Search results for ""The Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies""

The more than two dozen Rai languages in eastern Nepal, which make up the larger part of the Kiranti language family, are linguistically highly varied. Due to this, intergroup solidarity has been relatively weak, and Rai ethnicity must be seen as constructed in recent history. However, it is striking how the mythological narratives of these different Rai “subtribes”—oral stories about the origins of culture and the deeds of the ancestors—form a strong and coherent tradition in which the different variants of episodes possess an obvious “family resemblance.” This mythological tradition is clearly distinct from those of the neighboring Limbu, the other major Kiranti group.This volume, which includes introductory chapters to Rai mythology and Rai grammar, for the first time brings together different variants of myths from various Rai languages, presenting them with linguistic glossings in interlinear translations. This makes it possible not only to study the myths and their cultural meanings as oral texts but also to compare narrative structures across different grammars. The book is of special interest for linguists, anthropologists, and folklorists with a focus on the Himalayas.

Read more less

This poem belongs of the little-known Newari (Nepal Bhasha) language and literature, specifically to its even less known Buddhist version. It is one of the very rare cases that works in Newari language appear outside Nepal.In nineteen long cantos, the Sugata Saurabha tells of the life of the Buddha, following the traditional accounts, but situates it in the strongly local context of Newar and Nepali Buddhism. It emulates the classical (Kavya) style of the long-standing Indian tradition, and has been inspired by the 2,000-year-old Sanskrit poem, the Buddhacarita. Consequently, the poet inserts stanzas composed in traditional classical Sanskrit meter, though written in polished Newari.The poem was composed by the greatest modern writer in Newari language, Chittadhar Hrdaya (1906– 1982), while he was imprisoned by the autocratic strongly pro-Hindu Rana regime that governed Nepal from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.The poem is the best-known work of the flowering of modern Newari literature that emerged after the restrictions of the Rana regime were lifted in 1950.

Read more less

This volume discusses the Bhaikṣukī manuscript of the Candrālaṃkāra (“Ornament of the Moon”), a commentary of the twelfth century based on the Cāndravyākaraṇa, Candragomin’s seminal Buddhist grammar of Sanskrit. The discovery of the Bhaikṣukī script and of all available written sources are described. The detailed study of this codex unicus of the Candrālaṃkāra is accompanied by a facsimile edition and extensive tables of the script, a long-felt desideratum in the field of palaeography. The Buddhist author of the commentary has been identified for the first time, and the nature of his treatise and its position in the Cāndra school of grammar have been expounded. The history of the manuscript and newly discovered traces of the Bhaikṣukī script in Tibet are discussed. This publication will serve as a prolegomenon necessary for the preparation of a critical edition of the Candrālaṃkāra, which until now was believed to have been lost irretrievably.The Bhaikṣukī Manuscript of the Candrālaṃkāra will appeal to specialists with interests in a variety of fields such as Indian palaeography, grammar, Buddhism, history, and Indo-Tibetan studies.

Read more less

The Law Code of Viṣṇu (Vaiṣṇava-Dharmaśāstra) is one of the latest of the ancient Indian legal texts composed around the seventh century CE in Kashmir. Both because the Vaiṣṇava-Dharmaśāstra is the only Dharmaśāstra that can be geographically located and because it introduces some interesting and new elements into the discussion of Dharmaśāstric topics, this is a document of interest both to scholars of Indian legal literature and to cultural historians of India, especially of Kashmir. The new elements include the first Dharmaśāstric evidence for a wife burning herself at her husband’s cremation and the intrusion of devotional religion (bhakti) into Dharmaśāstras.This volume contains a critical edition of the Sanskrit text based on fifteen manuscripts, an annotated English translation, and an introduction evaluating its textual history, its connections to previous Dharmaśāstras, its date and provenance, its structure and content, and the use made of it by later medieval writers.

Read more less

Dating to the first half of the first millennium BCE, the Katha Aranyaka is a ritualistic and speculative text that deals with a dangerous Vedic ritual that provides its sponsor with a new body after death. In a new, never-before-published critical edition, Michael Witzel, using available manuscripts and, primarily, a color facsimile of a restored five-hundred-year-old Kashmiri birch bark manuscript preserved at Tübingen since 1895, presents this work which transitions the Vedic ritual into the philosophy of the Upanishads. The text is preceded by an extensive introduction in English dealing with Vedic ritualism and followed by a German translation as well as detailed variant readings and a verse index.

Read more less