Today I read in Philipp Maas’s contribution to Periodization and Historiography of Indian Philosophy (edited by Eli Franco) an intriguing critique of Colebrook and of all the Indologists who, seemingly following him, thought that there was nothing philosophical in Yoga apart from its Sāṅkhya component and that what was typical of Yoga alone was not philosophical.
Category Archives: conference reports
A round table on reuse
The Round Table at the end of the panel on Adaptive Reuse (see here) has been a chance for rethinking almost all the categories we had used until that point (and having to rethink is one of the things I appreciate more in scientific works).
The Yoga in Transformation Conference 1 (Maas and Wujastyk)
This conference aimed at bridging the gap between yoga practicioners and yoga researchers, providing the former “convenient access to information on high-level research”. Did it really fulfil this task?
32nd DOT in Münster: a thought-provoking experience
The 32nd DOT (Deutscher Orientalisten Tag, i.e., Assembly of the German Orientalists) took place from the 23rd to the 27th September in Münster (W). It was surely the biggest DOT ever and its 1,300 participants made it a bigger event than many (most, I would say) World Sanskrit Conferences. Was it also more interesting than them?
Sanderson is always an incredibly fascinating speaker. In this conference he discusses the dialectics of Śaivism and “orthodox Hinduism”: It is not only the case that Śaiva authors tried to be accepted as “orthodox Hindūs” and “orthodox Hindūs” tried to block them. By contrast, on both sides there were trends towards assimilation and resistance to these trends.
(Full disclosure: I have discussed a similar case of a complex dialectical relationship —this time between Pāñcarātra Vaiṣṇava theology and “orthodox Hindūism”— in an article to be published in the proceedings of IIGRS 4).