What determines the likelihood of textual reuse to occur? The genre, the time, the personality of the author? And what are the reasons for not naming one’s source?
Category Archives: Sanskrit Philosophy
Hayagrīva in the Hayaśīrṣa Saṃhitā
Hayagrīva previous to Veṅkaṭanātha seems to have a non-specific Vaiṣṇava iconography, with only his horse-head as a fixed element. He is, for instance, a standing figure in Khajurao, where he carries a club and has one hand in the dānamūdrā.
Hayagrīva at Khajurao
By contrast, after Veṅkaṭanātha, the iconography radically changes and two possibilities become fixed:
EAAA on reuse in visual arts
As you migh already know, I am leaving tomorrow for Olomouc where I will host on Friday the 26th with Julia Hegewald and Cristina Bignami a panel on reuse in visual arts. Here is the program of our panel:
Title: Re-use at the Borders of South Asia: Himalayas and South India
9-9:30 Elisa FRESCHI “Reuse in Texts and the Arts: The case of Hayagrīva’s Descriptions”
9:30-10 Julia HEGEWALD “The Theory of Re-use as a Method in Art-historical Research”
10-10:30 Gerald KOZICZ “The re-use of the nidhi iconography in the Tibetan context”
10:30-11 Verena WIDORN “The use and re-use of aesthetic concepts in the Himalayan area”
BREAK
11:30-12 Cristina BIGNAMI “The re-use of the iconography of the lion/tiger in the Karṇataka Medieval sovereignty
12-12:30 Tiziana LORENZETTI “Appropriation and re-interpretation of symbolic and architectural elements in the Lingayat religiosity”
12:30-13: Mallica KUMBERA LANDRUS “Sharing and reshaping collective memories in Portuguese Goa”
LUNCH + TOUR etc.
17-17:30 Elena MUCCIARELLI “The Plucking of different flowers: Re-use in Kerala theatrical tradition”
17:30-18 concluding session: DISCUSSION
Should you come to the conference, don’t forget to join the discussion (or to join me for a coffee break).
IABS, IDhC, etc.: which paper did you like more? UPDATED FOR THE THIRD TIME with further papers
UPDATE: I received further new suggestions per email or personally. You can add yours in the comments below.
I cannot help but enjoying papers dealing with Mīmāṃsā (especially if from a philosophical viewpoint, as it happened during the last IABS), they are just more interesting to me, but I asked friends and colleagues to forget about their personal interests and to tell me which papers of the IABS and IDhC they enjoyed more and why. The following ones are the results I collected.
Theology in a community of believers in methodology? (On Ram-Prasad 2014)
Can one speak of theology without partaking a given faith and belonging to a given community of believers? Religious texts can be read as historical or literary documents, but can they also be read as theological ones outside a community of believers?
CfP: Language as a tools for acquiring Knowledge (Atiner conference)
If you have been following this blog or my previous one you will know that I have been looking for chances for cross-cultural philosophy since many years. You will also know that I have been thinking at the Atiner Conference as a good chance to discuss about Indian themes as part of Philosophy tout court and not within the small ghetto of Indian Philosophy for Indologists.
This year, Malcolm C. Keating (University of Texas, Austin) and I will be hosting a panel at the next Atiner conference in Athens, 25–28 May 2015. If you are interested to join, read the following CfP and drop a line either in the comments or at my personal address. (more…)
Is bhakti a philosophy? Daya Krishna 2000
I am grateful to Elise Coquereau for bringing me back to one of my past interests, namely Daya Krishna‘s philosophy. Daya Krishna was a polyedric genius, who wrote on economics, sociology, history of Western and Indian Philosophy, aesthetics, etc., always with a revolutionary and unconventional spirit.
Enough with the “eternality of sound” in Mimamsa!
F.X. D’Sa Sabdapramanyam in Sabara and Kumarila (Vienna 1980) is one of the very first books on Mimamsa I read and I am thus very grateful to its author. Further, it is a fascinating book, one that —I thought— shows intriguing hypotheses (e.g., that Sabara meant “Significance” by dharma) which cannot be confounded with a scholarly philological enquire in the texts themselves.
What was Dignaga’s theory of apoha? On PS 5.43
The sequence of opponents and discussants within the Pramāṇasamuccaya is difficult to reconstruct and one might need to gather informations from many different sources. In the following I will focus on a specific problem:
- is the example of the presence of horns as leading to “non-horse” an instance of the way apoha works (as with Yoshimizu, which supports in this way his analysis of Dignāga’s procedure as entailing a compositional analysis) or just an example about an inference, which works in a way similar as the apoha, i.e., does not need to exclude elements one by one (as with Kataoka, who thus supports his claim that Dignāga does not need any positive postulation).
Andrew Ollett has just posted some interesting comments on K. Yoshimizu recent workshop and on the impact of his theories from a linguistic point of view. Andrew especially elaborates on the topic-comment opposition and on the possibility to read along these lines the vidheya–upadeya opposition found in Kumarila.
If you missed the workshop, you can read about it also here.