Category Archives: methodology

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Collating manuscripts

As part of my current project, I am collating some South Indian manuscripts. So far, I have been collating a recent Telegu transcript on paper and a Grantha one on palm leaf.

1. At the end of the training phase, I was able to collate one folio per day of the former (written in a modern notebook with 38 lines per page). This means that I will be able to collate it in full in 66 days, almost three working months. Supposing that I just register variants in a file which has already the text I am editing, I will probably save one third of the time, so let me settle for two months but the last pages of the manuscript contain an unpublished text, so that these needed to be collated anyway.

2. I just measured the time I need for the Grantha palm leaf manuscript after the training phase: 90 minutes for each side of a folio. Since the manuscript has 58 folios, this means I will need 174 hours to collate it, which means 43,5 working days (I can only collate for about 4–5 hours a day, since I cannot focus for longer than one hour on collating and I need to do something else in between), which means little more than two months. If I forget about a separate collation and just insert variants, I will probably need less, perhaps one month and ten days.

3. Next I will collate a damaged palm-leaf manuscript in Grantha containing 35 folios, which will take me little more than one month or two and a half weeks.

4. Then, a further palm-leaf manuscript in Grantha counting 153 folios, which amounts to little less than six months or four months.

5. Then, a last palm-leaf manuscript in Grantha counting 22 folios, which amounts to less than one month or two weeks.

6.–7. Last, I have a two transcripts on paper, written in Grantha in a modern notebooks, summing up to 638 pages. This risks to mean that I will have to invest 4 years on them (!). They contain an unpublished text and the collation cannot be avoided in their case.

This being said, collating in full is better than registering variants (since the latter process inclines one to read what one has in the model instead of reading the manuscript afresh) and preparing critical editions is better than accepting published texts uncritically. Still, it is extremely time-demanding (unless one enjoys collating and does it as her hobby). How important must be the text in order for a scholar to engage in a critical edition? How flawed the edition, in case of published texts? How important must be the text in order to engage in the collation of several manuscripts of an unpublished work?

Part of the problem lies also in the fact that some answers are only found while working on the manuscript(s) and the edition(s), so that an a priori answer is impossible. Thus, I test each manuscript by:

  1. collating some folios at the beginning, middle and end
  2. collating in any case the maṅgala and the colophon(s)
  3. preparing a (keyword) description of the manuscript
  4. comparing it with further manuscripts in order to detect possible transcripts, which can then be left out
  5. comparing it with the extant editions in order to check whether they have already been used (which makes the possiblity of adding something significant through their collation dependent on the quality of the edition)

What are your strategies? When do you decide that collating is worthwile?

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Working together? A short checklist

I am a passionate fan of co-working, since

  1. I believe that working with other people (especially if one works with always new people and not always with the same group) helps one becoming aware of one’s implicit presuppositions
  2. working with other people allows me to achieve more ambitious goals (in my case, an example are the volumes on the Reuse of texts in Classical Indian philosophy I edited for the Journal of Indian Philosophy—I would not have been able to achieve that target alone, since I lack the relevant expertise in many fields of Indian philoosophy)
  3. working with other people is more fun, and fun motivates one whenever one is stuck in a difficult situation
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The Indian ever-doubting quest for Truth

At times, it almost seemed blasphemous to say the things we said when the eternal flute of the Divine itself called to us every moment to give up the vain, empty, dry world of the intellect and the greeting of the ‘Rādhe Rādhe’ which remained us of the ecstasy of divine love. But amidst these enticements and allurements what sustained us was the unbelievably long, hard-core tradition of the ever-seeking, ever-doubting sāttvika quest for the ultimate Truth by the buddhi in the Indian tradition, which has never been afraid of raising the most formidable pūrvapakṣas against one’s own position and attempting to answer them.

(Daya Krishna, Bhakti, while discussing the saṃvāda on bhakti he organised at Vrindavan)

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“Imagination disciplined by data” as the destiny of (most?) scholars

Those within a particular community have had, and continue to have, a sense of the whole. Those studying from outside will progress toward greater understanding both by careful study of particular texts and rituals and by imaginative efforts to reconstruct the shape of the larger Vaiṣṇava community in particular periods. Imagination disciplined by data is necessary to see the larger picture, but our study involves much guess work that our successors may deem to be far off the track of either scholarly understanding or spiritual discernment. (Carman 2007, p. 73)

Independently of what you do, and of whether you specialise in formal logic or applied medicine, do you identify yourself with this definition of scholarly work?

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Two (or three) different narratives on Yoga, Mīmāṃsā, Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta etc.

Some authors tend to think that once upon a time there was one Yoga and that later this has been “altered” or has at least “evolved” into many forms. According to their own stand, they might look at this developments as meaningful adaptations or as soulless metamorphoseis.

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Is there “African Philosophy”? Or just Greek, German…and Indian Philosophy?

Don Howard recently uploaded an interesting paper on cross-cultural philosophy on academia.edu.
The paper discusses stimulating topics, such as why we* react ackwardly when we hear of “African philosophy” or “Native American philosophy” and why these labels sound like a contradictio in objecto.

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Translating from Sanskrit: Methodological issues

Scholars of Sanskrit philosophy are familiar with translations oscillating between the following two extremes:

  • A translation which closely follows the original and is chiefly meant as an aid to understand the Sanskrit text (as in Kataoka 2011)
  • A translation which smooths the text, so that it sounds as if it had been originally written in the target language (Dominik Wujastyk’s and Ch. Ram-Prasad’s ones)

A man must love a thing very much if he not only practices it without any hope of fame and money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well.

K.C. Chesterton (?)