1. It is true that the early commentaries refer to the YS-YBh complex
2. It is also true that Vedavyāsa is mentioned as author of the YBh only relatively late, possibly for the first time in Vācaspati’s Tattvavaiśāradī
3. Furthermore, it is only with Mādhava’s Sarvadarśanasaṅgraha that people start distinguishing Patañjali’s from Vyāsa’s authorships.
4. Nonetheless, Maas’ argument is too dependent on the manuscript tradition, which has the two texts together, but is extremely recent (for Maas’ reply that recent manuscripts must depend on earlier models, see this post).
5. Squarcini also mentions in a footnote that Vyāsa himself mentions the name of Patañjali (but see a further post on this blog for D. Wujastyk’s answer thereon).
6. After having, in his opinion, weakened Maas’ arguments, Squarcini lies down his own one in favour of the existence of a separate YS: The text is highly and consistently structured and locates itself within a net of intertextual references, which the author of the YBh partly ignores. Squarcini claims to have identified the deep structure of the YS and distinguishes several subtopics within the main topics, signalling them as such in the Sanskrit text and in the translation. Accordingly, Squarcini highlights some key sūtras of the YS which work as if they were adhikaraṇasūtras.
7. Accordingly, Squarcini’s translation does not need to borrow words from the commentaries, as most other translations.

The forelast point is the most relevant one and it is substantiated in the first hundred pages of Squarcini’s introductory study. I will highlight here some of the elements which struck as most interesting. Readers are alerted that this is nothing but my summary, not (yet) validated by F. Squarcini.

• The question of the alleged YS-YBh unity has an impact also on the alleged proximity of the Sāṅkhya and Yoga systems. Squarcini argues against it on the strength of texts more or less coeval to the YS (e.g., Milinsapañha, Visuddhimagga, Madhyamakahṛdayakārikā, see p. lxxviiff), including the Nyāyasūtra, which ignores Sāṅkhya but discusses at length Yoga.
• Notwithstanding some affinities, e.g., the use of the words puruṣa, prakṛti and kaivalya, the YS understands them very differently than, say, the Sāṅkhyakārikā (pp. lxxxi–lxxxii).
• The dualism of the YS is, unlike that of Sāṅkhya and also (although Squarcini does not spell this out explicitely) of the YBh, is not an ultimate dualism. pusuṣa and prakṛti will not remain distinct until the end. Rather, the dualism of the YS is an “eliminative dualism” (the label is by Paul M. Churchland). Squarcini here elaborates on hints which can be found in Adolf Janacek (1951) and in L.W. Pflueger’s Dueling with Dualism. Revisioning the Paradox of Puruṣa and Prakṛti (see pp. lxxxvii–cxi)

Federico Squarcini recently disputed this claim on the basis of the fact that it is too much dependent on the manuscript transmission, which is not so meaningful, given that all manuscripts are centuries later than the YS–YBh:

La maggior parte di quelli datati fra essi (manoscritti dello YS–YBh) è del XIX secolo. […] non si conoscono manoscritti degli Yogasūtra più antichi del XVI secolo d.C (Squarcini 2015, cxii).

Squarcini also mentions as an evidence in favour of the distinction of the two texts, text-passages such as the following of the YBh:

iti patañjaliḥ etat svarūpam ity uktam (YBh ad YS 3.44)

Here, the author or the YBh seems to quote from the YS as a work by someone different from himself, called Patañjali.

If you read Squarcini, Bronkhorst and Maas, which arguments convince you more?

On Maas 2013 and Maas’ view on the single author of YS and YBh, see here.

—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:

• Bart Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (OUP, NY, 2013) (by Patrick Olivelle).
• Electronic Text Reuse Acquisition Project (by Jonathan Silk).
• Jacob Schmidt-Madsen analysed textual reuse in the case of an Āyurvedic manuscript for his BA thesis The Florence Fragments – palm leaves among papyri.**
• Reynolds & Wilson, Scribes and Scholars (by Dominik Wujastyk).

*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).

• Introduction, Elisa Freschi and Philipp Maas

Reuse of Philosophy and other Śāstras

• On Parallel Passages in the Commentaries of Vācaspati Miśra and Bhaṭṭa Vāgīśvara, Yasutaka Muroya
• Creativity within limits: Different usages of a single argument from Dharmakīrti’s Vādanyāya in Vidyānandin’s works, Himal Trikha
• Traces of Reuse in Śaṅkara’s Commentary on the Brahma-Sūtra, Ivan Andrijanic
• Adaptive Reuse of the Descriptive Technique of Pāṇini in Non-Pāṇinian Grammatical Traditions with Special Reference to 
 the Derivation of the Declension of the 1st and 2nd Person Pronouns, Malhar Kulkarni
• From Śāstra to Kāvya: The Adaptive Reuse of Patañjali’s Yoga in Māgha’s Śiśupālavadha, Philipp A. Maas

Reuse of images and ideas

• The Steadiness of a Non-steady Place: Re-adaptation of the Imagery of the Chariot, Elena Mucciarelli
• Chariot Festivals: The Reuse of the Chariot as Space in Movement, Cristina Bignami
• Methodological and practical remarks on the question of reuse in epic texts, Sven Sellmer

Quoting and Untraced texts — Forging by Quoting?

• “This is Not a Quote”. Quotational Emplotment, Quotational Hoax, and Other Aberrant Cases of Textual Reuse in Sanskrit Poetics-cum-Dramaturgy, Daniele Cuneo
• Quotation, Quarrel and Controversy in Early Modern South Asia: Appayya Dīkṣita and Jīva Gosvāmī on Madhva’s Untraceable Citations, Kiyokazu Okita
• Reusing, Adapting, Distorting? Veṅkaṭanātha’s reuse of Rāmānuja, Yāmuna (and the Vṛttikāra) in his commentary ad Pūrva Mīmāṃsā Sūtra 1.1.1, Elisa Freschi
• If you don’t know the source, blame it on a yāmala: Quotations and ghost titles in the Ṛgvedakalpadruma, Cezary Galewicz

All the abstracts and our initial call for papers can be read on Academia.edu.

My contribution is avalaible in a non-final version on Academia.edu.

Other authors tend to think that there were several trends of Yoga prior to a given point (usually identified with the Yogasūtra (YS) if you agree with Chapple, etc., or with the Pātañjala Yogaśāstra (PYŚ) if you agree with Bronkhorst, Maas, etc.) and that they have been unified into a single system by the author of one or the other text. A long time after that, the same authors claim, new tendencies developed out of this unitary Yoga, much like in the way described by the authors of the fist group.

A minority group of authors contests the idea of a unitary Yoga at all and says that between the various things called Yoga in Classical and Post-Classical India there are at most family resemblances and at least nothing common at all. For these authors, it does not really make sense to host a conference on Yoga with people discussing Buddhist Tantric Yoga, Pāñcarātra Yoga, the Yogasūtra’s, contemporary Yoga practices and so on.

Who is right? Difficult to say. The point is that what we have are only fragments of the whole picture and that our interpretation of it will make us interpret some scattered pieces as belonging to the same puzzle or not. Accordingly, if we assume the first perspective, we will consider a form of Yoga which is far away from Patañjali’s YS (or PYŚ) as still somehow connected with it and detect slight similarities. If we assume the third perspective, we will rather notice the differences between the two.

Similar differences in approach can be detected in the case of Sāṅkhya (where the first scenario is ruled out by the data and scholars either subscribe to the second or to the third approach), Buddhism, the two Mīmāṃsās (Parpola embraces the first scenario, Bronkhorst the third one, there are no clear data in favour of the second one), the two schools of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta and so on. In the latter case, in fact, I only know scholars subscribing to the first scenario. Mumme (1988) is aware of the fact that there were differences between the two schools even before the official split, but still calls them both Śrī Vaiṣṇava and says that they were “complementary”.

Am I forgetting some further example or some further approach? And which approach do you subscribe to in the cases mentioned?

I received some interesting comments, both personally and on the blog, on my last post on the categorization of reuse.
Starting from the most basic type of re-use, Vitus convinced me to adopt “downcycling” for a destructive type of recycling, which brings a substance back to its raw materials.

Next would come what Philipp Maas and I had called “simple re-use”, i.e., re-use only governed by pragmatic and economic reasons (the old material is cheaper and closer). Now, Cristina Bignami suggested to me that “simple” in “simple re-use” seems to imply a judgemental value. She and EM suggested, instead “linear re-use”. I am not completely convinced by that, since I generally dislike “linear” as a description of historical processes (which tend to be more complicated than linear), but could go back to my initial suggestion (see this presentation), i.e., “pragmatic re-use“.

Next there is the adaptive reuse. Cristina suggested to read Julia Hegewald’s new life re-use as a subscategory of adaptive reuse, in case the adaption leads to a real new life of the object. The terminology seems to imply a radical change (i.e., “new-life” is not part of a continuous grey scale, like “adaptive reuse”).

A further point raised by Cristina regards the point of view from which we speak of reuse. She fears we are too much focused on the artist and not on the audience. I would say that I tried to speak of awareness of the audience while defining adaptive reuse, but perhaps this is not enough?

What do you think of this new terminology? Please note that “conventional re-use” would in this way be left out (and would be either a case of pragmatic re-use or of weak adaptive reuse —don’t forget that the two terms only delineate the two extremes of a continous grey scale).

For more on simple re-use vs. adaptive reuse you can read my Introduction to a panel I co-hosted together with Philipp Maas, here, or click “reuse” in the category list on this blog.

The following elements had been discussed at the round table after the panel on reuse (about which see this announcement and these comments right at the end of it) at the IABS conference:

• genre: it seems that philosophy is a special case, in which literality of quotations is especially evaluated, whereas commentaries on religious texts are mid-way (as shown by Jowita Kramer) and religious and ritual texts reuse more freely (as shown by Cathy Cantwell). Petra Kieffer-Pülz observed that genre plays no role in Pāli literature (whereas time does, see immediately below). Paul Hackett noticed that within tantric literature of all religious trends, reuse is so extensive, that even chapters’ numbers which make no sense in the new environment may be copied.
• authorship: unexpectedly, even a strong concept of authorship, as the one common in kāvya does not prevent a free reuse, since the readership still regards authored texts as it regards other kind of texts (as shown by Camillo Formigatti using the example of the avadāna-collections)
• time: surprisingly enough, Petra Kieffer-Pülz’ findings concerning Pāli harmonise with my own ones on Sanskrit and confirm that after a certain century, authors tend to be much more specific as for their sources, explicitly mentioning author’s and work’s names. When does this change take place? Petra suggested “after the 14th c.” in Pāli literature. I would say even before that in Sanskrit literature, that is, around the 11th c. (see however below, fn *, for the proposal that the turn can be traced back already to Dignāga). Further views on this topic: Philipp Maas noted that Vācaspati, in his commentary on the Yogaśāstra clearly feels the need to name his sources, sometimes by inventing names if he does not know them. Referring to an even earlier date, Charles DiSimone noted that Śāntideva quotes up to five authorities on the same topic (thus showing that “name dropping” was important, I would say).

This leads to some further important points, namely:

• reasons for not naming one’s sources: Petra Kieffer-Pülz preliminarly observed that the lack of naming one’s sources cannot be interpreted as due to the reliance on oral instructions, since in the Pāli milieu books were indeed used and there are even records of libraries. Cristina Pecchia noted that Dharmakīrti is consistently referred to as ācārya among his commentators and that the main authors would have been immediately present to their relevant audience. Another person (unknown to me, unfortunately, but if you recognise yourself, please add a comment below) highlighted the fact that we must imagine that there was a shared repertoire, especially in the case of texts to be performed (once the performative stage was ended, one needed to fill the names, etc.). Cathy Cantwell, last, observed that no naming of the source is needed if the text has the status of a revelation, nor if it is reused almost unconsciously, since it has become a part of oneself, after having memorised it at a very early age. This last comment fits with my own findings regarding the fact that one does not name authors in one’s own school (see my Introduction in the special issue of the JIPh I edited).
• “Forge” of textual material: This topic has been dealt with in connection with Madhva (see Mesquita’s books on this topic) and with the extraordinary fact that some authors felt the need to forge new quotes instead of using the well-accepted device of over-interpreting extant ones. It is interesting to note that, as observed by Petra Kieffer-Pülz, already in the Aṭṭhakathā literature there are accusations to people who would have “forged” sentences. A further interesting indication of the awareness that forgery was not admitted is the justification of new Buddhist rules or part of rules by attributing them to the Buddha and (implicitly?) saying that ‘Had the Buddha been alive, he would have said that’. UPDATE: This point is discussed in Kieffer-Pülz’ book Verlorene Gaṇṭhipadas, Vol. I, p. 252 and pp. 490–492 (thanks to Petra for pointing it out!).

Can you think of further elements you would take into account? Further applications of the elements we highlighted? For instance, we did not have time to discuss about geographic differences, nor about the impact of multilinguism (which had been dealt with by Charles DiSimone in his talk) on the accuracy of textual reuse.

*Kiyotaka Yoshimizu has kindly reminded me of an article by Larry McCrea in this volume) on how Dignāga’s way of referring literally to his opponents has changed at once the Indian way of doing philosophy and of engaging with one’s opponents. Could Dignāga be the source of such later developments?

For my first post on the same round table, see here. For the complete series of posts on the IABS, see here. Please remember that these are only my first impressions and that all mistakes are mine and not the speakers’ ones.

For the first conference of the EAAA, I hosted with Cristina Bignami and Julia Hegewald a panel on Reuse in art. In my paper, I started with the attempt to see whether the categories I had been elaborating for the analysis of textual reuse would have worked also in the case of artistic reuse. These are:

• continuous grey-scale between simple re-use and adaptive reuse

Simple re-use is the kind of reuse which is only determined by economic and pragmatic reasons, say, when I buy a used car because it is the cheapest available option. In simple re-use, the artist does not want the audience to recognise the reused elements as such and the fact that they are reused is not an explicit assett of the new composition. Adaptive reuse, by contrast, implies an explicit underlining of the reused element. The artist wants the audience to recognise what is happening and the fact that the element has been reused is part of the value of the new composition. Once again, the two are not aut-aut alternatives, but rather two extremes of a grey-scale.

simple re-use: pieces of Roman columns reassembled in early Christian buildings

adaptive reuse: an abandoned synagogue converted into a “food theater”, project by Diandian Ding.

I would have thought that the application of these categories to art would have been not controversial, given that Philipp Maas and I started using the term “adaptive reuse” after having read about it in texts about architecture (see for instance the work by Bie Plevoets, here). However, Julia A.B. Hegewald had already adopted a different terminology in her studies on re(-)use, starting from this one, distinguishing rather between:

1. recycling (when the row materials only are re-used, e.g., while melting a statue)
2. conventional re-use (when the purpose is not changed, e.g., a temple is re-used again as temple)
3. new life re-use (when the purpose is changed, i.e., a water tank is re-used as prison)

In my categories, I just did not take into account “recycling”, if this is limited to cases in which the original material is not recognised at all (e.g., by melting down a statue in order to use the metal for weapons). If it includes cases such as the reusal of columns (see image above), I would not label it “recycling” because the possibility that it is later reinterpreted as “adaptive reuse” by a different audience is open.
UPDATE: Vitus’ comment below makes me think that we could abandon the ambiguous term “recycling” and use instead “downcycling” for the case of melting statues to gain raw metal.
“New life re-use” seems quite close to what I call “adaptive reuse”.
“Conventional re-use”, by contrast, is not exactly tantamount to simple re-use, since the former points to the continuity of the purpose, whereas the latter to the awareness of artist and audience.

Comments on these and other terminological proposals are welcome. I will come back to the topic in a future post.

For more on simple re-use vs. adaptive reuse you can read my Introduction to a panel I co-hosted together with Philipp Maas, here, or click “reuse” in the category list on this blog.

Bronkhorst suggested that the Yogasūtras have been assembled by the author of the Bhāṣya (“the sūtras were brought together by the author of the Yogabhāṣya“, p. 17), who might have added further sūtras to the lore of transmitted ones and mentions among his evidences the fact that the YS 1.21–23 have an unforced interpretation which has been violated by the author of the Bhāṣya (who, then, evidently took pre-existing sūtras and provided them with a new context and a new interpretation). Accordingly, Bronkhorst suggests that “the available evidence points to two persons, Patañjali [as author of the YS] and Vindhyavāsin [as author of the Bhāṣya]” (p. 18). A large part of Bronkhorst 1985, in fact, points to the reconstruction of the theoretical background of YS and YBh and connects it with Sāṅkhya teachings.

Maas, seems to push the thesis further and maintains that the only text whose existence can be reconstructed is the Pātañjala Yogaśāstra (henceforth PYŚ, as in Maas 2013), already including sūtra and bhāṣya (to be understood not as “different literary genres but compositional elements of scholarly works (śāstra)”, p. 65). In the case of YS 1.2, 1.41 and 2.23, Maas suggests that the fact that they are introduced with the perfect tense pravavṛte instead of the usual present passive might be a hint of the fact that these sūtras were older. Noteworthy is also the fact that Maas uses a different set of arguments than the ones used by Bronkhorst 1985. In harmony with his textual critical interests, Maas picks out manuscript evidences, such as the lack of an independent transmission of the YS, which are only transmitted together with the YBh, the lack of a consistent marking of the sūtras in the manuscripts, and the colophons, which are not present separately for the YS part and which mention the “YBh” of Vyāsa only “in a few manuscripts of limited stemmatic relevance” (p. 58).

A very interesting way to validate Maas’ arguments would be, thus, to test them against the evidence of the other philosophical sūtras. Are not they also only transmitted within their Bhāṣya? And how do their colophons look like? Are the sūtras marked in manuscripts? I only know a little bit about the Mīmāṃsā– and Nyāyasūtra and have no information about their colophons.

Who are the Yoga philosophers? What and where (i.e., in which texts) did they discuss? In other words: What am I missing?

On the Yoga in Transformation conference, see here.