here by vyàṃsa-) is said having injured the jaws of Indra, cf. Schmidt 1963: 301.

[36] Appears in 2,12,4: “He, who (yáḥ) has made (akaḥ) the dā́saṃ várṇam inferior (ádharam)”. Furthermore, in 1,104,2 the expression no várṇam – “our group/party” appears.

[37] “The outward difference of both tribes was a different colour of face and body, so the expressions ‘Āryan colour’ and ‘Dāsic colour’ have been used to refer to the two parties”.

[38] 1986, 147: “In some of these verses the singular of ā́rya- must either be understood as a collective term or have a words such as ‘race’ (várṇa-) supplied in order to make full sense of the verse”. Geldner’s translation was already completed in the early 20s, cf. Jamison 2000: 2.

[39] Weber 1868, 4: “An Stelle der alten Gegenüberstellung von ârya und dâsa tritt in dieser Periode die von ârya und çûdra. Unter ârya sind die drei oberen Kasten zu verstehen … Und zwar wird der ârya varṇa dem çûdra gegenübergestellt” – “The old contrast of ārya- and dāsa- in this [the later literary] period is replaced by that of ārya- and śūdra-. Ārya- means the three upper castes [classes]. It is the śūdra- who is confronted with the ārya- varṇa-“.

[40] Cf. Martini 2008.

[41] Geldner translates Indras epitheton aruśahán- in 10,116,4 as “Töter der Schwarzen” – “killer of blacks”, but a *a-ruśant- “not white” = “black” is probably a bit too far-fetched. Indra’s epitheta are commonly related to the context, and 10,116 is a drinking song – I leave that out for now.

[42] Literally: “black strongholds”, but genitive and adjective in the Ṛgveda are showing possession without functional difference, cf. Zimmer 1978: 41.

[43] Following Oldenberg, cf. 1909-12: 96 sq.

[44] Cf. Gonda 1967: 41.

[45] On t(u)vác- cf. Jamison 198: esp. 167 sq., and Malamoud 1974: 78 sq.

[46] 1991, 159: “Der Dasyu wird untertan gemacht, während die ‘schwarze Haut’ verjagt wird”.

[47] Max Müller 1856, 04/12: “The dark race is sometimes called by the poets of the Veda ‘the black skin’”. Geldner in the comments towards 9,41,4: “Die Unholde oder die unarische Rasse” – “the fiends or the unaryan race”.

[48] Hock 1999, 153: “not necessarily designate human or animal skin, but can also refer to the surface of the earth”. Graßmann 1873, 564: “die schwarze Decke, d.h. die Finsternis” – “the black blanket, i.e. the darkness”.

[49] Elizarenkova 1994/95, 85: “The semantics of colour code in the RV is often determined by its mythology, and therefore cannot be supposed to reflect the real state of things”.

[50] Cf. Witzel 1995, 308: “This information can then be comnined in a grid of places, poets and tribes. […] Finally, this grid can be combined with a chronological grid established on the strengh of a few pedigrees of chiefs and poets available from the hymns”.

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Information Technologies and Innovation in Sanskrit based Indian Studies. Workshop in connection with the Festival of India at the University of Vienna, Institute for South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, 25/26th of March 2011

Sanskrit computational linguistics has been an issue at the latest since a series of symposia (Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Symposium, SCLS) on that field of research has been taken place at the INRIA in Rocquencourt in 2007, at the Brown University in 2008 (proceedings here), the University of Hyderabad in 2009 (proceedings here), and New Delhi in 2010 (proceedings here). It seems that really more and more goes on in this area, anyway there was enough new material to fill another workshop on Information Technologies and Innovation in Sanskrit based Indian Studies, which took place in March at the Institute for South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies at the University of Vienna, and which happened in relation to the Festival of India at the same time.

Among the several presenters Oliver Hellwig (Heidelberg) spoke about the perspectives and the further improvement of the Sanskrit POS Tagger, Anand Mishra (Heidelberg) about Integrating traditional analyses in computational processing, Jan Westerhoff (Durham) introduced Śāstravid which is going to be a useful browser of Indian philosophical text primarly based on their interrelations, while Birgit Kellner (Heidelberg) presented the Indian Logic Knowledge Base (ILKB), a project related to the SUEBS. Olga Serbaeva-Saraogi (Zürich) presented the computational derived Place and role of Śaiva Tantric texts in Early Medieval India (see here), Sven Sellmer (Poznan) explained the results of his computational analysis of the Anuṣṭhubh verses of the Mahābhārata. Himal Trikha (Vienna) talked about the Study of the manuscripts of the Woolner Collection (see here), Philipp Maas (Vienna) about Solving the textual contamination by means of computer-aided stemmatics, Ernst Prets (Vienna) introduced in the Fragments of Indian Philosophy a useful database of only-as-citation transmitted philosophical text fragments which is going to launched soon. Jonas Soiné explained his word-sense disambiguation (WSD) software based on the Decision lists algorithm, which he has quite successfully employed processing the words jana and śādūla in the text of the Rāmāyaṇa. Jonas is going to make his M.A. thesis which describes his project available soon.

SARIT@home – a big bump towards a versatile infrastructure for Sanskrit e-texts

The question about a standardized and comprehensive electronic canon of Sanskrit texts which is maintained independently as a data basis for various current and future projects came up in relation with many of the presentations of the workshop. Dominik Wujastyk in his talk about the importance to follow open and versatile data standards like TEI stressed the fact that e-texts following TEI conventions – which also Birgit Kellner underlines always as being the de-facto data standard for the humanities – are capable to fulfill the needs of a wide range of applications, and different sets of tags could be maintained side by side in the same files (e.g. textual variants, emendations, manuscript distribution, intertextual cross references, citations, personal names, place names, etc. etc.). As a matter of fact TEI as a basis for the coding of e-texts have been employed already by Richard Mahoney for the SARIT project at indology.info, where e-texts could be queried on a very high level using the Philologic software. Although SARIT could be used from outside the browser mask quite comfortable with Goldendict (see this posting here on Jalasthāna), but having the set of files on your own computer would be – like always – even more convenient. So a key step for SARIT definitely has been to put the set of files under a version control with Git.

Patrick Mc Allister in his presentation explained the benefits of this development: with Git the set of e-texts which are available at SARIT are most easy to get for the end user, the collection is easy to keep updated, own additions and revisions could be contributed easily while at the same time these alterations are available for all the other users at the very second if intended. Git as a further developed, distributed version control system (see this posting here) provides a whole wealth of possibilities, imagine things like a researcher puts in textual variants from a newly available manuscript in Lhasa or Kolkata while his partner can merge these variants into the e-text he has already on his computer online somewhere else with a single command line – like said, TEI offers far more than just providing post-HTML e-texts for grepping but a comprehensive framework for encoded texts, while Git as a background provides possibilities for any kind of interpersonal workflow for them: since everything works also independently from the central repository a set of tags could be maintained also exclusively within a group before it is going to be available for the others, etc. etc. But for the SARIT (in the sense of the collection of e-texts) & Git beginner it goes basically like this: just clone the central repository at git://github.com/paddymcall/SARIT.git to your own computer and there already you go with the texts. Changes of the repository could be tracked at this blog here or at this page here. When additions and/or revisions have been taken place (there are going to be messages like “xy pushed to master”) just update you local repository – that’s basically it (please consult the Git primers for details and the instructions here). With the same ease it’s possible to make changes and additions like own tags or new e-texts, please get into contact with Patrick Mc Allister so that he can approve you as a contributor of the central repository if you want to share your Git controlled TEI files publicly.

But what to do with the files you’ve received from SARIT? If you’ve installed Philologic (which is going to be available as a Debian/Mint/Ubuntu etc. packet soon) of course you can query the local texts in terms of corpus linguistics issues like it is possible at the SARIT web interface, but of course everything else which is possible with TEI files could be done with them: for example you can process them to result in PDF files and query them for personal names, citations and anything which has been tagged. The texts which the collection includes are maintained on a very high level: to be found are an Aṣṭāṅgahṛdaya by Das/Emmerick, a Ayurvedasūtram by Z. Slatoff, a Brahmapurāṇa by the Tübinger Purāṇa Project, a Caryāmelāpakapradīpa by C.K. Wedemeyer, an Arthaśāstra by R.P. Kangle, a Manusmṛti by J.L. Shastri, next to the Naradasmṛti from the critial edition by R.W. Lariviere (Philadelphia 1989), and a Nibandhāvali is coming soon. Like Dominik Wujastyk explained to provide high quality e-texts is a specification of the SARIT project. After the issues of data format and infrastructure have been solved optimally now of course the repository should be filled up with more texts, and hopefully many projects are going to choose the SARIT as their backbone for Sanskrit e-text maintenance and contribution, and also many already exiting e-texts are hopefully going to be converted into TEI and going to be included into SARIT. To be open for multiple hands and impulses is like said one of the main advantages here.

Of course an issue is that TEI being XML is not a convenient data format and that very quick the texts get so overloaded with tags that even John Nash wouldn’t recognize any structure in them anymore (keyword “tag overload”). It must be admitted that TEI isn’t easy to use on the bare “coding level” and that programmer’s language which is prevalent in Git, next to the mass of functions there initially rather scares off. Also the existing editing tools could be frustrating for explorers beyond the common stuff. But the setup – you can trust the people who know what they are doing – provides most of what you’ve ever thought of typing in Sanskrit texts, so it’s really worth to spend time into making yourself familiar with what’s going on here (mostly there are always only two, three basic things to figure out). As a matter of fact the combination of TEI and Git is the tip of what is possible today towards shared Unicode encoded standardized texts. Of course there is much room even for the development of convenient end user interfaces (one of the major topics of the upcoming 2011 TEI MM), and it’s generally a good idea to keep the end user as far as possible away from the bare XML. As a little example for what it could be, if you like please play around a little bit with Halfred, a Javascript mask for TEI 7/performance texts which have been set up by the Informatik at the University of Halle (thanks to Martin Andert for pointer and permission): after login (user: “guest”, password: “guest123″) you can upload TEI encoded drama text (some are already to be found), and after locking it (please use the key symbol on the right), there are several functions to comment the text (textmarkers, sticky notes), which are full exportable at the end (again as TEI or PDF). For all that TEI XML runs in the background without that the end user comes into contact with it. Something uncomplicated like this is what it could going to be in the near future with digital encoded texts in Sanskrit studies based on TEI and Git at SARIT.

Sir Henry Thomas Colebrooke’s (1765-1837) essay On the Vedas of 1805 [1] certainly should be regarded as the initial work of scientific study of the Veda of the Abendland. It took 25 years until the first edition of Ṛgvedic text appeared, and that is Friedrich August Rosen’s Rig-Vedae specimen of 1830, which contains a couple of hymns [2] next to notes and a latin translation on 27 pages. The Orientalist Rosen was appointed to the chair for for Sanskrit at the London University already with 22 years (sic!), and in a letter to his teacher Franz Bopp he wrote that for this work he has read a manuscript which was deposited in the British Museum by the collector Colonel Polier [3]. That one is the very first one recorded in Bendall’s catalogue of 1902 [4], the manuscript is written in Devanāgarī and dated vikrama saṃvat 1838 (approx. 1781). The Swiss Antoine Louis Henry Polier (1741-95) served in the East India Company between 1759 and 1789 and in a letter to the trustee Sir Joseph Banks from 1789 – it is kept together with his collection of manuscripts (Add. 5346-56) – he wrote that the items were copied on his behalf in Rajasthan (cf. op.cit.). Rosen’s specimens appear later again in Christian Lassen’s Anthologica Sanscrita from 1838 next to notes [5].

After that in the year 1833 the missionary John Stevenson published an edition of the first 39 hymns of the Ṛgveda next to extracts from commentaries and a paraphrase in Bombay under the title The threefold science printed at the American Mission Press [6]. Otto von Böhtlingk (1815-1904) examined this edition – which was pretty rare in Europe – for his Chrestomathie of 1845 and was quite disappointed [7].

Rosen’s new edition of the complete first aṣṭaka (- 1,121) in unaccented Devanāgarī next to the padapāṭha in transliteration and a latin translation appeared in 1838 under the title Rigveda-Sanhita liber primus sanskritè et latinè. The rich annotations are breaking with verse 28,1 in the Śunaḥśepa cycle (1,24-30) because Rosen unfortunately died already with 32 years on his birthday in 1837. The preface tells that two other manuscripts in London have been used for that edition, one was in the Library of the East-India Company [8], the other one was a manuscript of the padapāṭha in the possession of the widow of Sir Robert Chambers (1737-1803) – that time the huge collection of precious manuscripts collected by the judge wasn’t even sold to the Königliche Bibliothek in Berlin but later in 1842 [9]. Of course Rosen’s edition was widely used in the following years before the more complete editions of Müller and Aufrecht appeared [10]. Given also the limited resources Rosen could use his work nowadays only plays a role for research history [11]. The text of the first adhyāya (- 1,19) appeared later in Böhtlingk’s Chrestomathie of 1845 next to notes in accented form while the accents have been added by Albert Hoefer again from manuscripts of the Chambers Collection which has got to Berlin in the meanwhile [12].

By the way, in the time after Rosen’s edition editions of the other Vedic collections also appeared: Theodor Benfey’s edition of the Sāmaveda appeared 1848 [13] and Albrecht Weber’s epochal edition of the Black Yajurveda in three parts in the years 1852-59 [15]. Rudolf von Roth – who was appointed as Extraordinarius in Tübingen in 1848 and promoted to Ordinarius later in 1856 [15] edited together with his pupil William Dwight Whitney the Śaunaka Atharvaveda in 1856. Die Hymnensammlungen of 1845, the first Abhandlung of his Habilitation Zur Litteratur und Geschichte des Veda could be seen as a successor of Colebrooke’s essay on the Vedic literature and Windisch points out that this it was a kind of a manifest for the whole subsequent research [16]. Since there weren’t much printed text available this time Roth – who has been stimulated to work on the Veda in Paris by Eugène Burnouf – has gained his knowledge mainly from the manuscripts [17]. By the way, Weber did the same for his Akademische Vorlesungen über indische Literaturgeschichte of the Wintersemester 1851/52 at the University of Berlin, which he had seen as a kind appendix to his first manuscript catalogue of 1853 which covers mainly the Chambers Collection. Roth also started the seek for proper understanding of the content of the Ṛgveda. A special role for that plays the Wortforschung (lexical semantics) including the method of etymology – as a broadly educated Orientalist he was able to take into account also the linguistically related texts from the neighbouring culture of the Old Iran. Roth – who also contributed to the Petersburger Wörterbuch towards the Ṛgveda and who has dealt with Yāska’s Nirukta – has set up theoretical bases here. He also had taken a position towards the role of the native commentators – the question how to evaluate them, among them foremost Sāyaṇa, has been an issue also for the later generations of Western scholars – and he positioned himself independent from them [18] (for me this is the fact from which I believe the Western involvement with these texts gets its reason). Roth has also established the understanding of the Ṛgveda as a historical document. To have a more comprehensive edition of the Ṛgveda was one of the major issues of these days and this task was first approached by Horace Hayman Wilson (1786-1860) who was assay master of the Calcutta mint and later in 1832 became first Boden Professor in Oxford [19]. Roth was also involved in this endeavour like he has announced on the constitutional meeting of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft in 1845 [20].

A plan for editing a complete edition of the Ṛgveda including Sāyaṇas commentary, the Mādhavīyavedārthaprakāśa, was also pursued by Friedrich Max Müller, who was also a student of Eugène Burnouf, who has teached the Ṛgveda in Paris from Rosen’s edition of the first aṣṭaka and who also pointed out that a complete edition of the text would be the next important task. For that Müller first got into contact with Böhtlingk in St. Petersburg who managed it to got the huge Wörterbuch (published 1852-71) – somewhat comparable in its extension – financed by the Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, but this collaboration never took place [21]. The was a strong aversion between Roth and Müller [22] which somehow lead to the fact that Roth got out of this project, and Müller moved to London in 1846 to work on this edition. The first volume, the awesome monument of German diligence and British liberalism [23], finally appeared already in the year 1849, and up to 1874 the other five followed [24]. The book was first financed by the East-India Company and from the 4th volume on published on the behalf of the Secretary of State for India. A notable promoter of this project was the Prussian ambassador in London Chevalier Christian K.J. von Bunsen (1791-1860) [25]. By the way, the sharp Christian Lassen, wo looked through Rosen’s transcripts from the bequest, already noted that in the Ṛgveda manuscripts – a quite remarkable fact – there are solely orthographic and phonetic differences to be found but no factual textual variants at all [26], and that phenomenon is again described by Müller in the preface of his edition. For that the hymns of the Ṛgveda deserve a special status in manuscriptology, a theory for explaining that phenomenon it could be assumed that Ṛgvedic manuscripts have not been copied but have been repeatedly written new out of the oral tradition, in which the text was given special protection through its sub-versions like the padapāṭha. Anyway, the first edition of 500 copies was sold out quickly and the book became also very popular in India where Müller got great fame and the paṇḍits gave him the title “Mokṣamūla“, the „root of salvation“ – though some have seen the printed text as a degeneration. A second edition of Müller edition in four volumes – much better to work with – appeared in the years 1890 and 92 [27]. That edition contains an improved text of Sāyaṇa’s commentary which has been printed in a much smaller type and offers critical additions. The publication was financed by the Mahārāja of Vijayanagara, Pasupati Ananda Gajapati Raz.

Among the various people who have worked under Müller on the project over the years there was Theodor Aufrecht [28], who later became Lassens successor in Bonn in 1875 and was one of the most outstanding manuscriptologists in Indology. He came to London 1852 and worked as a cataloguer of the Bodleian Library in Oxford and together with Müller on the edition. Also that time he begun to work on his own edition of the saṃhitā text of the Ṛgveda in which the text is typed in transliteration [29]. This edition, which appeared in 1861 and 63 as part 6 and 7 of Weber’s Indische Studien, became much popular especially among comparative linguists which don’t have to deal with the Devanāgarī accents here, and Hermann Grassmann’s (1809-1877) ingenious dictionary of 1873-75 refers to the enumeration of this issue. Müller has particularly not liked that Aufrecht’s edition was completed before his one. The second edition of Aufrecht’s text appeared in 1877 and has replaced the forerunner completely also because the modified transliteration is more similar to today’s convention, though Aufrecht has given up the continuous enumeration of the hymns which brings difficulties in applying Grassmann’s dictionary, which is still is use.

Notes

This is the introductory part of what I had the chance to present in Bucharest last year. Rather than to let it be included into what is going to be printed in the forthcoming proceedings I have decided to just take it out and to bring it here now as it is/was – just on this piece of 19th century research historiography it can be made much more (which I would like to do in the future), and I think that would be beyond the scope of being just a part of an article on basically something different (namely the “racial evidence” of the Ṛgveda).

[1] Reprinted next to valuable notes by Whitney (p. 103 sq.) in the first volume (the second one if the biography volume is counted into a three-volume set) of the Miscellaneous Essays, p. 8-102.

[2] 3,4,10 & 11 (Visvamitrae hymnus in solem), 4,1,1 (Atreyae hymnus in agnim) 5,1,5 (Bharadvajae hymnus in auroram), 5,2,17 (Ad agnim), 18 & 19 (Vasishthae hymnus in agnim), 21 (Vasisthae hymnus in agnim), and 5,7,2 (Vasisthae hymnus in deum pluvium).

[3] „Seit meiner Rückkehr nach London habe ich mein Hauptaugenmerk auf die Vedas, zunächst auf den Rig Veda gerichtet. Ich suchte meine bereits früher gemachten Auszüge aus den Hymnen desselben hervor, und bemühte mich, in der Verständniß derselben einzudringen. An der Polier’schen Handschrift in dem mir benachbarten Britischen Museum hatte ich Gelegenheit, solche Versuche weiter auszudehnen“ (Letter from London of the 26.2.1830, cf. Lefmann 1895, II, p. *191).

[4] Bendall’s catalogue, cf. p. 1 (Add. 5151).

[5] Cf. p. 97-102 and 130-48 (Notae in Hymnos Vêdicos).

[6] Original Sanskrit title: Trividyā triguṇātmikā bhāga 1, cf. Gildemeister’s Bibliothecae Sanskritae, p. 21 (no. 61).

[7] Sanskrit-Chrestomathie, p. VII sq.: „Stevenson mag ein sehr guter Missionär sein, wie er denn auch nicht ermangelt das Werk mit einigen in’s Sanskrit übersetzten Sprüchen aus der heiligen Schrift zu beschliessen, aber ein großer Meister im Sanskrit ist er nicht.“

[8] I would have guesses that „2,133“ – in that form not to be found nowhere else – relates to the early catalogue by Burnell (cf. Janert no. 162 – only hardly available), and probably to a piece of Colebrooke’s manuscripts (probably denoting “no. 133 of the stock’s 2nd layer”) which has been given to the India Office in 1819, cf. Sutton, Guide to the India Office Library, p. 39. But Burkhard Quessel at the British Library (great support there!) was so nice to point me to the fact that there is a shelfmark “2133″ in Eggeling’s catalogue of the Vedic manuscripts in the India Office Library from 1887 (e.g. no. 27).

[9] „the other, from which the text printed in Roman characters is transcribed, belongs to the private collection of Lady Chambers, and is marked in her Catalogue D: it is in octavo“. Lassen tells that the preface was written by Louis Poley and that Lassen was entrusted with several items from Rosen’s bequest incl. transcripts (which gives evidence that Rosen has considered even moren than the two mentioned manuscripts) and more of the annotations next to indexes, cf. Lassen’s recension in the Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 3 (1840), p. 467-89.

[10] See Hoefer’s Notizen über die Geschichte des bisherigen Studium der Vêda’s, p. 436 sq.

[11] Windisch, Geschichte der Sanskrit-Philologie, p. 94: „Verglichen mit Max Müllers und Th. Aufrechts vollendeten Ausgaben des Ṛgveda muß Rosens Ausgabe des I. Aṣṭaka allerdings als mir unzulänglichen Mitteln unternommen erscheinen. Er hat nur zwei Handschriften benutzt […] Die Akzentbezeichnung fehlt. Mancherlei Ungenauigkeiten und Fehler lassen sich nachweisen.“

[12] Nos. 60 & 42 of the Chambers Collection (but both are also padapāṭha manuscripts, see Weber’s catalogue, p. 4 sq. [nos. 9 & 17]). Böhtlingk, op.cit, p. VIII: „Bei zwei zusammengeflossenen Vokalen hat Hoefer auch zwei Pada-Handschriften zu Rathe gezogen.“ The notes in the Chrestomathie are to be found on p. 353-441.

[13] This was preceded by an edition of Stevenson.

[14] Of the Vājasaneyisaṃhitā in 1852, the Śatapathabrāhmaṇa in 1852, the Kātyāyana-Śrautasūtra in 1859. An edition of the 9th adhyāya of the VS appeared before as dissertation in 1845 (cf. that posting here).

[15] Cf. Stietencron, Attraktion und Ausstrahlung: das Wirken Rudolf von Roths, p. 79.

[16] „Indem Roth auf wenigen Seiten in seiner knappen Art, ohne Dialektik und Polemik, die Ergebnisse seiner Studien mitteilte, hat er zugleich ein Programm für die ganze weitere Forschung auf dem Gebiet des Veda aufgestellt“ (Geschichte der Sanskritphilologie, p. 257).

[17] There is a list of regarded manuscripts to be found at the beginning of the first essay, cf. Kleine Schriften, p. 39 sq. It seems that Roth established the method of citing related to the maṇḍalas.

[18] Roth in a letter to his teacher Heinrich Ewald from Paris on the 13.11.1844: „Meine Liebe zu den Weden wächst beständig. Man muß über den glatten, systematisch steiffen Sinn der Eklärer hinauskommen, um in diesen Gesängen eine Fülle poetischer und religiöser Anschauungen zu finden“ (Zeller, R.v.Roth als Schüler, Lehrer und Gelehrter im Spiegel von Briefdokumeten, p. 93). There is a harsh critique of Roth’s methods by Goldstücker in his Páņini of 1861.

[19] Towards Wilson’s Indian years see Kejariwal, The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the discovery of India’s past (1784-1838), p. 118 sq. (4. H.H. Wilson and the expanding frontiers of historical scholarship 1815-32).

[20] Roth presented Die Hymnensammlungen there (cf. the Jahresbericht der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft für 1845-46, p. 35 sq. [Protokoll der dritten ordentlichen Sitzung]). It is said: „Es gereicht mir zu besonderem Vergnügen, mit der Ankündigung schliessen zu dürfen, dass ein solches Werk in England vorbereitet wird. Die Wissenschaft wird dafür Wilson verpflichtet seyn […] Jüngeren Kräften, unter welchen Dr. Trithen in London und Dr. Rieu aus Genf ich mich zählen darf, soll es unter seiner Leitung möglich gemacht werden, dieses ausgedehnte Material zur Erklärung des Weda dem Studium zugänglich zu machen“ (p. 65).

[21] Müller in My autobiography wrote that he has been invited by Böhtlingk to St.Petersburg, but couldn’t overcome his doubts – enforced by warnings of Burnouf – after he never got an official invitation from the academy: „All this, I confess, began to frighten me. For me, a poor scholar, to go to St. Petersburg without any official invitation, without any appointment, seemed reckless“ (p. 182). Müller’s refuse led to a lifelong struggle between the two researchers, e.g. Böhtlingk wrote a harsh Zur Charakteristik Max Müller’s in the Anzeiger der Jenaer Literaturzeitung of 1876 (p. 14: „Auch lerne er endlich sich bescheiden, da es ihm doch nicht gelingen wird, das zu werden und bei competenten Richtern für das zu gelten, was er zu sein scheinen möchte“), and later in 1891 published the harsh lampoon Max Müller als Mythendichter.

[22] Müller puts it: „Roth was my senior by several years, and engaged in much the same work as myself. But we never got well together […] and later on he offered to join me in editing the Rig-veda, I declined, perhaps incluenced by that early impression which I could not get rid of“ (op.cit., p. 171 sq.).

[23] „Sie ist ein großartiges Monument deutschen Fleifses und englischer Liberalität“ (Review of Weber in ZDMG 4 [1850], p. 265-68 = Indische Streifen 2 [1869], p. 8 sq.).

[24] See Windisch’s Geschichte der Sanskritphilologie, p. 272 sq. (270-76: 37. Max Müller. Ausgabe des Ṛgveda).

[25] „The same Bunsen, His Excellency Baron Bunsen, the Prussian Minister in London, on his own accord went afterwards to see the Chairman and the Directors of the East India Company, and explained to them what the Rig-Veda was, and that it would be a real disgrace if such a work were published in Germany; and they agreed to vote a sum of money such as they never voted before for any literary undertaking“ (autobiography, p. 13. sq.). Peter Wyzlic pointed to me before Bunsen as a somewhat obscure person.

[26] „Es kommen nämlich kaum wirkliche Varianten vor; ich meine solche, die in verschiedenen Worten oder Wortformen bestehen und schließe zweierlei aus. Erstens solche, wo die geschriebenen Laute diesselben sind […] Zweitens, was ich orthographische Varianten nennen möchte“ (op.cit., p. 472).

[27] The text of the saṃhitā with the padapāṭha of the editio princeps without the commentary appeared in two volumes before that in 1873.

[28] Something comprehensive on Aufrecht going beyond the anecdotes which are traditioned in Bonn is still missing. Must do it so far: Kirfel’s little piece in the Bonner Gelehrte – Beiträge zur Geschichte der Wissenschaften in Bonn, Sprachwissenschaften (Bonn 1970), p. 315-18.

[29] His early transliteration scheme follows mainly the system of Brockhaus (Über den Druck sanskritscher Werke mit lateinischen Buchstaben from 1841) which follows Franz Bopp.

There are several ways to get great PDFs with Open Source tools on the desktop: OpenOffice.org Writer and the other office and the DTP applications like Scribus export (and partly even import) proper PDF, LaTeX can produce PDF with pdflatex, the XeTeX engine is a further development which also can process even OpenType Unicode fonts, and the LuaTeX engine is also fine native, most flexible PDF software. But it is also possible to generate PDF documents dynamically through code. This is certainly not mend as a replacement for the end user solutions which I’ve mentioned, but furthermore to provide PDF as an output format on the source code level without the need for calling huge external applications for generating them (like: you own Sanskrit inflected form generator is 175 KB … and depends on Tex Live which is 700 MB). Here I am going to discuss two applications, the ReportLab library for Python and TCPDF for PHP.

ReportLab library for Python

The company ReportLab in London distributes a Python library for PDF generation, the ReportLab Toolkit (RLTK). Like other companies the vendor is pursuing a two level distribution policy: the core library is licensed free (Debian Squeeze: python-reportlab, currently 2.4-4) while the complete toolkit (“ReportLab Plus”), which includes end-user oriented goodies like a versatile own markup language (ReportLab Markup Language – RML) with a self-standing PDF generator next to additional tools, is proprietary software. Up to now ReportLab is Python 2.x software, but it’s planned to catch up to 3.x next.

The ReportLab library out of the box generates upright DIN A4 with a resolution of 75 DPI, the coordinates of the page are given by points, and are starting bottow left. A simple “Hello, world!” with the basic pdfgen module simply goes like this:

from reportlab.pdfgen.canvas import Canvas

pdf = Canvas('reportlab.pdf')
pdf.drawString(100,750,"Hello, world!")

pdf.save()

It’s correct to say the objects like text strings are being “painted” that way, that’s a little bit like Postscript but that’s not so convenient for larger text. As a matter of fact ReportLab has a huge arsenal when it comes to drawing (it depends on the Python Imaging Library), and of more fancier objects like forms etc. All in all the ReportLab library works a little bit like a DTP application, and for even this target group it could be very interesting as a kind of LaTeX for Desktop Publishing where always design objects are created and positioned on a page (see for example this brochure on the Seychelles here created with it).

Platypus (“Page layout and typographing using scripts”) is a higher level module for text documents, it handles the paragraphs and provides layout elements. A basic document with that goes like this:

from reportlab.platypus import SimpleDocTemplate, Paragraph
from reportlab.lib.styles import getSampleStyleSheet

styles = getSampleStyleSheet()

text1 = Paragraph('Header', styles['Heading1'])
text2 = Paragraph('Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet', styles['Normal'])

story = []
story.append(text1)
story.append(text2)

pdf = SimpleDocTemplate('reportlab.pdf')
pdf.build(story)

Note that instead of the Canvas the SimpleDocTemplate of platypus regulates the space calculating and generates the PDF, the SampleStyleSheet provides the basic style types like heading, normal etc., and the text elements are being combined using the story. The resulting PDF could be found here (admitted that the PDF isn’t that impressive the way it was produced I would say certainly is). To have a versatile PDF generator like this inside of a powerful environment like Python gives a god-like range of possibilities towards e-documenting.

To continue building up basic ReportLab skills, after the “Hello, world!” runs Sanskrit people usually ask about diacritics. Next to the build-in standard PDF fonts (Courier, Helvetica, Times, Symbol, Zapf Dingbats) ReportLab can employ random Type 1 (Postscript) and TrueType (TTF) fonts easily, and a proper TTF Unicode font like Junicode for example does a good job here. Here’s a demonstration of that, again with the Canvas of pdfgen module:

#!/usr/bin/python2.6
# coding=utf8

from reportlab.pdfgen.canvas import Canvas
pdf = Canvas('reportlab.pdf')

from reportlab.pdfbase import pdfmetrics
from reportlab.pdfbase.ttfonts import TTFont
pdfmetrics.registerFont(TTFont('Junicode', 'Junicode-Regular.ttf'))

pdf.setFont('Junicode', 12)
pdf.drawString(100,750,"Ṛtusaṃhāra")

pdf.save()

(note: since there are problems with Unicode encoded sources files with Python 2.x the coding must be given together with the Shebang for a runable file, see here). So, that’s all for the introduction of ReportLab this time, please follow the pointers for further information.

What code level PDF generations brings could be seen on the tool rst2pdf (Debian Squeeze currently 0.14.2-1) which produces a PDF directly from the lightweight markup language reStructuredText (ReST, reST) without the need to go over intermediate formats like XML/DocBook, LaTeX or something else like the converters like Docutils or Pandoc do (see here): a simple text file containing nothing else than “Hello, world!” is enough to generate a PDF from that – that’s pretty lean.

Pointers:

• ReportLab PDF library user guide 2.5, code snippets
• reportlab-users mailing list here
• Jochen Schnelle: PDF-Dokumente mit ReportLab generieren. In: Das freie Magazin 4/2010, p. 34-38
• A simple step-by-step ReportLab tutorial, ReportLab tables at The mouse vs. the python

TCPDF for PHP

TCPDF (recently 5.9/PHP5) is a PDF generator class for PHP and is already included in some of the top notch internet software like Joomla, Drupal, Typo3, etc. It became very popular in the meanwhile (now it stands on place no. 15 in the “most active” ranking at Sourceforge, see here) and it looks that there is absolutely nothing which TCPDF can’t do (e.g. OTF fonts could be employed, different barcode standards are supported and even bidi is possible). It has even hyphenation capabilities and it’s pretty useful even for generating documents containing larger text. TCPDF is mend to run on a web server (either online or locally) so that you can process your documents sources as .php files on that server, TCPDF spits out a proper PDF then for downloading. It’s a little uncomfortable for TCPDF beginners that the class is only poorly documented – the auto generated documentation page here is the most comprehensive I could found, but there are a couple of examples here (both are also included in the vendor’s packet).

A rudimentary TCPDF source file goes like this:

Note that several things are pre-defined by config/tcpdf_config.php (Helvetica as standard, page values like format and orientation, standard header/footer, PDF_MARGINSs, etc.). Next to the usual standard PDF fonts there are also the DejaVu and the tasteful GNU Freefonts are included in the current revision, which both cover the whole range of latin diacritics. Random fonts could be employed not too complicated (see here).

The PHP community evolved an own subculture towards PDF (see here) and there are a lot of other applications. Very interesting is the PDF generator mPDF (current stable 4.6), which is like TCPDF a further development of the PHP4 class FPDF, so these two could be seen as sister projects. mPDF is documented in a more non-geeky manner with a tutorial and the current beta 5.0 (see this forum post here) is even made up to deal with random TTF (but still no OTF?) fonts directly.

For all that PHP programs a scope of application certainly is also WordPress, and there are already a couple of plugins available for exporting blog postings as PDF, there are: PDF24 (3.0.3) and wp-mpdf (2.4.5, mPDF – now in action here on this blog), but there are some more – additions welcome! Pretty outdated (and even orphaned?) are: AS-PDF (0.3, TCPDF 3.1/PHP4), article2pdf (0.27, FPDF), and post2pdf (0.5, FPDF).

Previous chunk

Lindtner’s manuscript reads together with Vaidya’s edition against Bhattacharya in 2,49a: samanta- (samasta-).

vijñāpayāmi saṃbuddhān sarvadikṣu vyavasthitān / mahākāruṇikāṃś cāpi bodhisattvān kṛtāñjaliḥ // 2,27

Ich verkünde (vi-√jñā-) den in allen Himmelsrichtungen (sarva-diś-) etablierten (vyavasthita-), vollständig erleuchteten (sambuddha-), und vom großen Mitleid erfüllten (mahā-kāruṇika-) Erleuchtungswesen (boddhi-sattva-) mit zusammengelegten Händen (kṛtāñjaliḥ):

anādimati saṃsāre janmany atraiva vā punaḥ / yan mayā paśunā pāpaṃ kṛtaṃ kāritam eva vā // 2,28

Dasjenige (yat) Böse (pāpa-), dass von mir (mayā) dem Vieh (paśu-) sowohl (vā) im anfangslosen (anādimat-) Geburtenkreislauf (samsāra-) begangen worden ist (kṛta-) und auch nur (eva) im Leben (janman-) hier (atra), als gerade auch (vā) das, was ich veranlasst habe zu begehen (kārita-),

yac cānumoditaṃ kiṃcid ātmaghātāya mohataḥ / tad atyayaṃ deśayāmi paścāttāpena ṭapitaḥ // 2,29

und alles (kiṃcid) was (yat) aus Verblendung (moha-) gutgeheissen worden ist (anumodita-) zu meinem eigenen Schaden (ātma-ghāta-, Dat.mod.), das (tat) Vergehen (atyaya-) gestehe ich ein (√diś-), von Reue (paścāttāpa-) gepeinigt (tapita-).

ratnatraye ‘apakāro yo mātapitṛṣu vā mayā / guruṣv anyeṣu vā kṣepāt kāyavāgbuddhibhiḥ kṛtaṃ // 2,30

Dasjenige (yaḥ) Niederträchtige (apakāra-), das von mir (mayā) begangen worden ist (kṛtam), sowohl gegen die drei Juwelen (ratna-traya-) und Vater und Mutter (māta-pitṛ-), als auch (vā) gegenüber anderen (anya-) Ehrenpersonen (guru-) aus Niedertracht (kṣepa-) in Handeln (kāya-), Rede (vāc-) oder Denken (buddhi-),

anekadoṣaduṣṭena mayā pāpena nāyakāḥ / yat kṛtaṃ dāruṇaṃ pāpaṃ tat sarvaṃ deśayāmy aham // 2,31

ihr Führer (nāyaka-), das (yat) von mir (mayā) als einem durch mehrere Laster (aneka-doṣa-) verdorbenen (duṣṭa-) Sünder (pāpa-) begangene (kṛtam-) schreckliche (dāruṇa-) Böse (pāpa-), das (tat) ganze (sarva-) gestehe ich (aham) ein (√diś-).

2,32 most probably to be omitted

kathaṃ ca niḥsarāmy asmāt paritrāyata satvaram / mā mamākṣīṇapāpasya maraṇam śīghram eṣyati // 2,33

Und wie (katham) entkomme (nis-√sṛ-) ich dem (idam-)? Helft (pari-√trā-) schnell (satvaram)! Ein früher (śīghra-) Tod (maraṇa-) ereile mich (mama) mich nicht (mā √iṣ-) mit ungetilgten (akṣīṇa-) Vergehen (pāpa-)!

kṛtākṛtāparīkṣo ‘yaṃ mṛtyur viśrambhaghātakaḥ / svasthāsvasthair aviśvāsyākasmikamahāśaniḥ // 2,34

Dieser (ayam) Tod (mṛtyu-) unterscheidet nicht (aparīkṣa-) zwischen Getan und Ungetan (kṛta-akṛta-) – der Töter der Unbefangenheit (viśrambha-ghātaka-). Mißtraut (aviśvāsya-) von Gesunden (svatha-) und Kranken (avastha-) ist er wie ein plötzlicher (ākasmika-) Blitzschlag (mahā-aśani-).

priyāpriyanimittena <pāpaṃ kṛtam ] kṛtaṃ pāpam L> anekadhā / sarvam utsṛjya gantavyam iti na jñātam īdṛśam // 2,35

Für (-nimittena) Freunde und Feinde (priya-apriya-) wurde auf vielfache Weise (anekadhā) Böses (pāpa-) begangen (kṛta-). “Nachdem alles (sarva-) aufgegeben wurde (ut-√sṛj-) muss man fortgehen (√gam-)”: derartiges (īdṛśam) wurde nicht gewußt (na jñāta-)!

apriyā na bhaviṣyanti priyo me na bhaviṣyati / ahaṃ ca na bhaviṣyāmi sarvaṃ ca na bhaviṣyati // 2,36

Die Feinde (apriya-) wird es nicht mehr geben (√bhū-), den Freund (priya-) wird es für mich (me) nicht mehr geben, mich wird es nicht mehr geben,  und alles wird es nicht mehr geben.

tat tat smaraṇatām yāti yad yad vastv anubhūyate / svapnānubhūtavat sarvaṃ gataṃ na punar īkṣyate // 2,37

Welche Sache  (vastu-) auch immer (yad yat) erfahren wird (anu-√bhū-), sie (tat tat) wird (√yā-) zu Erinnerung (smaraṇa-tā-). Alles (sarva-) ist wie Traumerfahrung (svapna-anubhūta-vat-): vergangen (gata-) und nicht wiedergesehen (na punar √ikṣ-)-.

ihaiva tiṣṭhatas tāvad gatā naike priyāpriyāḥ / tannimittaṃ tu yat pāpaṃ tat sthitaṃ ghoram agrataḥ // 2,38

Schon (eva) solange (tāvad) ich mich auf der Erde (iha, “hienieden”) befinde (√sthā-) sind viele (naika-) Freunde (priya-) und Feinde (apriya-) gegangen (gata-). Das (yat)  Böse (pāpa-) um ihretwillen (tat-nimitta-) hingegen (tu), dies (tat) schreckliche (ghora-) bleibt (sthita-) da (agratas).

evam āgantuko ‘smīti <na mayā ] mayā na L> pratyavekṣitam / <mohā ] tenā L>nunayavidveṣaiḥ kṛtaṃ pāpam anekadhā // 2,39

“Ich bin (√as-) genauso (evam) ein Besucher (āgantuka-)”: das wurde von mir (mayā) nicht überdacht (pratyavekṣita-).  Aus Verblendung (moha-), aus Zuneigung (anunaya-) und aus Haß (vidveṣa-) wurde vielfach (anekadhā) Böses (pāpa-) getan (kṛta-).

rātriṃ divam aviśrāmam āyuṣo vardhate vyayaḥ / āyasya cāgamo nāsti na mariṣyāmi kiṃ nv aham // 2,40

Tag und Nacht (rātrim divam, Akk.temp.) vergeht (√vṛdh-) das vergängliche (vyaya-) Leben (āyuṣa-) unaufhörlich (aviśrāmam), und einen Besitz (āgama-) von Gewinn (āya-) gibt es nicht (na √as-). Warum (kiṃ nu) sollte ich (aham) nicht (na) sterben (√mṛ-)?

iha śayyāgato nāpi bandhumadhye api tiṣṭhatā / mayaivaikena soḍhavyā marmacchedādi<vedanā ] vedanāḥ L> // 2,41

Hier (iha) auf das Bett gekommen (śayyā-gata-) liege ich (√sthā-) zwar (api) mitten unter den Verwandten (bandhu-madhya-), die Schmerzen (vedanā-) einer Amputation und von Schlimmeren (marma-cheda-ādi-) müssen doch (eva) von mir (mayā) alleine (ekena) ertragen werden (soḍhavya-).

yamadūtair gṛhītasya kuto bandhuḥ kutaḥ suhṛt / puṇyam ekaṃ tadā trāṇaṃ mayā tac ca na sevitam // 2,42

Woher (kutaḥ) ein Verwandter (bandhu-), woher ein Gefährte (suhṛd-) für den von Yamas Boten (yama-dūta-) ergriffenen (gṛhīta-)? Verdienst (puṇya-) alleine (eka-) ist dann (tadā) die Rettung (trāṇa-), und (ca) der (tat) ist von mir (mayā) nicht gepflegt worden (na sevita-).

anityajīvitāsaṅgād idaṃ bhayam ajānatā / pramattena mayā nāthā bahu pāpam upārjitam // 2,43

Aus Hingabe (āsaṅga-) an das unstete Leben (anitya-jīvita-) wird diese (idam) Gefahr (bhaya-) nicht erkannt (√jñā-). Im Rausch (pramatta-) ist von mir (mayā), ihr Herren (nātha-), viel (bahu-) Böses (pāpa-) angehäuft worden (upārjita-).

aṅgacchedārtham apy adya nīyamāno viśuṣyati / pipāsito dīnadṛṣṭir anyad evekṣate jagat // 2,44

Selbst (api) der heute (adya) herbeigeführt (nīyamāna-) worden ist, um ihm ein Glied (aṅga-) abzuhacken (cheda-artha-), vertrocknet (vi-√śuṣ-). Er ist durstig (pipāsita-), sieht erbärmlich aus (dīna-dṛṣṭi-), und die Welt (jagat-) sieht er (√ikṣ-) sogar (eva) verkehrt (anya-).

kiṃ punar bhairavākārair yamadūtair adhiṣṭhitaḥ / mahātrāsajvara<grastaḥ ] grasta L> purīṣotsarvagaveṣṭhitaḥ // 2,45

Wie erst (kiṃ punar) der von den schreckgestaltigen (bhairava-ākāra-) Boten des Yama (yama-dūta-) heimgesuchte (adhiṣṭhita-), von großer Angst (mahātrāsa-) und Fieber (jvara-) gequält (grasta-), und von Kotausfluß (purīṣa-utsarga-) besudelt (veṣṭita-),

kātarair dṛṣṭipātaiś ca trāṇānveṣī caturdiśam / ko me mahābhayād asmāt sādhus trāṇaṃ bhaviṣyati // 2,46

und mit ängstlichen (kātara-) Blicken (dṛṣṭi-pāta-) in alle Richtungen (catur-diśam) Schutz (trāṇa-) suchend (aṇveṣin-)? Welcher (kaḥ) gute Mensch (sādhu-) wird mir (me) ein Schutz sein (√bhū-) vor diesem (idam-) großen Schrecken (mahā-bhaya-)?

trāṇa<śūnyā ] śūnya L>diśo dṛṣṭvā punaḥ saṃmohāgataḥ / tadāhaṃ kiṃ kariṣyāmi tasmin sthāne mahābhaye // 2,47

Nachdem ich eine Gegend (diś-) leer (śūnya-) von Schutz gesehen habe (√ḍrś-) und wieder (punar) wieder in Verwirrung (saṃmoha-) gekommen bin (āgata-), was (kiṃ) will ich (aham) dann (tadā) tun (√kṛ-) in diesem (tasmin) Zustand (sthāna-) des großen Schreckens?

adyaiva śaraṇaṃ yāmi jagannāthān mahābalān / jagadrakṣārtham udyuktān sarvatrāsaharān jinān // 2,48

Heute (adya) noch (eva) nehme ich Zuflucht (śaraṇam √yā-) zur den mächtigen (mahā-bala-) Herrschern der Welt (jagat-nātha-). Sie sind eifrig (udyukta-) zum Zwecke des Schutzes (rakṣa-artham) der Welt, die alle Furcht (sarva-trāsa-) nehmenden (hara-) Sieger (jina-).

taiś cāpy adhigataṃ dharmaṃ saṃsārabhayanāśanam / śaraṇaṃ yāmi bhāvena bodhisattvagaṇaṃ tathā // 2,49

Und (ca) auch (api) zu der von ihnen (taiḥ) erkannten (adhigata-), den Schrecken des Geburtenkreislaufes (saṃsāra-bhaya-) vernichtenden (nāśana-) Lehre (dharma-) nehme ich Zuflucht (śaraṇam √yā-) in voller Absicht (bhāvena), und genau so (tathā) zu der Schaar der Erleuchtungswesen (bodhisattva-gaṇa-).

samantabhadrāyātmānaṃ dadāmi bhayavihvalaḥ / punar ca mañjughoṣāya dadāmy atmānam ātmanā // 2,50

Dem Samantabhadra gebe ich mich (ātman-) hin (√dā-) vor Schrecken außer mir (bhaya-vihvala-), und auch (punar ca) dem Mañjughoṣa gebe ich mich hin in freiem Entschluß (ātmanā).

taṃ cāvalokitaṃ nāthaṃ kṛpāvyākulacāriṇam / viraumy ārtaravaṃ bhītaḥ sa māṃ rakṣatu pāpinam // 2,51

Und (ca) dem Herrn (nātha-) Avalokita, erfüllt (vyākula-) von Mitleid (kṛpā-) wandelnd (cāriṇa-), heule ich (vi-√ru-), der Erschrockene (bhīta-), den Schmerzenschrei (ārtarava-) zu: “Er (saḥ) schütze (√rakṣ-) mich (mām), den Sündigen (pāpin-)!”

āryam ākāśagarbhaṃ ca kṣitigarbhaṃ ca bhāvataḥ / sarvān mahākṛpāṃś cāpi trāṇānveṣī viraumy aham // 2,52

Ich (aham), der um Rettung sucht (trāṇa-anveṣin-) heule (vi-√ru-) nach dem edlen (ārya-) Ākāśagarbha und (ca) nach Kṣitigarbha von ganzen Herzen (bhāvataḥ),  als (ca) auch (api) nach allen (sarva-) anderen, die großes Mitleid haben (mahā-kṛpā-).

yaṃ dṛṣṭvaiva ca saṃtrastāḥ palāyante caturdiśam / yamadūtādayo duṣṭās taṃ namasyāmi vajriṇam // 2,53

Ich verneige mich (namasya-) vor dem (tam) Vajraträger (vajrin-). Sobald (eva) sie ihn (yam) erblicken (√dṛś-) fliehen (√pal-) die Boten des Yama und die anderen (yama-dūta-ādi-) Bösen (duṣṭa-) entsetzt (saṃtrasta-) in alle vier Himmelsrichtungen (catur-diś-, Akk. der Bewegungsrichtung).

atītya yuṣmad vacanaṃ sāṃprataṃ bhayadarśanāt / śaraṇaṃ yāmi vo bhīto bhayaṃ nāśayata drutam // 2,54

Nach dem ich euer (yuṣmat) rechtes (sāṃprata-) Gebot (vacana-) übertreten haben (ati-√i-) nehme ich, der Erschrockene (bhīta-), Zuflucht (śaraṇam √yā-) bei euch (vaḥ), weil ich die Gefahr (bhaya-) erkenne (darśana-). Macht der Gefahr schnell (drutam) ein Ende (√naś-)!

itvaravyādhi<bhīto ‘pi ] bhītyāpi L> vaidyākhyam na laṅghayet / kimu vyādhiśatair grastaś caturbhiś caturuttaraiḥ // 2,55

Gerade (api) wer Angst (bhīta-) hat vor einer vorübergehenden Krankeit (itvara-vyādhi-), der mißachtet nicht (na √laṅgh-) die Anweisung (vākya-) des Arztes (vaidya-). Um wieviel weniger (kim u) der von den um die Zahl 4 erhöhten (catur-uttara-) vier (catur-) Krankheitshunderten (vyādhi-śata-) befallen worden ist (grasta-)?

ekenāpi yataḥ sarve jambudvīpagatā narāḥ / naśyanti yeṣāṃ bhaiṣajyaṃ sarvadikṣu na labhyate // 2,56

Durch schon (api) eine (ekena) sterben (√naś-) alle (sarva-) auf den Rosenapfelkontinent (jambudvīpa-) gekommenen (gata-) Menschen (nara-) . Für sie (yeṣām) ist in allen Gegenden (sarva-diś-) keine Medizin (bhaiṣajya-) erhältlich (na √labh-).

tatra sarvajñavaidyasya sarvaśalyāpahāriṇah / vākyam ullaṅghayāmīti dhiṅ mām atyantamohitam // 2,57

Dennoch (tatra) mißachte ich (ud-√laṅgh-) die Anweisung (vākya-) des allwissenden (sarva-jña-) Arztes (vaidya-), der alle  Fremdkörper (sarva-śalya-) entfernt (apahārin-). Schande (dhik) über mich (mām), den bodenlos (atyanta-) Verblendeten (mohita-)!

atyapramattas tiṣṭhāmi prapāteṣv itareṣv api / kimu yojanasāhasre prapāte dīrghkālike // 2,58

Gerade (api) an den gewöhnlichen (itara-) Fallgruben (prapāta-) stehe ich (√sthā-) sehr aufmerksam (ati-apramatta-), um wieviel mehr (kim u) erst an der lange währenden (dīrgha-kālika-) Fallgrube, die tausend Yojanas tief (yojana-sāhasra-) ist?

adyaiva maraṇaṃ naiti na yuktā me sukhāsikā / avaśyam eti sā velā na bhaviṣyāmy ahaṃ yadā // 2,59

“Heute (adya) wird es schon (eva) keinen (na) Tod (maraṇa-) geben”: so ein Wohlbefinden (sukhāsikā-) ist nicht gut (na yukta-) für mich (me). Selbstverständlich (avaśyam) kommt (√i-) die Todestunde (velā-), wenn (yadā) ich (aham) nicht mehr da sein werde (na √bhū-).

abhayaṃ kena me dattaṃ niḥsariṣyāmi vā katham / avaśyam na bhaviṣyāmi kasmān me susthitaṃ manaḥ // 2,60

Von wem (kena) wurde mir (me) Furchtlosigkeit (abhaya-) gegeben (datta-)? Wie (katham) werden ich entrinnen (ni-√sṛ)? Mit Sicherheit (avaśyam) wird es mich nicht mehr geben (√bhū-), warum (kasmāt) bleibt der Geist (manas-) unerschütterlich (su-shtita-)?

pūrvānubhūtanaṣṭebhyaḥ kiṃ me sāram avasthitam / yeṣu me ‘bhiniviṣṭena gurūṇāṃ laṅghitaṃ vacaḥ // 2,61

Von dem, was früher (pūrva-) genossen (anubhūta-) und verschwendet (naṣṭa-) worden ist, welches (kim) Vermögen (sāra-) ist mir (me) geblieben (avasthita-)? Dadurch, dass ich (me) diesen Dingen (yeṣu) zugetan war (abhiniviṣṭa-, Lok.Abs.) wurde die Anweisung (vac-) des Meisters (guru-) überschritten (√laṅgh-).

jīvalokam imaṃ tyaktvā bandhūn paricitāṃs tathā / ekākī kvāpi yāsyāmi kiṃ me sarvaiḥ priyāpriyaiḥ // 2,62

Nachdem diese (imam) Welt der Lebenden (jīva-loka-), die Verwandten (bandhu-) und Bekannten (paricita-) so (tathā) aufgegeben worden sind (√tyaj-), werde ich alleine (ekākin-) irgendwohin (kvāpi) gehen (√yā-). Was ist mir (kiṃ me) durch alle (sarva-) Freunde und Feinde (priya-apriya-)?

iyam eva tu me cintā yuktā rātriṃ divaṃ tadā / aśubhān niyataṃ dūḥkhaṃ niḥsareyaṃ tataḥ katham // 2,63

Gerade (eva) dieser (iyam) Gedanke (cintā-) ist gut (yukta-) für mich (me) bei bei Nacht und bei Tag (rātriṃ divam, Akk.temp.): Den Sünden (aśubha-) ist Leiden (duḥkha-) sicher (niyata-). Wie (katham) kann ich dem (tataḥ) entrinnen (√sṛ-)?

mayā bālena mūḍhena yat kiṃcit pāpam ācitam / prakṛtyā yac ca sāvadyaṃ prajñaptyā vadyam eva ca // 2,64

Welches (yat) Böse (pāpa-) auch immer (kiṃcit) von mir (mayā), dem dummen (mūḍha-) Kind (bāla-), angehäuft wurde (ācita-), das (yat) der Natur nach (prakṛti-) feststellbare (sāvadya-) und der Regel nach (prajñapti-) nennenswerte (vadya-),

tat sarvaṃ deśayāmy eṣa nāthānām agrataḥ sthitaḥ / kṛtāñjalir <duḥkhabhītaḥ ] bhītabhītaḥ L> praṇipatya punaḥ punaḥ // 2,65

dies (tat) alles (sarva-), siehe (esaḥ), gestehe ich ein (√diś-) vor (agrataḥ) den Herren (nātha-) stehend (sthita-) mit zusammengelegten Händen (kṛtāñjaliḥ), voll Furcht (bhīta-) vor dem Leiden (duḥkha-), nachdem ich mich immer wieder (punaḥ punaḥ) zu Boden geworfen habe (pra-ni-√pat-).

atyayam atyayatvena pratigṛhṇantu nāyakāḥ / na bhadrakam idaṃ nāthā na kartavyaṃ punar mayā // 2,66

Mögen die Führer (nāyaka-) das Vergehen (atyaya-) dem Vergehen nach (atyaya-tvena) auffassen (prati-√grah-). Es (idam) ist nicht gut (na bhadraka-), ihr Herren (nātha-), von mir (mayā) wird es nicht noch einmal (na punar) begangen werden (√kṛ-).

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Lindtner’s manuscript reads together with Vaidya’s edition against Bhattacharya in 2,8c: -sattvā (-sattvāḥ), 2,15a: māndārava (mandārava)-.

2. Eingeständnis des Bösen (pāpadeśanā)

tac cittaratnagrahaṇāya samyak pūjāṃ karomy eṣa tathāgatānām / saddharmaratnasya ca nirmalasya buddhātmajānāṃ ca guṇodadhīnām // 2,1

Siehe (eṣaḥ), ich verehre (pūjāṃ √kṛ) auf rechte Weise (samyak) die So-Gegangenen (tathāgata-) um dieses Denkjuwel (citta-ratna-) zu ergreifen (grahaṇa-, Dat.fin.), und das makellose (nirmala-) Juwel der rechten Lehre (sat-dharma-), sowie die Buddhasöhne (buddha-ātmaja-), diese Ozeane (udadhi-) von Vorzügen (guṇa-).

yāvanti puṣpāṇi phalāni caiva bhaiṣajyajātāni ca yāni santi / ratnāni yāvanti ca santi loke jalāni ca svacchamanoramāṇi // 2,2

Gerade (eva) so viele (yāvat-) Blüten (puṣpa-) und Früchte (phala-), und so viele Kräuterarten (bhaiṣajya-jāta-) wie (yat-) es gibt (√as), und so viele Juwelen (ratna-) wie es gibt auf der Welt (loka-), sowie den reinen Geist (svaccha-manas-) erfrischende (rama-) Wasser (jala-),

mahīdharā ratnamayās tathānye vanapradeśāś ca vivekaramyāḥ / latāḥ sapuṣpābharaṇojjvalāś ca drumāś ca ye satphalanamraśākhāḥ // 2,3

Berge (mahīdhara-), die aus Juwelen bestehen (ratna-maya-), Waldgefilde (vana-pradeśa-), ergötzlich in ihrer Abgeschiedenheit (viveka-ramya-), Ranken (latā-), prächtig (ujjvala-) durch den Schmuck (ābharaṇa-) von schöne Blüten (sat-puṣpa-), und Bäume (druma-), deren Zweige (śākhā-) durch reife Früchte (sat-phala-) niedergedrückt (namra-) werden.

devādilokeṣu ca gandhadhūpāḥ kalpadrūmā ratnamayāś ca vṛkṣāḥ / sarāṃsi cāmbhoruhabhūṣaṇāni haṃsasvanātyantamanoharāṇi // 2,4

Schwaden von Wohlgerüchen (gandha-dhūpa-) in der Welt der Götter und der anderen (devādi-loka-), Wunschbäume (kalpadrūma-) und Bäume (vṛkṣa-) aus Juwelen gemacht, Teiche (saras-), die mit dem Teichlotos (ambo-ruha-) als Schmuck (bhūṣana-) überaus hinreißen (atyanta-manohara-) mit ihrem Gänsegeschnatter (haṃsa-svana-).

akṛṣṭajātāni ca śasyajātāny anyāni vā pūjyavibhūṣaṇāni / ākāśadhātuprasarāvadhīni sarvāṇy apīmāny aparigrahāṇi // 2,5

Ungepflügte (akṛṣṭa-jāta-) und gesäte (śasya-jāta-) [Feldfrüchte] oder anderen Schmuck (vibhūṣaṇa-) für die Verehrungswürdigen (pūjya-): alle (sarva-) diese Dinge (idam-) – nur mit der Anzahl (prasara-) der Himmelsphären (ākāśa-dhātu-) als Obergrenze (avadhi-) – sind noch unbenutzt (a-parigraha-).

ādāya buddhyā munipuṃgavebhyo niryātayāmy eṣa saputrakebhyaḥ / gṛhnantu tan me varadakṣiṇīyā mahākṛpā mām anukampamānāḥ // 2,6

Siehe (eṣaḥ), ich habe (das alles) in der Vorstellung (buddhyā, Instr.) genommen (ā-√dā) und bringe es den Besten der Weisen (muni-puṃgava-) mitsamt ihren Söhnen (sa-putraka-) dar (nir-yātay-). Die der besten Opfergaben würdig sind (vara-dakṣinīya-) mögen es (tan) vor mir (me) annehmen (√grah-)! Die das große Mitleid haben (mahā-kṛpā-) bemitleiden (anu-√kamp-) mich (mām).

apuṇyavān asmi mahādaridraḥ pūjārtham anyan mama nāsti kiṃcit / ato mamārthāya parārthacintā gṛhnantu nāthā idam ātmaśaktyā // 2,7

Ich bin (√as-) ohne Tugend (a-puṇya-vat-) und bettelarm (mahā-daridra-), und ich habe (mama √as-, Gen.poss.) nichts anderes (na anyat kiṃcid) zum Zwecke der Verehrung (pūjā-artha-). Daher (ataḥ) mögen die sich um das Wohl der anderen sorgenden (para-artha-cintā-) Herren (nātha-) dies (idam) aus freien Stücken (ātma-śaktyā) zu meinem Wohl (mama-arthāya, Dat.com.) annehmen (√grah-)!

dadāmi cātmānam ahaṃ jinebhyaḥ sarveṇa sarvaṃ ca tadātmajebhyaḥ / parigrahaṃ me kurutāgrasattvā yuṣmāsu dāsatvam upaimi bhaktyā // 2,8

Und ich (aham) gebe mich (ātman-) den Siegern (jina-) und ihren Söhnen (tad-ātmaja-) ganz und gar (sarveṇa sarvam) hin (√dā-). Ihr höchsten Wesen (agra-sattva-), nehmt mich (me) in Besitz (parigraham √kṛ-)! Mit Hingabe (bhakti-) trete ich ein (upa-√i-) in die Dienerschaft (dāsa-tva-) bei euch (yuyam-).

parigraheṇāsmi bhavatkṛtena nirbhīr bhave sattvahitaṃ karomi / pūrvaṃ ca pāpaṃ samatikramāmi nānyac ca pāpaṃ prakaromi bhūyaḥ // 2,9

Mit Erlaubnis der Erhabenen (parigraheṇa bhavat-kṛtena, Instr.abs.) bin ich (√as-) im Dasein (bhava-) ohne Furcht (nir-bhī-) und ich handele zum Wohl der Wesen (sattva-hitam √kṛ-). Vorherige (pūrva-) Verfehlung (pāpa-) überkomme ich (sam-ati-√kram-), und keine andere (anya-) Verfehlung begehe ich (pra-√kṛ-) darüber hinaus (bhūyaḥ).

ratnojjvalastambhamanorameṣu muktāmayodbhāsivitānakeṣu / svacchojjvalasphāṭikakuṭṭimeṣu sungandhiṣu snānagṛheṣu teṣu // 2,10

In diesen (tat-) wohlduftenden (sugandha-) Badehäusern (snāna-gṛha-), ihre Säulen (stambha-) erfreuen (mano-rama-) mit Juwelenglanz (ratna-ujjvala-), ihre aus Perlen gemachten (mukta-maya-) Baldachine (vitānaka-) strahlen (udbhāsi-), und ihre Kristallfußböden (sphāṭika-kuṭṭima-) sind klar (svaccha-) und prächtig (ujjvala-),

manojñagandhodakapuṣpapūrṇaiḥ kumbhair mahāratnamayair anekaiḥ / snānaṃ karomy eṣa tathāgatānāṃ tadātmajānāṃ ca sagītavādyam // 2,11

siehe (eṣaḥ), bereite ich ein Bad (snānam √kṛ-) mit Gesang (sa-gīta-) und Instrumentalmusik (vādya-) für die So-Gegangenen (tathā-gata-) und ihre Söhne (tad-ātmaja-), mit mehreren (aneka-) Krügen (kumbha-) aus großen Edelsteinen (mahā-ratna-maya-) voller (pūrṇa-) wohlriechendem (manojña-gandha-) Wasser (udaka-) und Blüten (puṣpa-).

pradhūpitair dhautamalair atulyair vastraiś ca teṣāṃ tanum un<mṛśāmi ] mṛjāmi L> / tataḥ suraktāni sudhūpitāni dadāmi tebhyo varacīvarāṇi // 2,12

Ich reibe ihre (teṣām) Körper (tanu-) mit duftenden (pradhūpita-) und fleckgereinigten (dhauta-mala-), einzigartigen (atulya-) Tüchern (vastra-) ab (ud-√mṛj-), dann (tataḥ) gebe ich (√dā-) ihnen (tebhyaḥ) schöngefärbte (su-rakta-), parfümierte (su-dhūpita-) und ausgewählte (vara-) Kleider (cīvara-).

divyair mṛduślakṣṇavicitraśobhair vastrair alaṅkāravaraiś ca tais taiḥ / samantabhadrājitamañjughoṣalokeśvarādīn api maṇḍayāmi // 12,13

Mit himmlischen (divya-), weichen (mṛdu-), feinen (ślakṣṇa-), verschiedenfarbigen (vicitra-) und glänzenden (śobha-) Gewändern (vastra-) und mit allerlei Schmuckauslese (alaṅkāra-vara-) schmücke ich (√maṇd-) gerade Samantabhadra, Ajita, Mañjughoṣa, Lokeśvara und die anderen (ādi-).

sarvatrisāhasravisārigandhair gandhottamais tān anulepayāmi / sūttaptasūnmṛṣṭasudhautahemaprabhojjvalān sarvamunīndrakāyān // 2,14

Mit den besten der Parfümen (gandha-uttama-) – ihr Duft (gandha-) breitet sich aus (visāri-) in allen dreitausend (sarva-trisāhasra-) [Welten] – salbe (anu-√lip-) ich sie (tān), die Körper (kāya-) der Hervorragendsten aller Weisen (sarva-muni-indra-). Sie sind gut getrocknet (su-uttapta-), ordentlich abgerieben (su-unmṛṣṭa-), gründlich poliert (su-dhauta-) und strahlen (ujjvala-) von Goldglanz (hema-prabhā-).

māndāravendīvaramallikādyaiḥ sarvaiḥ sugandhaiḥ kusumair manojñaiḥ / abhyarcayāmy arcyatamān munīndrān sragbhiś ca saṃsthānamanoramābhiḥ // 2,15

Ich verehre (abhi-√arc-) die höchst verehrungswürdigen (arcya-tama-) Hervorragendsten der Weisen (muni-indra-) mit allen (sarva-) wohlduftenden (su-gandha-) entzückenden (mano-jña-) Blüten (kusuma-), unter anderem (ādi-) vom Korallenbaum (māndārava-), blauer Lotos (indīvara-) und Jasmin (mallikā-), sowie mit erfreuenden (mano-rama-) geflochtenen (saṃsthāna-) Kränzen (sraj-).

sphītasphuradgandhamano<ramaiś ] haraiś L> ca tān dhūpameghair upadhūpayāmi / bhojyaiś <ca khādyair ]  sakhādyair L> vividhaiś ca peyais tebhyo nivedyaṃ ca nivedayāmi // 2,16

Und mit Nebelwolken (dhūpa-megha-) von hinreißendem (mano-hara-) schweren (sphīta-) und durchdringenden (sphura-) Parfüm (gandha-) bedufte ich (upa-dhūpaya-) sie (tān), und mit köstlichen (khādya-) Speisen (bhojya-) und verschiedenen (vividha-) Getränken (peya-) bringe ich ihnen ein Opfer (nivedya-) dar (ni-vedaya-).

ratnapradīpāṃś ca nivedayāmi suvarṇapadmeṣu niviṣṭapaṅktīn / gandhopalipteṣu ca kuṭṭimeṣu kirāmi puṣpaprakarān manojñān // 2,17

In einer Reihe  (paṅkti-) angeordnete (niviṣṭa-) Lampen aus Edelsteinen (ratna-pradīpa-) in Goldlotossen (suvarṇa-padma-) bringe ich ihnen dar (ni-vedaya-), und ich verstreue (√kṛ-) entzückende (mano-jña-) Blütenmengen (puṣpa-prakara-) auf die mit Parfüm benetzten (gandha-upalipta-) Fußböden (kuṭṭima-).

pralambamuktāmaṇihāraśobhān ābhāsvarān diṅmukhamaṇḍanāṃs tān / vimānameghān stutigītaramyān maitrīmayebhyo ‘pi nivedayāmi // 2,18

Ich opfere (ni-vedaya-) den aus Wohlwollen Bestehenden (maitrī-maya-) sogar (api) von lieblichen (ramya-) Lobgesängen (stuti-gīta-) erfüllte Wolkenpaläste (vimāna-megha-), die (tān) prächtig sind (ābhāsvara-), und mit einer Pracht (śobhā-) von herabhängenden (pralamba-) Perlen- und Juwelenschnüren (mukta-maṇi-hāra-) in alle Richtungen hin (diś-mukha-) schmückend sind (maṇḍana-).

suvarṇadaṇḍaiḥ kamanīyarūpaiḥ saṃsaktamuktāni samucchritāni / pradhārayāmy eṣa mahāmunīnāṃ ratnātapatrāṇy atiśobhanāni // 2,19

Siehe (eṣaḥ), ich überreiche (pra-√dhṛ-) den großen Weisen (mahā-muni-) große (samucchrita-) und überaus prächtige (atiśobhana-), mit Perlen besetzte (saṃsakta-mukta-) Edelsteinsonnenschirme (ratna-ātapatra-) mit wohlgeformten (kamanīya-rūpa-), goldenen Stöcken (suvarṇa-daṇḍa-).

ataḥ paraṃ pratiṣṭhantāṃ pūjāmeghā manoramāḥ / tūryasaṃgītimeghāś ca sarvasattvapraharṣaṇāh // 2,20

Mögen sich darüber hinaus (ataḥ param) erfreuende (mano-rama-) Opfermassen (pūjā-megha-) und die alle Wesen (sarva-sattva-) ergötzende (praharṣaṇa-) Massen von Musikinstrumenten und Gesängen (tūrya-saṃgīti-megha-) erheben (pra-√sthā-)!

sarvasaddharmaratneṣu caityeṣu pratimāsu ca / puṣparatnādi<va̱rṣā̱ś ] varṣāṇi L> ca pravartantāṃ nirantaram // 2,21

Möge auf alle (sarva-) Juwelen der rechten Lehre (sat-dharma-ratna-), auf Seelen (caitya-) und Körper (pratimā-) fortwährend (nirantaram) Regenschauer (varṣa-) von Blumen (puṣpa-) und Juwelen (ratna-) und anderem (ādi-) fallen (pra-√vṛt-).

mañjughoṣaprabhṛtayaḥ pūjyanti yathā jinān / tathā tathāgatān nāthān saputrān pūjyāmy aham // 2,22

Wie (yathā) Mañjughoṣa und die anderen (pabhṛti-) die Sieger (jina-) verehren, so (tathā) verehre (√pūj-) ich (aham) die So-Gegangenen mit ihren Söhnen.

svarāṅgasāgaraiḥ stotraiḥ staumi cāhaṃ guṇodadhīn / stutisaṃgītimeghāś ca saṃbhavantv eṣv ananyathā // 2,23

Und ich preise (√stū-) die Ozeane von Vorzügen (guṇa-udadhi-) mit Hymnen (stotra-) als Ozeane von Tonfolgen (svara-aṅga-sāgara-) und es möge nichts anderes (ananyathā) als Massen (megha-) von Lobgesängen (stuti-saṃgīti-) bei ihnen (idam-) entstehen (sam-√bhū-).

sarvakṣetrāṇusaṃkhyaiś ca praṇāmaiḥ praṇamāmy aham / sarvatryadhvagatān buddhān sahadharma<gaṇo ] guṇo V>ttamān // 2,24

Und ich verehre (pra-√nam-) mit Niederwerfungen (praṇāma-) in der Anzahl (anu-saṃkhyā-) aller Welten (sarva-kṣetra-) die Buddhas aus allen (sarva-) drei Zeiten (try-adhva-gata-), bei denen ist das Höchste (uttama-) die Eigenschaft (guṇa-), im Einklang mit der Lehre (saha-dharma-) [zu handeln].

sarvacaityāni vande ‘haṃ bodhisattvāśrayāṃs tathā / namaḥ karomy upādhyāyān abhivandyān yatīṃs tathā // 2,25

So (tathā) grüße ich (√vand-) alle Idole (sarva-caitya-) und Schreine der Erleuchtungswesen (bodhisattva-āśraya-). So (tathā) verneige (namaḥ √kṛ-) ich mich vor den verehrungswürdigen (abhivandya-) Lehrern (upādhyāya-) und Asketen (yati-).

buddhaṃ gacchāmi śaraṇaṃ yāvad ābodhimaṇḍataḥ / dharmaṃ gacchāmi śaraṇaṃ bodhisattvagaṇaṃ tathā // 2,26

Ich nehme Zuflucht (śaraṇam √gam-) zum Buddha bis (yāvat) zur Essenz der Erleuchtung (ā-bodhi-maṇḍa-). So nehme ich Zuflucht bei der Lehre und bei der Schaar (gaṇa-) der Erleuchtungswesen.

Next chunk

Indische Studien – Beiträge [1 (1850): Zeitschrift] für die Kunde des indischen Altertums. Im Vereine mit mehreren Gelehrten herausgegeben von Dr. Albrecht Weber. 1 (1850) – 18 (1898). Berlin: Dümmler (nos. 1-8) / Leipzig: Brockhaus.

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.

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.

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 Docutils 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.

“There was a king with the name Nala, Vīrasena’s strong son. He was equipped with the desirable qualities, had a good shape and knew how to treat horses …” – here’s a little bibliography on the Nalopākhyānam, the tale of Nala and Damayantī. The episode is truly one of the gems of the Mahābhārata and has always been a popular text even of beginners in Sanskrit. Furthermore, the text is ideal to get into the critical edition of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Insitute in Pune (BORI), where it is to be found in the 3rd volume, that’s the 1st part of the Āraṇyakaparvan (edited by Vishnu S. Sukthankar in 1942), in Adhyāyas 50-78. The reception history which could be seen from this little chronological bibliography here (far from being complete and a allowedly a little bit biased towards German) shows that the text always was an issue in Indology since its “discovery” by Franz Bopp (1791-1867) in Paris in the early 19th century [1]. To quote one of the forefathers, August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845) praises the text: “Hier will ich nur so viel sagen, daß nach meinem Gefühl dieses Gedicht an Pathos und Ethos, and hinreißender Gewalt der Leidenschaften wie an Hoheit und Zartheit der Gesinnungen, schwerlich übertroffen werden kann. Es ist ganz dazu gemacht, alt und jung anzusprechen, vornehm und gering, die Kenner der Kunst, und die, welche sich bloß ihrem natürlichen Sinne überlassen” [2]. Here we go:

• J[ohann] G[ottfried] L[udwig] Kosegarten (1792-1850): Nala. Eine indische Dichtung von Wjasa. Aus dem Sanscrit im Versmasse der Urschrift übersetzt, und mit Anmerkungen begleitet. Jena: Fromman 1820.

• Friedrich Rückert: Nal und Damayanti. Eine indische Geschichte. Frankfurt a.M.: Sauerländer 1828 [2nd ed. 1838, 3rd ed. 1845].

• Franz Bopp: Nalus maha-bharati episodium. Textus sanscritus cum interpretatione latina et annotationibus criticis. Altera emendata editio. Berolinum: Nicolai 1832.

• Franz Bopp: Nalas und Damayanti. Eine indische Dichtung. Aus dem Sanskrit übersetzt. Berlin: Nicolai 1838 [3].

• Monier Monier-Williams (1819-1899): Nalopákhyánam. Story of Nala. An episode of the Mahá-Bhárata. The Sanskrit text with copious vocabulary, grammatical analysis and introduction. The metrical translation by Henry Hart Milman. Oxford: University Press 1860.

• Edmund Lobedanz: König Nal und sein Weib. Indische Sage. Deutsch metrisch bearbeitet. Leipzig: Brockhaus 1863.

• P.G. Maggi: Nala. Poemetto indiano estratto dal terzo libro del Mahàbhàrata. In: Rivista Orientale 1 (1867/68), 68 sq.

• John Peile (1838-1910): Notes on the Nalopȧkhyȧnam or Tale of Nala for the use of Classical students. Cambridge: University Press 1881.

• Hermann Camillo Kellner (1839-1916): Das Lied von König Nala. Erstes Lehrbuch für Anfänger im Sanskrit. Nach didaktischen Grundsätzen bearbeitet und in transkribiertem Texte mit Wörterbuch herausgegeben. Leipzig: Brockhaus 1885.

• W[illem] Caland: Sāvitrī und Nala. Zwei Episoden aus dem Mahābhārata. Text mit kurzen erklärenden Noten und Glossar. Utrecht: Oosthoek 1917.

• P[aul] E[mile] Dumont (1879-1968): Histoire de Nala conte indien. Episode du Mahâbhârata. Traduction nouvelle. Bruxelles: Lamertin 1923.

• Franklin Edgerton (1885-1963): A critical edited text of Nala, 1-5 [review of the 1st fasc. of volume 3 of the BORI edition]. In: Journal of the American Oriental Society 62,3 (1942), 198-200.

• Albrecht Wezler: Nala und Damayanti. Eine Episode aus dem Mahābhārata. Aus dem Sanskrit übertragen und erläutert. Stuttgart: Reclam 1965 (Reclams Universal-Bibliothek; 8938).

• Soh Takahashi: The tale of Nala. Text (transcription) and vocabulary. Hildesheim (usw.): Olms 1994 (Text und Studien zur Orientalistik; 9) [reviewed in JAOS 117,1 (1997), 226].

Notes:

[1] See W. Morgenroth: Franz Bopp als Indologe und die Anfänge der Sanskrit-Lexikographie in Europa. In: R. Sternemann (Hrsg.): Bopp-Symposium 1992 der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Akten der Konferenz vom 24.3-26.3.1992 aus Anlaß von Franz Bopps zweihundertjährigem Geburtstag am 14.9.1991. Heidelberg: Winter 1994 (Indogermanische Bibliothek, 3. Reihe), 162-72.

[2] On page 98 of the review of Bopp’s first edition of the text (Nalus carmen sanscritum Mahàbhàrato. Edidit, latine verit, et adnotationibus illustravit Fanciscus Bopp. London (usw.): Treuttel et Würtz 1819) in the first volume of the Indische Bibliothek from 1832, 97-128. On the early contributions towards the Nalopākhyānam see F. Adelung’s Bibliotheca sanscrita (2nd ed., St. Petersburg 1837), p. 243 seq., and J. Gildemeister’s Bibliotheca sanskritae sive recensus librorum sanskritorum (Bonn and London 1847), nos. 98 seq.

[3] Wilhelm von Humboldt in a letter to Bopp from 1837: “Es ist mir eine große Freude, mein vieljähriger, hochverehrter Freunde, Ihnen den innigsten Dank für den Genuß zu sagen, den mir die erst diese Nacht vollendete Lectüre ihrer schönen Übertragung des Nalus verschafft hat. Bei Ihnen erst glaubt man sich in das alte Gedicht versetzt. Rückert leiß mir immer den Eindruck der Tünche und der Vergleichung; die Sie haben wagen können in der Stille des Baumes Kummerlos zeugt ganz für Ihre Art der Behandlung. Das Großartige des ungeheuren Gedichts gewinnt bei der schmucklosen Einfachheit, in der Sie immer gestrebt haben, es erscheinen zu lassen” [S. Lefmann: Franz Bopp, sein Leben und seine Wissenschaft. 1. Hälfte. Berlin 1891, p. 125*].