Pu?pik?: Tracing Ancient India Through Texts and Traditions

Nina Mirnig, Peter-Daniel Szanto, Michael Williams

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781782970446
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

It is perhaps commonplace to say that India is one of the world's richest and most enticing cultures. One thousand years have passed since Albiruni, arguably the first "Indologist", wrote his outsider's account of the subcontinent and two hundred years have passed since the inception of Western Indology. And yet, what this monumental scholarship has achieved is still outweighed by the huge tracts of terra incognita: thousands of works lacking scholarly attention and even more manuscripts which still await careful study whilst decaying in the unforgiving Indian climate. In September 2009 young researchers and graduate students in this field came together to present their cutting-edge work at the first International Indology Graduate Research Symposium, which was held at Oxford University. This volume, the first in a new series which will publish the proceedings of the Symposium, will make important contributions to the study of the classical civilisation of the Indian sub-continent. The series, edited by Nina Mirnig, Péter-Dániel Szántó and Michael Williams, will strive to cover a wide range of subjects reaching from literature, religion, philosophy, ritual and grammar to social history, with the aim that the research published will not only enrich the field of classical Indology but eventually also contribute to the studies of history and anthropology of India and Indianised Central and South-East Asia.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Defining the Svara Bearing Unit in the siksavedanga Literature: Unmasking a veiled debate
• Chapter 2: Puranic transformations in Cola Cidambaram: The Cidambaramahatmya and the Sutasamhita
• Chapter 3: Unfuzzying the fuzzy. The distinction between rasas and bhavas in Bharata and Abhinavagupta
• Chapter 4: A contribution of Vedanta to the histroy of Mimamsa: Prakasatman's interpretation of "verbal effectuation" (sabdabhavana)
• Chapter 5: Married women and courtesans: Marriage and women's room for manoeuvre as depicted in the Katha-sarit-sagara
• Chapter 6: Towards a new edition of the corpus of Pallava inscriptions
• Chapter 7: Did Mimamsa authors formulate a theory of action
• Chapter 8: Trajectories of dance on the surface of theatrical meanings: a contribution to the theory of rasa from the fourth chapter of the Abhinavabharati
• Chapter 9: Dravya as a Permanent Referent: The Potential Sarvastivada Influence on Patanjali's Paspasahnika
• Chapter 10: Rituals in the Mahasahasrapramardanasutra
• Chapter 11: The Lingodbhava Myth in Early Saiva Sources
• Chapter 12: Yantras in the Buddhist Tantras-Yamaritantras and Related Literature
• Chapter 13: Saiva Siddhanta Sraddha Towards an evaluation of the socio-religious landscape envisaged by pre-12th century sources
• Chapter 14: Constituents of Buddhahood as Presented in the Buddhabhumisutra and the 9th Chapter of the Mahayanasutralamkara: A Comparative Analysis
• Chapter 15: The ganacchandas in the Indian metrical tradition
• Chapter 16: Anatmata, Soteriology and Moral Psychology in Indian Buddhism
• Chapter 17: Paramarthika or aparamarthika? On the ontological status of separation according to Abhinavagupta
• Chapter 18: Thy Fierce Lotus-Feet: Danger and Benevolence in Mediaeval Sanskrit Poems to Mahisasuramardini-Durga
• Chapter 19: Minor Vajrayana texts II. A new manuscript of the Gurupancasika
• Chapter 20: Can we infer unestablished entities? A Madhva contribution to the Indian theory of inference