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Is a Christian scholar better equipped to understand and translate early Christian texts? Yes and no

Or, better: Is a culturally Christian scholar better equipped to understand and translate early Christian texts?

Let me stipulate that “culturally Christian” denotes a scholar who was educated in a Christian milieu and knows Christianity from the inside. She might be more or less devout at the present point of her life. This stipulation is needed in order to avoid deciding about the inner life of people, which is, by definition, imperceptible and therefore undecidable.

Now, a culturally Christian scholar surely has some advantages over a non-Christian one, insofar as she will immediately recognise what is meant by short hints in a text. She will probably also be more likely to apply the principle of charity which —in my humble opinion— is a needed approach to the study of ancient philosophy.

However, a non-Christian scholar will have the opposite advantage, namely he will not try to understand small hints found in the text, because he will not immediately see them against the background of their successive evolution.

For instance, let us take the controversial problem of whether Jesus defined himself as God in the synoptic Gospels. The synoptic Gospels, unlike the Gospel of John, do not contain clear statements in this regard. Jesus rather defines himself as “the son of Man” (ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου). A culturally Christian scholar knows that Jesus is believed to be the second person of God (no matter how sure she is in her faith) and will therefore interpret the ambiguous statements of Jesus in the Gospels according to this knowledge. By contrast, a non-Christian scholar will be freer to think that perhaps Jesus was not at all claiming to be God in the synoptic Gospels.

Hence the question: Given the same degree of scholarship (and assuming that this can be ascertained), should we prefer scholars who are culturally close to the texts they are going to study and translate? In the case of texts which need to be approached by a team of scholars, should we prefer them to be ALL culturally close to the texts?

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Can we speak of “multiple Renaissances”? What are the historical and political consequences of this use?

I just came back from a conference on the many Renaissances in Asia. Since it was part of the Coffee Break Conference project, it was meant to be most of all an open discussion on a fascinating topic (rethinking the concept of Renaissance and asking whether this could be applied also outside its original context, and more specifically in South Asia). The starting point of the discussion was Jack Goody’s book “Renaissances: The one or the many?”, which has been analysed from very different perspectives in the opening talks by Camillo Formigatti and Antony Pattathu and to which most of the following talks referred back to. There was a general consensus about the fact that Goody’s depiction of South Asia is at best incomplete and at worst repeats some orientalist prejudices about its being changeless.

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What happens when the Veda prescribes malefic actions?

Vīrarāghavācārya's take on the Śyena

To my knowledge, Veṅkaṭanātha’s Seśvaramīmāṃsā (henceforth SM) has been commented upon only once in Sanskrit, namely in the 20th c. by Abhinava Deśika Vīrarāghavācārya.
Vīrarāghavācārya continues Veṅkaṭanātha’s agenda in reinterpreting Mīmāṃsā tenets in a Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta way.

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The next IIGRS is approaching

Call for paper

International Indology Graduate Research Symposium

We are pleased to announce that the tenth International Indology Graduate Research Symposium (IIGRS 10) will take place at SOAS, University of London, on Friday the 28th and Saturday the 29th September 2018.

We look forward to receiving abstracts from graduate students, as well as early career researchers who have completed their PhD within the past five years.

Abstracts should be submitted to iigrsuk@googlemail.com by the 6th of May 2018. We will consider all Indological topics provided they are based on primary sources studied in the original language.

Abstracts should not exceed 300 words and should include:
1) Your name and institution + indication of research degrees and positions held;
2) the title of your paper;
3) a broad indication of its subject area;
4) an outline of its contents.

Please send your abstract in both Word and PDF format. More information can be found at:
https://iigrs.wordpress.com/

For further questions, contact us directly at iigrsuk@googlemail.com

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Why should one study the meaning of the Veda? I.e., why studying Mīmāṃsā?

(It is hard to present your research program to the public)

At a certain point in the history of Mīmāṃsā (and, consequently, of Vedānta), the discussion of the reasons for undertaking the study of Mīmāṃsā becomes a primary topic of investigation. When did this exactly happen? The space dedicated to the topic increases gradually in the centuries, but Jaimini and Śabara don’t seem to be directly interested in it.

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Die Lange Nacht der Forschung: How do we present our research to the public?

Two days ago I visited a part of the “Long night of research”, an event having the purpose of presenting research to the public. Universities, the academy of sciences and various private funds supporting scientific research (like the Rotary club) had a small portion of an open space to present their highlights. The idea is that people just stroll from one location to the other and spend only some minutes in each. Thus, an effective communication needs to be essential, catchy and striking enough to mould the audience’s memory.

The public included many children and their parents. It goes without saying, I guess, that the institutes focusing on natural sciences were way more successful in gaining the attention of young visitors. In the photograph, you can see two 13 ys old boys operating a fake brain.

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Is there a Sanskrit word for “intelligence” (or any other word)?

A reader wrote me:

I would like to know whether there is a similar term in Indian philosophy (sanskrit) for ‘Intelligence’. Can we equate it with the term prajñānam?

The problem with such questions (I do not know about you, but I often receive them), is that they are based on an atomic concept of sentences, as if there were a 1:1 correspondence among concepts and words and among language 1 and language 2. This theory has long been superseded both in linguistics (see Saussure’s discussion of how not even “tree” can be easily translated) and in translation theories. Moreover, as a scholar of Mīmāṃsā, I tend to imagine that the contribution of each word in a sentence is at least also a result of the contributions of the other words in the same sentence.

Thus, at least in case of philosophical concepts, one cannot focus on a single term, i.e., on a “dictionary approach”, but rather on what Umberto Eco calls the encyclopedic approach, i.e., offering a broader definition instead of a 1:1 translation. Moreover, each discussion of a (European) philosophical term needs to be preceded by an analysis of the term itself. Ideally, one should reconstruct it, too, through an encyclopedic approach (what does “X” entail? in which contexts is it used?).

In the case of “intelligence”, prajñā (not prajñāna) is often used, even more so in Mahāyāna texts, for “wisdom”, it can mean also “discrimination” and can therefore be compared to “intelligence”. I would, however, rather suggest buddhi, which stands for one’s ability to engage intellectually, especially because it does not have the sapiential aspect of prajñā and because buddhimat `having buddhi‘ can often be used in contexts in which in English one would speak of “intelligent” people. Another possibility would be prekṣā, again because of the use of prekṣāvat in order to define people who are able to consider things before deliberating.

What do readers think? How do you conceive “intelligence” in Sanskrit?

Cross-posted on the Indian Philosophy blog

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On translating the titles of Sanskrit works

I gave some more thoughts to the topic of whether we should translate the titles of Sanskrit works.
As you might remember, braodly speaking, many of our US colleagues started translating them and most of our Japanese, Indian and European colleagues just leave the Sanskrit titles as they are.

I basically have two problems with the translations:

  1. the English titles might be too vague (“Commentary”) or misleading (“Maxims”, suggesting the enunciation of a moral truth, not to speak of “Mirrors”, “Amulets”, “Rising Moons” and the like)
  2. there is no standardised translation (I know that here some colleagues might suggest to just follow Sheldon Pollock’s one, but even they will have to agree that sūtra is more often translated as “Aphorisms” than as “Maxims”), so that readers of article a, b and c might think that their authors are talking about different texts.

Thus, I see no point in translating titles in case of articles of books targeted at Sanskritists. For a Sanskritist like me, a title like “Versed Commentary” just forces me to wonder what is meant, whether Ślokavārttika immediately rings a bell. Nor do we want to have our PhD students learn English titles instead of Sanskrit ones, I believe, since if they did so they would have more troubles reading actual Sanskrit texts.

However, I also understand the advantage of translating Sanskrit titles in English in articles or books aiming at non-Sanskritists, which at least give some idea (though vague or misleading) and might be more easily memorised by lay readers. Hence, what about the following:

  • we use a translation which is slightly more specific, e.g. (Pūrva) Mīmāṃsā Sūtra = “Maxims (or Aphorisms) on Vedic Exegesis” or “Exegetic Maxims (or Aphorisms)”.
  • we explain in the first footnote about the texts whose titles should be translated, e.g., PMS and ŚBh, something like “The title Mīmāṃsāsūtra has been differently translated. In general, it states that the text is about Mīmāṃsā, i.e., about an investigation on Vedic texts, and that it is composed in short, syntetic and terse sentences, called sūtras. These are often hardly understandable without an extended commentary, and bhāṣya means indeed ‘extended commentary’. For pragmatic reasons, in the following we will refer to these texts with an English translation, i.e., as “Exegetic Maxims” and “Commentary on the Exegetic Maxims” respectively.”


What do you think?

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Genitive compounds and brahmajijñāsā (or dharmajijñāsā)

All commentators on the Brahmasūtra starts by dealing with the wording of the first sūtra, namely

athāto brahmajijñāsā
Now, after that, there is the desire to know the brahman.

Several topics are discussed in this connection, namely:

  • What does “Now” (atha) exactly mean?
  • What does “after that” (ataḥ) mean? What does it refer to?
  • How should one interpret the compound brahmajijñāsā ‘desire to know the brahman’?
  • Why the desiderative in jijñāsā `desire to know’?