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Muldoon-Hules (2011), Brides of the Buddha [Avadānaśataka VIII]

Karen Maria Muldoon-Hules. ‘Brides of the Buddha and Other Stories: Reading the Women’s Stories of the 8th “Varga” of the “Avadānaśataka” in Context’. PhD dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles, 2011. 455 pages. ISBN: 9781124885032; ProQuest document ID 2462477631.

author: @ UCLA. Book: 2017. Brides of the Buddha: Nuns’ Stories from the Avadanasataka. ISBN 9781498511452 [official site]

From the Abstract

There has been little in the way of systematic examinations of the evidence on marriage customs among Buddhists, and our understanding of the lives of early Buddhist women is still quite limited. Much of what has been published on early Buddhist women is based on Pali texts from Sri Lanka. Fortunately, ten stories or avadanas about women in the Avadānaśataka, a north Indian text probably compiled 2nd-4th century C.E., offer a chance to nuance [sic] that understanding. These stories provide evidence for marital customs among north Indian Buddhists during this period, customs that show significant Brahmanical influence. In addition, these ten avadānas hint at a changing position for Buddhist nuns that may have been related to an increasingly conservative view of women emerging in the Brahmanical tradition and a revamping of the asrama system into sequential life-stages for men.

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Kwan, ‘From Abhidharma to Pramāṇa School’ (2010)

Kwan, Siu-Tong. ‘From Abhidharma to Pramāṇa School: A Critical Hermeneutics of their Epistemology and Philosophy of Language’. PhD dissertation, University of Hong Kong, 2010. 258 pp. [official site / PDF]

From the Abstract

This thesis attempts to trace the continuous philosophical developments, if any, from the Abhidharma to Pramāṇa thoughts.

Notable Quotation

Hattori’s […] precise exposition of those passages and phrases had, in fact, greatly relieved us from the hardship of reading Dignāga’s thought.
[p.18]

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Ehrhard, ‘A Rosary of Rubies’ (2008)

Franz-Karl Ehrhard. A Rosary of Rubies. The Chronicle of the Gur-rigs mDo-chen Tradition from South-Western Tibet. Collectanea Himalayica 2. München: Indus Verlag, 2008. http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/12212/ [PDF]

Contains an edition of the དཔལ་ལྡན་གུར་རིགས་མདོ་ཆེན་བརྒྱུད་པའི་ལོ་རྒྱུས་ཉུང་ངུའི་ངག་གི་བརྗོད་པ་པདམ་རཱ་གའི་ཕྲེང་བ་:

From the Abstract

This book presents a critical edition, an annotated translation and a photo­graphic reproduction of a manuscript copy of a rare chronicle of the Gur-rigs mDo-chen tradition written by Brag-dkar rta-so sPrul-sku Chos-kyi dbang-phyug (1775–1837). The text provides us with an over­view of the tradition’s development mainly through biographical accounts but also through pro­ph­ecies, prayers and praises for individual masters. The study concludes with two appendices based on the mDo chen bka’ brgyud gser ’phreng, a lin­­eage history composed in the 15th century, and the “records of teachings received” (thob yig) of three important mem­bers of the Gur family, thus allowing us to gain an insight into the trans­missions of the mDo-chen bKa’-brgyud-pa school and the interactions of its represen­tatives with other important Bud­dhist teachers up to the 18th century.

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Query: Deposit libraries for Buddhist studies

Which public libraries accept donations of scholarly books on Buddhism? I hope to facilitate the building of collections in institutions that are open to the public and support Buddhist studies. I am looking specifically for information on collections in Asia: India, peninsular Southeast Asia, China and Korea.

Please send me your recommendations, together with contact details (if you have any). This information may be compiled, entirely at my discretion, into an open list of Buddhist studies deposit libraries, unless you ask for it to be kept private. Feel free to reply either by email or in the comments.

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EB Garamond: A better class of open-source font

Georg Duffner’s EB Garamond, according to its official website, “is an open source project to create a revival of Claude Garamont’s famous humanist typeface from the mid-16th century.”

It has true italics, true bold (more like semi-bold), true subscripts and superscripts, true swash caps and true small caps (including true capital ß – see Ralf Herrmann’s crystal-clear presentation on this). There are old style figures, discretionary ligatures, and work-in-progress initials. And in particular, there is coverage of the Unicode Latin Extended Additional codeblock.

This is not only actually all in a free font, but in one that looks pretty good, as the specimen [PDF] shows:

EB Garamond specimen, p.9
EB Garamond specimen: just... wow.

Although I haven’t given EB Garamond a full tryout yet, I can confirm that it works out of the box in XeTeX, which is probably the tool that can exploit its advantages to the fullest.

A caveat: EB Garamond is work in progress; Cyrillic italics, for example, are clearly provisional at the time of writing, and some outlines were updated as recently as a couple of weeks ago on github. Nonetheless, it will be good enough to set camera-ready copy for many projects as it stands; it is certainly miles ahead of the unspeakable G****** U****** and its ilk. Thankyou, Mr. Duffner.

Files

https://github.com/georgd/EB-Garamond/blob/master/otf/EBGaramond.otf?raw=true
https://github.com/georgd/EB-Granjon/raw/master/OTF/EBGaramondItalic.otf
https://github.com/georgd/EB-Granjon/blob/master/OTF/EBGaramondBold.otf

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‘Cambridge to study ancient Sanskrit texts’ (2011/11/08)

Someone in England is studying the sources of the South Asian Buddhist mainstream?

“The project, which is led by Sanskrit-specialists Dr Vincenzo Vergiani and Dr Eivind Kahrs, will study and catalogue each of the manuscripts, placing them in their broader historical context, a university release said.

So far, so good.

“In the 1870s, Dr Daniel Wright, surgeon of the British Residency in Kathmandu, rescued the now-priceless cultural and historical artefacts from a disused temple, where they had survived largely by chance.”

Oh dear. Still, this sounds better:

“Most of the holdings will also be digitised by the library and made available through the library’s new online digital library (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/).”

Let’s hope the cameras get to those masterpieces of Nepal and the Pāla Dynasty before the local twits [see final sentence], eh?

(‘Cambridge to study ancient Sanskrit texts.’ Deccan Herald, Nov 8, 2011.)

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Administrivia: Hiatus & Linkdump

Visits have almost tripled this year. Nonetheless, save some of that bandwidth: Jinajik will be on hiatus while I do stuff for the next two weeks or so. Some nidhi to fill the break:

Dissertations & Papers

Erich Gundlach and Matthias Opfinger (2011). ‘Religiosity as a Determinant of Happiness’. https://www.econstor.eu/dspace/handle/10419/48360 [“Our interpretation of the empirical results is that the indifference curves for religiosity and other commodities of the utility function are hump-shaped.”]

Kevin McCraney (2011). ‘You’re A Bodhisattva All The Time: An Exploration of Buddho-Catholic Syncretism in the Works of Jack Kerouac’. https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/handle/1811/48976

Matthew Roe Dasti (2010). ‘Rational belief in classical India: Nyaya’s epistemology and defense of theism’. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/ETD-UT-2010-05-757

Jenny Hua-Chen Lin (2010). ‘Crushed pearls: The revival and transformation of the Buddhist nuns’ order in Taiwan’. http://hdl.handle.net/1911/61955

Hyne, Amy Louise (2009). ‘Ascetics behaving madly: on the role of the unmatta in ancient Indian ascetic traditions’ [unpublished M.A. thesis] http://catalog.lib.utexas.edu/record=b7261598~S29

A. Fadzakir (2001). ‘The Muslims of Kathmandu: A study of religious identity in a Hindu Kingdom’. http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/5288

Books:

林光明(編著) (2011)《梵漢對音初探》 [A survey on Sino-Sanskrit transcription] http://www.books.com.tw/exep/prod/booksfile.php?item=0010502929

立川武蔵 (2011) 『曼陀羅のほとけたち』 https://www.senri-f.or.jp/FS-Shop/wwb/item/199-139123.html

Other:

本庄良文先生作成 チベット語訳『倶舎論実義疏』ノート http://www2.otani.ac.jp/~akio/wiki/index.php

Last, but by no means least:

Luther Obrock (2005). ‘Honor and Shame in Greek and Sanskrit Epics’.
http://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_interstp3/52

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Unicode Siddham symbol

᠀ नमो वागीश्वराय ।

Indologists still haven’t moved the Devanagari code block much beyond the inadequate ISCII-1988. Meanwhile, Michael Everson’s ill-informed “Newari” (sic) proposal — the only rañjanā-lipi proposal out there — hasn’t gone anywhere since the 1990s. Today, something like the siddham symbol in Unicode 6.0 [test page] has to be found in the Mongolian code block:

U+1800 MONGOLIAN BIRGA

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Luo Hong, Buddhakapālatantra & Abhayapaddhati 9–14 (2010)

May it be auspicious:

Luo, Hong 罗鸿 (ed. & tr.). The Buddhakapālatantra, Chapters 9 to 14. Sanskrit Texts from the Tibetan Autonomous Region 11. Hamburg & Beijing: Asien-Afrika-Institut & China Tibetology Research Center, 2010. lxi+249 pp. ISBN 978-7-80253-188-8.

Luo, Hong 罗鸿 (ed. & tr.). Abhayākaragupta’s Abhayapaddhati, Chapters 9 to 14. Sanskrit Texts from the Tibetan Autonomous Region 14. Hamburg & Beijing: Asien-Afrika-Institut & China Tibetology Research Center, 2010. xxxiii+130 pp. ISBN 978-7-80253-309-7.

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Dinnell, ‘Sāmrājyalakṣmīpīṭhikā: An Imperial Tantric Manual from Vijayanagara’ (2011)

Darry Dinnell. ‘Sāmrājyalakṣmīpīṭhikā: An Imperial Tantric Manual from Vijayanagara’. M. A. Thesis, McGill University, 2011. 142 pp. [official site]

From the Abstract

This thesis examines the Sāmrājyalakṣmīpīṭhikā, a tantric manual for kingship created during the rule of the Vijayanagara Empire of early sixteenth-century South India. After establishing the plural, inclusive nature of religion at Vijayanagara in this period, this study identifies two crucial ways in which the text’s titular goddess Sāmrājyalakṣmī rewards kings who correctly propitiate her: firstly, by helping them to actualize god-like status on earth, and secondly, by allowing them to absolve themselves of sin (pāpa) without curbing their ability to perform the violence necessitated by their caste affiliation. In this way, Sāmrājyalakṣmīpīṭhikā articulates a solution to the classical Indian quandary of kingly dependence upon (and inferiority to) Brahmins, in the process offering kings unprecedented ritual power which translates directly into political power and, ultimately, universal overlordship (sāmrājya). The text provides another example of how tantric practices can be and were central to Indian society, aiding in statecraft and kingship.