The aim of the present study is to shed light on why the citation taken from Saraha’s Dohākośagīti and occurring in the Madhyamakaratnapradīpa, chapter 7, opens the door to some fundamental reflections concerning the authority and the “nature” of this latter text. On the basis of a historical and doctrinal analysis, here a new interpretation is put forward, according to which the Madhyamakaratnapradīpa should be considered a tenth century CE handbook, written by some unknown Buddhist teacher perhaps as a manual (...) for his lessons. The primary purpose of this teacher seems to have been the discussion—in the light of textual sources compiled up to this time—of the doctrinal and philosophical perspectives contained in the sixth century CE Bhāviveka’s Madhyamakahṛdayakārikā and Tarkajvālā. The Madhyamakaratnapradīpa could have been composed on the basis of notes written down for the benefit of this teacher’s students. Moreover, the analysis of the general style and quotes or references of the text, on the one hand, compared with the passage containing the quote from Saraha, on the other hand, lead us to take seriously into consideration the possibility that the citation borrowed from the Dohākośagīti could have been embedded into the text a little after its composition, by someone different from its original author. (shrink)

The study of textual reuse is of fundamental importance in reconstructing lost or partially lost texts, passages of which can be partly recovered through other texts in which they have been embedded. Furthermore, the study of textual reuse also provides one with a deeper understanding of the modalities of the production of texts out of previous textual materials. Finally, it constitutes a unique chance to reconsider the historicity of concepts such as “author”, “originality” and “plagiarism”, (...) which do not denote really existing universals, but have rather evolved—and still evolve—in different ways in different cultural milieus. After a general introduction and an analysis of the historical background of textual reuse in India and Europe, the essay attempts some general conclusions regarding the formulas introducing instances of textual reuse in Classical South Asian texts. (shrink)

The eleventh-century Indian Buddhist master Ratnākaraśānti presents a unique Yogācāra interpretation of tantric _maṇḍala_ visualisation in the _*Guhyasamājamaṇḍalavidhiṭīkā_. In this text, he employs the neither-one-nor-many argument to assert that the qualities of the mind represented by the deities in the _maṇḍala_ are neither the same nor different from the mind itself. He also provides five scenarios of meditation to explain the necessity of practising both the perfection method (_pāramitānaya_) and the mantra method (_mantranaya_) together in Mahāyāna. Ratnākaraśānti’s explanation exerts a (...) significant influence on the works of later Buddhist masters in India and Tibet, with parts of it being reused in the _*Śrīherukopadeśanāmasvādhiṣṭhānakrama_ by Śūnyasamādhivajra (c. the eleventh century), the eighteenth chapter of the _Āmnāyamañjarī_ by Abhayākaragupta (from the late eleventh to the twelfth century) and the tantric compendium _sNgags rim chen mo_ by the Tibetan master Tsong kha pa Blo bzang grags pa (1357–1419). This paper explores how Ratnākaraśānti’s explanation has been reused and modified in these subsequent works. While Śūnyasamādhivajra faithfully reproduced Ratnākaraśānti’s Yogācāra explanation, Abhayākaragupta modified it to align with his Madhyamaka view. Abhayākaragupta in turn influenced Tsong kha pa, who accepted Abhayākaragupta’s Madhyamaka modification in his works. This paper also engages with current scholarly discussions on textual reuse and the underlying reasons behind it. While Śūnyasamādhivajra and Abhayākaragupta assimilated Ratnākaraśānti’s explanation without acknowledgement, Tsong kha pa quoted the text by name and acknowledged Abhayākaragupta’s reuse of Ratnākaraśānti’s explanation. This paper concludes by discussing the factors that determine whether the reused text is acknowledged or not, and the possible reasons behind textual reuse. (shrink)

Studies in originality, authorship, and intertextuality in the contexts of the South Asian and Tibetan Buddhist literature are indispensible for uncovering the direct and indirect referential connections and the diverse modes of their production in an extensive mosaic of Buddhist texts. They also highlight the multifarious functions of textual reuses and re-workings in cultural productions and religious and literary reinvigorations. Moreover, a reintegration of explicit and silent citations and creative paraphrases and a recirculation of narrative adaptations, which have been (...) often sidelined in the study of Buddhist literature, have been shown to be integral to the formation of a textual authority and to the restructuring of cultural and doctrinal meanings. (shrink)

The Sārasaṅgaha is a Pāli text of XIIth–XIIIth century by the Sinhalese monk Siddhattha Thera. Its themes include the aspiration to become a Buddha, shrines, meditation, theories on rain, wind, gender and more. The main body consists of citations from the Nikāyas, the Jātakas, the Visuddhimagga and above all, from commentarial literature. By analysing the way the Sārasaṅgaha refers to and establishes a dialogue with the quoted works, this paper promotes a new assessment of the cultural and textual tendencies (...) that influenced the development of Buddhist literature especially in the Middle Ages. In particular, the analysis of this text and the quotations of which it is composed reveals the importance of commentarial literature, a literary genre that only recently has attracted the attention of Pāli scholars. (shrink)

Madhusūdana Sarasvatī wrote several treatises on Advaita philosophy. His magnum opus is the Advaitasiddhi, written in order to reply to the keen objections moved by the Dvaitin Vyāsatīrtha’s Nyāyāmṛta. Advaitasiddhi is verily a turning point into the galaxy of Vedānta, not only as far as its replies are concerned, but also for the reutilization of earlier vedāntic material and its reformulation by means of the highly sophisticated language of the new school of logic. This article is an attempt to contextualize (...) Madhusūdana’s works in a broader context through three looking glasses: the analysis of how Madhusūdana refers to his own works, in order to reconstruct a relative chronology among them; Madhusūdana’s adherence to the tenets of the previous Advaita tradition, how much he is indebted to Vyāsatīrtha, how he quotes him and how he replies to him; Madhusūdana’s acquaintance with other textual traditions, mainly Vyākaraṇa, Pūrva Mīmāṃsā and Nyāya. (shrink)

Digital cultural archives and databases are promising an era of heritage democratization and an enhancement of the role of arts in everyday cultures. It is hoped that mass digitization initiatives in many corners of the world can facilitate the secure preservation of human cultural heritage, with easy access and diverse ways for creative reuse. Understanding the dialogic processes within these increasingly vast databases necessitates a dynamic conceptualization of data they contain. The paper argues that this can be found in (...) Juri Lotman’s cultural semiotic notion of text and text’s functions in culture. It elaborates on the three key characteristics of text – expression, boundary, and structure – as manifested within the digital semiosphere. At the same time, the textual dialogues within digital archives are increasingly conditioned by metadata, which is hereby conceptualized as metalanguage inducing a modeling effect on archived texts and defining their possible sphere of dynamics. To balance the explanations of creative operations of digital archives, the paper also demonstrates their auto-communicative mechanisms for facilitating cultural continuities and stability. (shrink)

The paper offers a detailed investigation of select passages from the Vita II Sancti Remacli, a hagiographic text produced in the diocese of Liège in the last decades of the tenth century. The purpose of this investigation is threefold. First, to illustrate the point that the tenth-century Latin hagiographic texts produced in the diocese of Liège did not display quotations from classical and patristic authors only as petrified forms of frozen ancient wisdom with a merely decorative function, but rather as (...) raw gems which were polished and adjusted to fit seamlessly into a new framework. Thus, they could enhance both the form and contents of texts closely connected to their age’s political and intellectual realities. Second, to show that nineteenth- and twentieth-century editions of such texts can act as distorting mirrors to modern readers and researchers, since, due to an editorial strategy that privileged classical material over its medieval context, the editors sometimes completely neglected how quotations from ancient authors were re-worked by the tenth-century hagiographer following the stylistic requirements of rhymed prose. Third, to suggest as a necessary corrective to this distorting approach a new way of reading and consequently editing these types of texts, which places classical and patristic quotations in their proper context, by paying due attention to manuscript evidence, to the stylistic requirements of their new context, and to the complex functions they play in their new textual environment. (shrink)

This book seeks to explain why different systems of sovereign states have built different types of fundamental institutions to govern interstate relations. Why, for example, did the ancient Greeks operate a successful system of third-party arbitration, while international society today rests on a combination of international law and multilateral diplomacy? Why did the city-states of Renaissance Italy develop a system of oratorical diplomacy, while the states of absolutist Europe relied on naturalist international law and "old diplomacy"? Conventional explanations of basic (...) institutional practices have difficulty accounting for such variation. Christian Reus-Smit addresses this problem by presenting an alternative, "constructivist" theory of international institutional development, one that emphasizes the relationship between the social identity of the state and the nature and origin of basic institutional practices. Reus-Smit argues that international societies are shaped by deep constitutional structures that are based on prevailing beliefs about the moral purpose of the state, the organizing principle of sovereignty, and the norm of procedural justice. These structures inform the imaginations of institutional architects as they develop and adjust institutional arrangements between states. As he shows with detailed reference to ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, absolutist Europe, and the modern world, different cultural and historical contexts lead to profoundly different constitutional structures and institutional practices. The first major study of its kind, this book is a significant addition to our theoretical and empirical understanding of international relations, past and present. (shrink)

A canonical formalism for the relativistic classical mechanics of many particles is proposed. The evolution equations for a charged particle in an electromagnetic field are obtained and the relativistic two-body problem with an invariant interaction is treated. Along the same line a quantum formalism for the spinless relativistic particle is obtained by means of imprimitivity systems according to Mackey theory. A quantum formalism for the spin-1/2 particle is constructed and a new definition of spin1/2 in relativity is proposed. An evolution (...) equation for the spin-1/2 particle in an external electromagnetic field is given. The Bargmann Michel, and Telegdi equation follows from this formalism as a quasiclassical approximation. Finally, a new relativistic model for hydrogenlike atoms is proposed. The spectrum predicted is in agreement with Dirac's when radiative corrections have been added. (shrink)

We live today in the first global system of sovereign states in history, encompassing all of the world's polities, peoples, religions and civilizations. Christian Reus-Smit presents a new account of how this system came to be, one in which struggles for individual rights play a central role. The international system expanded from its original European core in five great waves, each involving the fragmentation of one or more empires into a host of successor sovereign states. In the most important, associated (...) with the Westphalian settlement, the independence of Latin America, and post-1945 decolonization, the mobilization of new ideas about individual rights challenged imperial legitimacy, and when empires failed to recognize these new rights, subject peoples sought sovereign independence. Combining theoretical innovation with detailed historical case studies, this book advances a new understanding of human rights and world politics, with individual rights deeply implicated in the making of the global sovereign order. (shrink)

The quality of our theoretical argumentation, the diversity and insights of our methods, and our general level of understanding are markedly better than a generation ago. However, this progress has been driven by a division of labor with increased specialization that has led each part of the field to become narrower.

Animal people are usually confident that Cartesianism is something of the past and that modern science clearly establishes that animals are sentient beings. But actually the scientific status of sentience is anything but firmly established. Not only is the subjective point of view absent from current science; it is precluded by construction from our fundamental realms of knowledge. Physics — the mother-science once we reject Cartesian dualism — is currently unable to include sentience in its account of the world. A (...) large part of the philosophy of mind describes a mindless mind, from which subjectivity — feeling, qualia — has been stripped, leaving only in place functional relations. This situation paves the way for discourses in which sentience seems to escape the realm of knowledge to fall into that of private beliefs, which individuals can choose as freely as their religion. This is a real obstacle to having animal sentience taken seriously; as such it has been largely underestimated. We believe it necessary for the movement for animals to understand that it cannot by-pass the “mind-matter” problem. We must not allow the existence and relevance of animal sentience to be denied in the name of science. One path we are contemplating is a “Declaration on Sentience” in which scientists and other thinkers would subscribe to the following assertion: sentience is an objective reality of the world and belongs to the realm of science. Despite the current intractability of the “mind-matter” problem, we do have something on our side. Although we cannot prove the reality of sentience, we can show it impossible for anyone to disbelieve in it — just as no one can really disbelieve in the reality of the physical world. We thus have enough reasons to reject the main ways in which sentience is denied or dismissed in many realms of current philosophy or science. These reasons are based on our own situation as sentient and deliberative beings. (shrink)

This is French version of John Stuart Mill's essay "On Nature" accompanied by a introduction by the translator and a lexicon of English words (used in moral philosophy) often wrongly translated into French and a short reflection on the two senses of the word "law" that often cause confusion.

Este artigo discute uma hipótese hermenêutica da exegese de Platão com o intuito de mostrar que, ante os paradigmas de leitura existentes, ela oferece resposta original para o problema da crítica aos diálogos médios contida nos diálogos tardios. Depois de comentar algumas dificuldades da interpretação de Platão (seção I) e a vigência de diferentes paradigmas de interpretação dos Diálogos, a hipótese basanística é apresentada (seção II) com auxílio de dois trechos da República. Em seguida, são analisadas algumas de suas vantagens (...) (seção III) e alguns de seus problemas (seção IV). A conclusão aponta para seu caráter inovador e sua eficiência como ferramenta de leitura dos Diálogos. (shrink)

The present article intends to approach as its theme the encounter between the religions in the perspective of the hope in Jürgen Moltmann. In the first moment, it is noticed that, due to the serious problems that affect today’s society, there is the necessity of having a cooperation among the different religions, which will only be possible if there is a perspective of change based on hope in the transformation of the current reality Secondly, there is the discussion about the (...) need for a theology of hope that changes our thoughts and builds new perspectives from faith, and that strengthens the collaborative bonds of all those who seek the same ideal of building an alternative world, where justice and peace are its base. A third moment will be based on the following question: from the eschaton, what other world is it possible to build? As a thesis, Moltmann’s thought will be the reason to understand that in the eschaton what unites prevails over what divides, for the urgencies of transformation overcome divergences, being fundamental the perspective of hope as lens from which it is possible a collaborative encounter between religions. (shrink)

Rāmānujācārya’s Tantrarahasya, a philosophical treatise mainly dedicated to the hermeneutics and epistemology of the Pūrva Mīmāṃsā School, might be considered hardly more than a jigsaw of reused passages, since one third of it has a direct source, and a further third has its roots in interlanguage usage. It is thus a perfect case study for investigating the compositional habits of philosophical authors in pre-modern śāstra literature. The article analyses the formal aspects of textual reuse by Rāmānujācārya and draws (...) some general conclusions regarding the author’s intellectual affiliation to Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā on the basis of the way he reuses his school’s texts as compared to the reuse of other schools’ texts. A final section discusses the possibility of generalising these results to the approach to textual reuse of the whole Pūrva Mīmāṃsā. (shrink)

The phyi dar or ‛later dissemination’ of Buddhism in Tibet is known to be a crucial formative period of Tibetan Buddhism; yet, many questions still wait to be answered: How did Tibetan Buddhist teachers of this time approach the Buddhist scriptures? Did they quote from books or from memory? Did they study Buddhism through original Sūtras or exegetical literature? To what degree was the text of the scriptures fixed and standardised before the Bka’ ’gyur and the Bstan ’gyur were compiled? (...) In search for some answers to questions such as these, the present article focuses on the gzhung pa or ‛scriptural tradition” of the Bka’-gdams-pa school of Tibetan Buddhism. Their works contain quotations from the Indian Buddhist scriptures that sometimes differ markedly from the mainstream editions of the Bka’ ’gyur and Bstan ’gyur. There are several possible explanations for such discrepancies: The Tibetan authors might be quoting a different Tibetan translation that was later discarded by the redactors of the Tibetan canon; they might be quoting from a secondary source such as a commentary or Buddhist anthology; or they might be quoting from memory, changing the text either deliberately or by accident. Giving examples from works of the early Bka’-gdams-pa masters this article discusses how textual deviations from the canonical versions can be explained. It will thereby provide insights into the way the Indian Buddhist scriptures were studied and transmitted in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition around the 11th–13th centuries. (shrink)

The article presents a preliminary survey of textual reuse in Nepalese collections of j?takas and avad?nas, focusing in particular on three works: the Avad?na?ataka, the Divy?vad?na, and the Dv?vi??atyavad?nakath?. The reassessment of the manuscript tradition of these three Sanskrit collections, based on Nepalese manuscripts and Tibetan translations, sheds more light on the role of scribes in the creation of these collections and of the Nepalese avad?nam?l? literature. In particular, the great role played in the 17th century by the (...) Nepalese scribe and scholar Jayamuni in shaping the text of the Avad?na?ataka, the Divy?vad?na, and many other Buddhist narrative works is brought to light. The result of this preliminary survey shows that a study of this type of collections based on the available critical editions should be rethought in the light of the specific character of their manuscript and textual transmission in medieval and early modern Nepal. (shrink)

This paper examines a passage of the eleventh chapter of the Rigs gter of Sa skya Paṇḍita on the division of arguments by consequence of the form “Because S is P, it follows that it is Q” with respect to the type of relation between P and Q. This passage appears in quite different versions in several available recensions of the Rigs gter, all of which are problematic to some extent. The different interpretations of the commentators can be shown to (...) derive from their reliance on different versions of the text, which they strove to make sense of through two distinct strategies. Following up on the examination of a division of arguments by consequence along the same line in the works of Sa skya Paṇḍita’s Tibetan predecessors, in particular Phya pa Chos kyi seng ge and mTshur ston gZhon nu seng ge :883–938, 2016b), I evaluate the diverging versions of the Rigs gter against a coherent logical scenario founded on Sa skya Paṇḍita’s discussion pertaining to the types of logical reasons in inference in the tenth chapter of his work and comparison with the classification by Phya pa. I offer a hypothesis regarding the genesis of the problematic versions of the passage on the classification of consequences in the Rigs gter based on the comparison with the classification found in mTshur ston’s epistemological work. I propose that the composition of this portion of the Rigs gter might have involved a textual reuse of mTshur ston’s classification, even though mTshur ston and Sa skya Paṇḍita disagree on background issues. This very disagreement imposed changes to the reused text that led to problematic readings. (shrink)

The bulk of the present volume focuses on the reuse of Buddhist texts. The Introduction gives some background to the topic of textual reuse in general and discusses the reasons for undertaking the analysis of textual reuse within Buddhist texts. It then elaborates on the extent of its pervasiveness within Buddhist literature through the example of Tibetan ritual texts. Lastly, it takes stock of the articles on text-reuse and discusses some general lines of interpretation (...) of the phenomenon of textual reuse in Buddhism, highlighting the importance of the genre over that of the time and language of composition. Thus, philosophical or technical texts tend to quote explicitly, whereas ritual texts see the predominance of the conveyed message over the transparency of the transmission so that reuse is mostly silent. Religious texts of various forms come in between these two extremes. (shrink)

The Kāśikāvṛtti, the oldest available complete commentary on Pāṇini’s grammar, the Aṣṭādhyāyī, is found quoted often in the later Pāṇinian grammatical tradition. These quotations throw light on a number of aspects of the text of the Kāśikāvṛtti. This paper focuses on how this later Pāṇinian grammatical tradition views the modifications in the text of the Aṣṭādhyāyī and concludes that also the tradition ascribes these modifications to the Kāśikāvṛtti. Further, this paper also attempts to show that these quotations can be shown (...) to have interacted with the manuscript tradition of the Kāśikāvṛtti and indeed with the help of these quotations it becomes easier to better understand the manuscript transmission of the Kāśikāvṛtti. Thus, this article focuses on one of the applications of the study of quotations: through an analysis of the content of the quoted passages of the Kāśikāvṛtti in later Grammatical literature, it discusses the history of the transmission of the KV and of the text it comments upon, i.e., Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī. It also shows how a study of quotations is an unavoidable complement of the analysis of manuscripts for scholars aiming at the reconstruction of texts so remote in time. (shrink)

Dharmottara, one of the most outstanding commentators of Dharmakīrti, re-uses arguments in the Pramāṇaviniścayaṭīkā, his broad commentary on Dharmakīrti’s Pramāṇaviniścaya, from his independent essay, the Kṣaṇabhaṅgasiddhi. By analyzing contents of re-used arguments in the Pramāṇaviniścayaṭīkā, this paper clarifies Dharmottara’s intention of paraphrasing his arguments in his commentarial work on Dharmakīrti. I argue that, in terms of content, such arguments are original and never fit into Dharmakīrti’s own system. It can be said that Dharmottara has a clear intention to display his (...) new innovations not only in his independent monograph, but also in his commentarial work. For Dharmottara, a commentary on Dharmakīrti is a better place than an independent monograph for showing off his advanced notions, since it is only in a commentary that his ideas can stand out directly against those of Dharmakīrti. In this sense, Dharmottara writes his commentary strategically. At the end of the article I discuss the significance of composing independent monographs or essays in the intellectual history of medieval India in the case of Dharmottara. (shrink)

This article examines some of the strategies adopted by the authors of Sanskrit law digests in dealing with quotations. Given the peculiar nature of the Nibandhas, which in the majority of cases are almost exclusively made of quotations from authoritative texts, citations are here not only a method to support a viewpoint, but constitute the very core of the text. In order to narrow the topic, the analysis has been restricted to a sub-category of the Dharmanibandha genre, i.e. the so (...) called dānanibandhas, the digests specialized on the rules for gifting. Given their chronological distribution, these texts can be considered representative of the tendencies emerging in this branch of literature. The focus will lie both on the general rules and conventions accepted by the various Nibandha authors, and on concrete examples of the different methods applied while quoting from the same texts. Particular attention will be given to the methodological statements detected in these works, like the incipit of Lakṣmīdhara’s Kṛtyakalpataru and that of Ballālasena’s Dānasāgara. (shrink)

Examining the function and style of the references to grammatical literature found in a substantial section of Helārāja’s Prakīrṇaprakāśa on Bhartṛhari’s third book of the Vākyapadīya, the article argues that the likely ideological motive of this commentary was to establish its mūla work firmly within the Brahmanical canon and should therefore be seen in the context of the appropriation of Bhartṛhari’s ideas on the part of the roughly contemporary Pratyabhijñā philosophers of Kashmir. Incidentally, it also touches upon the making of (...) the Pāṇinian tradition and the relation between Helārāja and Kaiyaṭa, the Kashmiri commentator of Mahābhāṣya. (shrink)