Sanskritic civilization · Tantric studies · Newar & Nusantaran Buddhism
Nice to see some respect for Mañjuśrī in a journal on Indian Logic:
Rolf W. Giebel. ‘The One Hundred and Eight Names of Mañjuśrī: The Sanskrit Version of the Mañjuśrīkumārabhūta-aṣṭottaraśatakanāma Based on Sino-Japanese Sources’. Indian Logic 3 [インド論理学研究 第Ⅲ号], 2011 [平成23 年11 月30 日], pp.303–345.
Continue reading “Giebel, ‘The 108 Names of Mañjuśrī’ (2011)”
Is Tantric Buddhism senseless? Forthcoming:
Christian K. Wedemeyer. Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism: History, Semiology, and Transgression in the Indian Traditions. South Asia Across the Disciplines. Columbia University Press, 2012. ISBN 9780231162401.
The Asian Classics Input Project recently announced the “complete distribution of the long awaited Kangyur (བཀའ་འགྱུར་) and Tengyur (བསྟན་འགྱུར་) etext collections in Tibetan unicode script”. Big up to the ACIP: this is quite an achievement. It’s old news for some, but when I recently asked some colleagues about this, none had any inkling that etexts of the full bKa’ ’gyur were available.
Using the ACIP etexts requires working in Tibetan script and registration — the latter possibly encouraging lying (it’s doubtful that most registrants will have anything like formal permission to read the entire tantric corpus).
However, there is alternative online access to the same body of scripture — though not necessarily the same electronic corpus (THL’s bKa’ ’gyur is specified as sDe dge, rather than ACIP’s Lha sa) — at the Tibetan and Himalayan Library: http://www.thlib.org/encyclopedias/literary/canons/kt/catalog.php#cat=d/k. Type Wylie or Tibetan Unicode text in the search box and you’re away. (Thanks to J.)
Hwang cut open a female dog’s abdomen and held up its uterus and oviduct, pointing out where the ovarian eggs were. He demonstrated the extraction of 10 eggs from the oviduct, and then let the monks look at the eggs through a microscope.
What’s all this about? Hwang Woo-suk, “disgraced geneticist” and “devout Buddhist”, is still in the lucrative business of cloning puppies.
Bae Ji-sook, ‘Buddhist leader visits disgraced scientist Hwang’, The Korea Herald, March 8, 2012. [link; seen at buddhistchannel.tv]
It’s hard to work Korea out; after just two generations of intensive missionizing, far more South Koreans are now Christian than Buddhist. In Asia, only the Philippines has more Christians. I just hope Hwang draws the line at cloning the people who ran “Buddhist studies” into the ground in the English-speaking world.
That title is hyperbole, I trust:
Talukdar, S. P. Genesis of indigenous Chakma Buddhists and their pulverization worldwide. Delhi: Kalpaz Publications, 2010. 307 pp. ISBN 9788178357584.
The Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente (IsIAO), standard bearer of the scholastic brilliance incarnated in Giuseppe Tucci, co-founder of its predecessor institution, is a walking ghost. Its liquidation has already been decreed. But this is a ghost that will not go quietly. Let me satiate the preta by linking to its disembodied voice: isiaoghost.wordpress.com.
A stupid person is a person who caused losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see that this is directed at the bureaucrats who sacrificed Tucci’s and Gnoli’s legacy upon the unholy altar of economic irrationality. Come to think of it, though, it could equally apply to certain academics. “It is not difficult to understand how […] institutional power enhances the damaging potential of a stupid person,” Prof. Cipolla observes. How true!
(Thanks to A. for the pointer.)
Pascale Hugon and Toru Tomabechi (eds.) Dharmakīrti’s Pramāṇaviniścaya Chapter 3. Critically edited by Pascale Hugon and Toru Tomabechi with a preface by Tom J.F. Tillemans. Sanskrit Texts from the Tibetan Autonomous Region 8. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2012. 223 pp, €45. ISBN13: 978-3-7001-6893-5. [official site]
田中 公明 「『秘密集会』の身体曼荼羅論 : Nāgabodhiの安立次第論』第2章サンスクリット写本ローマ字化テキスト」 『東洋文化研究所紀要』 第160冊 2011.12
Tanaka, Kimiaki. ‘Nāgabodhi’s *Samājasādhanavyavasthālī: The Tibetan Translation and Sanskrit Text of Chapter II’ [in Japanese]. Tōyō Bunka Kenkyūjo kiyō 160, 2011, pp. 324(313)–338(299). [URI / PDF]
“In this article I have transcribed the Sanskrit text of Chapter II of the Vyavasthālī. This chapter mainly explains the body-maṇḍala theory of the Guhyasamāja-tantra. For further details, reference should be made to pp. 333-324.”
Your comments are invited on a proposal to encode the script ‘prevalent’/’in vogue’ (pracalita) in Nepal since the late fourteenth century, and which since the Shah period has continued in use in the scribal and print culture of the Newars. The proposal under discussion was submitted a month ago by Anshuman Pandey to the international standards body for character sets, WG2 under JTC1 of the ISO. Download it here:
Anshuman Pandey. ‘Proposal to Encode the Newar Script in ISO/IEC 10646’. ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 proposal N4184 [PDF]. January 5, 2012. [Supersedes N4038, ‘Preliminary Proposal to Encode the Prachalit Nepal Script’]
Anyone can submit a proposal for consideration by WG2. However, this is not a trivial process; documents need to comply with the group’s requirements, and if I observe correctly, there are very few competing complete proposals for historic scripts. No proposal has come from the Nepalese government, Newar culture having little, if any, official status in the Shah and post-Shah nation-state. The proposal under discussion (hereafter “N4184”) is that of a private individual, in collaboration with the Script Encoding Initiative at Berkeley. Mr. Pandey has graciously agreed to consider informed feedback on his proposal, which I hope will be incorporated into future documents submitted to WG2. It is in this constructive spirit that your feedback is requested; anyone may add comments via the form the end of this post.
The present discussion should focus on the completeness and accuracy of the glyph repertoire represented in the present proposal. Matters such as the proposed name and classification of the script, the description of interaction between glyphs (e.g. conjunct formation, §4.8.1), issues related to other Nepalese or Indic scripts (except where strictly relevant) and so on should notbe discussed here. If there is sufficient interest, these matters can be addressed in separate posting(s). Here I will offer some of my own preliminary, informal feedback on the proposal, on which comments are also welcome.
N4184 aims to “encode a core set of Newar characters” (p.17). This invites the question of how “core” should be defined. I will not discuss this in depth, other to say that the standard should include those characters which are most common and most useful in this form of writing. Specifically, I propose that the characters depicted in Figs.6 and 7 below should be part of the standard. This is the repertoire proposed in N4184:
Continue reading “Nepalese Script in Unicode, 1: JTC1/WG2 N4184 Open Thread”
Outrageously expensive scans of basic material for the study of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism:
DPS電子仏教文献データ 『ギャンツェ・テンパンマ・カンギュル写本DVD』 470,000円
DPS電子仏教文献データ 『北京版カンギュルDVD』 370,000円 [prices from Kawachen]
Digital Preservation Society. Tempangma manuscript of the Kangyur. 113 (? out of 114) volumes. PDF files, distributed on DVD. Shinagawa, Tokyo: 2010. US$4,700.00 (Including shipping) [sample]
Digital Preservation Society. Peking Kangyur. 107 volumes. PDF files, distributed on DVD. Shinagawa, Tokyo: 2010. US$3,700.00 (Including shipping) [sample]
See also the Digital Preservation Society’s PDF flyer in English.