3. Philology and Indology Flashcards
Philology Definition
Renan 1892:
modern spirit, that is, rationlism, criticism, liberalism, was founded the same day philology was founded… The founders of the modern spirit are the philologists
Critique and marginalisation:
Cerciglini 1989:
“Philology is a bourgeois, paternalist, and hygienist system of thought about the family; it cherishes filiation, tracks down adulterers, and is afraid of contamination. Its thought is based on what is wrong (the variant being a form of deviant behavior), and it is the basis for a positive methodology.”
de Veeer 2001:
“[The] philological project of editing Hindu texts (…) is a construction of a Sanskrit canon that privileges a “classical age” before A.D. 1200 and marginalizes or ignores (…) literatures written in modern Indian languages, such as Tamil, Bengali, or Urdu.
[…]
In some respects orientalist philology was simply the successor of brahmanical philology.”
= more attention to practical parts of society
Reaction Pollock 2009:
“….
philology is, or should be, the discipline of making sense of texts. It is not the theory of language—that’s linguistics—or the theory of meaning or truth—that’s philosophy— but the theory of textuality as well as the history of textualized meaning… philology is and has always been a global knowledge practice, as global as textualized language itself, albeit no such global account of its history has ever been written. Thus, both in theory and in practice across time and space, philology merits the same centrality among the disciplines as philosophy or mathematics.”
Codicology
Philological subfield:
- DIPLOMATICS
The concern for the authenticity of documents, also reflected, for example, in Indian prescriptive literature (e.g. the Dharmaśāstra).
- PALEOGRAPHY
RelateD to epigraphy (Inschriften)
TEXTUAL CRITICISM
CORE FIELD OF PHILOLOGY
Edition of texts develop in Europe in the renaissance (important antecedents and
parallels in South Asia and China, Pollock)
Ø Modern Textual Criticism inaugurated by Karl Lachmann (1793-1851), founder of the
stemmatic (or genealogical) method.
Basic aim: establishing the text of a work on the basis of that of existing witnesses, by selecting, collating, and correcting them. Informed by (comparative) historical linguistics.
stemma codicum
Genealogical trees of manuscripts
conceptual method
identifies hyper elements of texts
The critical edition:
i.e. ca 2010 Example of a critical edition: a Buddhist protective text (dhāraṇī) transmitted in Nepal
method: recording diversity, reading unity
Pollocks three meanings
Problems interpreting classical Indian texts:
1. “Textual meaning” (cf. Skt. paramārthika-sat)
Belief (conceit?) about the recoverability of an early/original meaning of a text. TRADITIONAL APPROACH
2. “Contextual meaning “(cf. Skt. vyavahārika-sat)
Attention to “vernacular mediations”, to traditional hermeneutics, to use of texts in given historical settings. (HOW, WHERE AND BY WHOM a part. text was received)
3. “Philologist’s meaning”
Impossibility for the philologist, even if applying an objectivizing method, to erase himself from the philological act. Identification of one’s situatedness in a genealogy of knowledge and an academic field
IDEAL: Kombination of all three
The problem of “Ur-Text”
Presupposes an “autograph”, i.e. a single author and a unique redactional moment. But:
Ø Some genres of texts, such as Buddhist sūtras, are from their very origin, plural.
Ø The stemmatic method does not account well for oral or hybrid transmissions.
Ø The“author is not so much an isolated genius as it is (like the title and other paratexts) an ordering factor of discourses, cf. Foucault, Genette.
The plural state of texts however do not empty the usefulness of hypothesizing an antecedent when editing/interpreting texts.
Recent studies: Many treatises in fact were delivered orally by Indian masters, and were textualized through the notes taken by their disciples (but notes from student A differs from that of student B!)
Triangulation method
For texts composed among Indian communities (e.g. sūtras, Vinaya texts, or treatises):
when an Indic witness is preserved, the consultation of Chinese and Tibetan translations might help the establishment of the text (to address a problem in the transmission)
when no Indic witness is preserved, triangulation of the various Chinese and Tibetan versions.
Passive transmitters
Traditional philology disregarded the role of the “copyists”, taken as passive (or ignorant) agents in the textual transmission, or as responsible for corruptions.
Ø Does not account well for the possibility of erudite “editors” to have consulted several witnesses, exclusion of “contaminated” or “interpolated” testimonies.
Increasing attention, among philologists working with Indian texts, to the textual practices underlying the sources that they study (cf. Pollock 2015). In some cases, the agency and cultural projects of individual editors may be retraced.
South Asian intellectuals as philologists and editors Buddhist texts
Example of Jayamuni, 17th c. Newārī pandit:
Scholar active in the mid-17th c., belonging to a lineage of erudite and charismatic masters based in Pāṭan, at the Mahābauddhavihāra (a copy of Bodhgayā’s main temple)
Active collector and “editor” of Buddhist texts, which he copied, updated (also linguistically) and reinterpreted.
“sanskritizing”
“neutral” editors?
- Each editorial/hermeneutic enterprise is the product of its own-time.
- It reflects not only the state of the field at a particular time, but also the sensibility and presuppositions of a given individual.
