Textual reuse in South Asian texts: Some resources

A basic bibliography on textual reuse can be found at the end of my Introduction to the Reuse of Texts in Indian Philosophy, available Open Access on Academia.edu and on the website of the Journal of Indian Philosophy. Apart from these titles, you might want to know about a few others which have been published thereafter or are now forthcoming:

—Catherine Cantwell, Jowita Kramer, Robert Mayer and Stefano Zacchetti (eds.) (in press), Authors and Editors in the Literary Traditions of Asian Buddhism, special issue of the Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, vol. 36.*

—Elisa Freschi and Philipp Maas (eds.) (forthcoming), Adaptive Reuse in premodern South Asian Texts and Contexts, to appaear in the series ‘Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes’, Harrassowitz: Wiesbaden. The TOC can be read here. The initial CfP with the initial abstracts can be read on Academia.edu. My contribution is avalaible in a non-final version on Academia.edu.

—Catherine Cantwell, Elisa Freschi and Jowita Kramer (eds.) (forthcoming), Originality and the Role of Intertextuality in the Context of Buddhists Texts, special issue of the Buddhist Studies Review. My contribution to it is avalaible in a non-final version on Academia.edu.

—Elisa Freschi (forthcoming), The reuse of the iconography of Hayagrīva in texts and iconography, submitted to a journal and available in a non-final version on Academia.edu.

Further, the following references have been mentioned on the Indology mailing list in a related thread:

 

*TOC: Cathy Cantwell and Robert Mayer, ”Introduction”
Jonathan Silk “Establishing/Interpreting/Translating: Is it just that easy?”
Robert Mayer “gTer ston and Tradent: Innovation and Conservation in Tibetan Treasure Literature”
Cathy Cantwell “Different kinds of composition/compilation within the Dudjom Revelatory tradition”
Jowita Kramer “Innovation and the Role of Intertextuality in the Pañcaskandhaka and Related Yogācāra Works”
Oskar von Hinuber “Building the Theravāda Commentaries: Buddhaghosa and Dhammapāla as authors, compilers, redactors, editors and critics”
Lance Cousins “The Case of the Abhidhamma Commentary”
Sarah Shaw “In what way is there a saṅghavacana? Finding the narrator, author and editor in Pāli texts”
Marta Sernesi “The Collected Sayings of the Master: On Authorship, Author-function, and Authority”
Martin Seeger ” ‘The (Dis)appearance of an author’: some observations and reflections on authorship in modern Thai Buddhism”
Péter-Dániel Szántó “Early works and persons related to the so-called Jñānapāda school”

** Jacob has been so kind as to send me his thesis (in Danish language) and an English abstract of it. The relevant part of the latter reads as follows: “I continue with a discussion of tradition and innovation in classical Indian scientific literature based on Sheldon Pollock’s notion of “the Shastric paradigm” (Pollock 1985), and link it to a sample analysis of quotational techniques applied in the Florence Fragments. The main conclusion drawn is that while Pollock and others tend to focus on commentaries as the sine qua non in traditional innovation, my analysis shows that a more subtle, and ultimately more powerful, manipulation of original material is likely to take place in the act of transmission itself.” (emphasis added) If I am interpreting correctly his thesis, the quotational techniques identified by Jacob are: 1. polyphony (the use of many sources on the same topic), 2. fragmentation (the division of a single textual passage in several parts according to the topics dealt with), 3. recontextualisation (of a given textual passage in a new context).

Comments and discussions are welcome. Be sure you are making a point and contributing to the discussion.

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