I just received my copy of Puṣpikā 3. Tracing Ancient India Through Texts and Traditions. Contributions to Current Research in Indology, edited by Robert Leach and Jessie Pons. The volume is the third in a series of volumes publishing the proceedings of the various IIGRS conferences and it is innovative in so far as it drops the alphabetic order adopted in the first two volumes. Here, the sequence of articles is rather organised thematically, with two papers on philosophical topics:

1. Marie-Hélẻne Gorisse (Is Inference a cognitive or a linguistic process? A line of divergence between Jain and Buddhist classifications)
2. Elisa Freschi (Between Theism and Atheism: A journey through Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta and Mīmāṃsā)

Next come five articles ordered according to the chronology of their topics, from the Veda to contemporary Bengali Bauls:

3. Moreno Dore (The pre-eminence of men in the vrātya-ideology)
4. Paul F. Schwerda (“Tear down my Sādhana- and Havirdhāna-huts, stow away my Soma-vessels!” —Jaiminīya Brāhmaṇa 2,269ff: A typical case of cursing in the Veda?)
5. Aleix Ruiz-Falqués (A New Reading Of the Meghadūta)
6. Jerôme Petit (Banārasīdās climbing the Jain Stages of Perfection)
7. Carola Erika Lorea (If people get to know me, I’ll become cow-dung: Bhaba Pagla and the songs of the Bauls of Bengal)

The last paper follows the chronological sequence, since it discusses the application of modern teaching methods to Sanskrit:

8. Sven Wortmann and Ann-Kathrin Wolf (Revisiting Sanskrit Teaching in the Light of Modern Language Pedagogy)

I had discussed the presentations on which the last paper was based in my previous blog, here. Aleix Ruiz-Falqués’ paper at the IIGRS had been discussed here.

I have not read the printed version of my article yet, but I already have one regret: I did not explicitly thank Robert (Leach) for his careful editing and for the many efforts invested in making my article understandable (my only excuse for that is that the editors of the first Puṣpikā had asked us to avoid such notes).