Cikitsā

Some OA journals that publish S-Asia related research

2012-02-02T15:57:00.002Z

And see the India-related list maintained by Scholars Without Borders (mostly science and medicine):

http://www.swb.co.in/open-access-journals

colophons, names of text portions in Sanskrit manuscripts

2012-01-26T16:40:00.002Z

I believe that David Pingree introduced the term "post-colophon" into Indian manuscript studies when he wrote his catalogue of the Bodleian Chandra Shum Shere jyotiṣa collection.

Am I right that nobody outside Indological circles (and those influenced by indologists in the last few decades) uses the term "post-colophon"?

Here's a grid of usages:

Key: Pingree (various catalogues, starting 1984)
Tripathi: C. Tripathi, Cat. of Jaina MSS at Strasbourg
Wikipedia: see here and links.
X: no special term

Description      Pingree     Tripathi     Wikipedia (andnon-indologists)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Final verse
of text                 X               X              explicit

iti...samāptam    colophon colophon X (or colophon?)

saṃvat phrase post- Scribal colophon
colophon Remarks

after saṃvat
phrase X post- X
colophon

Pratapaditya Pal uses "post-colophon" in his 1978 Arts of Nepal book
(http://tinyurl.com/37n8f2z), in the same sense as Pingree. Perhaps
that's where David got it?

Copyright and Open Access

2012-01-16T14:08:00.003Z

Never sign away the copyright of your own writings. Instead, grant the publisher a license that gives them what they want, and assigns to you the rights that you want. Here are such licenses, in several languages:

http://copyrighttoolbox.surf.nl/copyrighttoolbox/authors/licence/

For background on the Zwolle principles, see here:

http://copyright.surf.nl/copyright/zwolle_principles.php

and see also the SURF initiative, on Copyright Management for Scholarship:

http://copyright.surf.nl/copyright/

ibus bug fix

2012-01-14T03:00:00.000Z

Typing Sanskrit in Ubuntu Linux is normally very convenient, using the built-in ibus and m17n systems. You can write देवनागरी or romanisation (devanāgarī) with just a switch of the keyboard input method. (Thansiang's input method for romanisation input is effective and convenient, but has to be added manually because it isn't included in the main m17n distribution.)

However, with the update to Ubuntu 11.10 in October 2011, a bug was introduced that spoiled typing for several Asian languages, for users of the standard Ubuntu Unity and Gnome windows managers. The symptom was that as you typed a space, the letters around the cursor jumped into the wrong order.

The November solution by fujiwarat fixed things. But it hasn't yet made its way into the standard Ubuntu updates. At the time of writing, you have to update your ibus installation to version 1.4.0 manually. One way to do it is here, kindly provided by Alex Lee.

Oneiric Ocelot upgrade woes

2011-10-28T09:21:00.001+01:00

My main desktop machine got in a terrible mess during the Oneiric update. Could have been my fault - I started the update and then left the machine for two days. When I got back to it, it was frozen, and on hard reboot it wouldn't boot. Finally, I got it back by booting from a USB stick and then using chroot to get a pseudo-login as root on the hard disk.

http://karuppuswamy.com/wordpress/2010/06/02/how-to-chroot-to-ubuntu-using-live-cd-to-fix-grub-rescue-prompt/

Having a network connection, that enabled me to clean up the system with dpkg and apt-get, so I fetched all the latest versions of everything and updated and upgraded tidily. But still couldn't get a boot because of an obscure network problem with connecting to the bus. Finally solved by these (weirdly written) instructions:

http://journalxtra.com/2011/10/upgrade-oneiric-ocelot/

Now up and running, amazingly.

--

and another thing...

The compiz grid feature developed a fault about putting a window on the top-right of the screen. Solution is here: https://launchpad.net/~lbrulet-8/+archive/ppa

Ubuntu Evince menu fonts turn to garbage

2011-10-09T11:00:00.001+01:00

Grr, recurrence of the old, old problem that the Evince menus turn to little squares like this:

Solution:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=8216711&postcount=4,
that says:

sudo mv /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.evince ~/
sudo /etc/init.d/apparmor restart

Simplest Sanskrit XeLaTeX file

2011-10-04T19:16:00.000+01:00

Input:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setmainfont[Script=Devanagari]{Nakula}

\begin{document}
Your Devanāgarī looks like this: आसीद्राजा नलो नाम and your romanized stuff looks like this: āsīd rājā nalo nāma.
\end{document}

Output:

You can get the Nakula font (and its twin, Sahadeva) from John Smith's website, http://bombay.indology.info

Guṭkās

2011-10-03T19:52:00.000+01:00

Sanskrit booklets, or guṭkās, contain several works collected between one set of covers. They were presumably copied sequentially by their owners as a vade mecum of useful knowledge.

Biswas 0891 (available digitized, no. 090393 at http://www.jainlibrary.org/menus_cate.php) is a series of catalogues of MSS in Jaina libraries in Rajasthan. Volume 2 (1954), 73 ff. has a section that describes 222 such booklets, and lists their contents in detail. A study of these particular collocations of texts would provide a valuable insight into reading habits, the circulation of texts and knowledge, and the personal tastes and obsessions of pre-modern Indian readers.

printer driver

2011-08-26T16:44:00.002+01:00

Ubuntu, HP LJ 1300 - use the Gutenprint or the Foomatic/pxlmono driver. Not CUPS or HPLIP.

Greedy grepping

2011-08-25T14:41:00.002+01:00

to make a regular expression not greedy, append ?

Gleick

2011-07-27T22:45:00.000+01:00

I'm reading Gleick's The Information. Very enjoyable and interesting romp through loosely-connected stories in the history of science from Babbage to Shannon and beyond. I've very much enjoyed all of Gleick's books.

Viruses and bacteria

2011-07-27T13:06:00.000+01:00

Why computer "virus"? The metaphor would surely work better with the image of a computer "bacterium," wouldn't it? A bacterium can be eradicated, unlike most viruses. Bacteria can be contagious, and can multiply cells and colonize a particular location.

Yes, "Computer bacterium" from now on, I think.

Natty tweaks

2011-07-14T14:30:00.000+01:00

Essential tweaks for 11.04, from Webupd8

Ubuntu / dropbox

2011-04-21T12:53:00.002+01:00

If you get the warning

Unable to monitor filesystem
Please run "echo 100000 | sudo tee /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches" and restart Dropbox to correct the problem.

here's one way to increase the default value of /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches at startup, so one doesn't have to do it manually at every boot.

As root (or with sudo), create a file

/etc/sysctl.d/30-inotify.conf

with the contents

fs.inotify.max_user_watches=100001

Reboot, or run "service procps start".

That's it!

devanagari.sty / xelatex clash

2010-12-27T17:31:00.000Z

devanagari.sty uses the LaTeX2e font conventions (of course). Today I had an old document using devanagari.sty that I'm just converting to XeLaTeX and UTF8. It was fine, except that the document's English parts were in the chosen polyglossia font, while the table of contents was in cmr.

That was because of a statement

\def\DNrmdefault{cmr}

used by \NormalFont in devanagari.sty

The answer was to define \englishfont

\newfontfamily\englishfont{IndUni-P}

and then redefine \NormalFont as follows:

\DeclareRobustCommand\NormalFont{\dn@penitshape\englishfont}

In the end, this is all transitional nonsense, of course, since I will get rid of devanagari.sty and use XeLaTeX's internal facilities for the Devanagari in a day or two.

Hyphenating Sanskrit in roman transliteration

2010-11-22T13:46:00.003Z

%!TeX program = xelatex
%
% Thanks to Yves Codet for the first version of this test file, and to Yves
% and Jonathan Kew for the hyphenation tables
% for Sanskrit (hyph-sa.tex):

% This file exemplifies the case where some Sanskrit is embedded in a
% mainly-English document, but the Sanskrit words are appropriately
% hyphenated. The Sanskrit words are in the argument of the
% \textsanskrit{} command.

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{polyglossia}

\setdefaultlanguage{english}
\setmainfont{Charis SIL}

\setotherlanguage{sanskrit}
\newfontfamily\sanskritfont{Charis SIL}

\textwidth=0.5cm
\parindent 0pt

\begin{document}

Sanskrit hyphenation:
\par\smallskip

\textsanskrit{manum ekāgram āsīnam abhigamya maharṣayaḥ |\par}

\bigskip

English hyphenation:
\par\smallskip

manum ekāgram āsīnam abhigamya maharṣayaḥ |

\end{document}

DLI - DownLoad Impossible?

2010-09-03T22:50:00.003+01:00

An exceptionally useful series of remarks about the Digital Library of India from PW, here: http://www.indologica.de/drupal/?q=node/1240

Thanks, Peter!

XeLaTeX, Velthuis encoding, and palatal nasals

2010-09-01T11:13:00.002+01:00

When using the Velthuis input coding for Devanāgarī, and wanting to have it handled by XeLaTeX, one finds the palatal ñ disappears in the Nāgarī.

input: sa~njaya

output: स न्जय

That's because the Velthuis input code for ञ् is ~n, and the "~" is a special code in TeX, meaning "hard space".

Here's the workaround. I define a font-switching command \dev that will turn Velthuis into Devanāgarī. \dev is mostly made up of "\textsanskrit" which is set up using the standard XeLaTeX/polyglossia \newfontfamily commands. \textsanskrit does the work of invoking the mapping-conversion (from XeTeX's velthuis-sanskrit.tec file).

But just before \textsanskrit, we change tilde into a normal character. And after \textsanskrit, we turn tilde back into an "active" hard space. We use the \aftergroup command so that the "active" version of tilde is activated after the closing of the group that contains the Devanāgarī.

Here's the code:

\newfontfamily\textsanskrit [Script=Devanagari,Mapping=velthuis-sanskrit]{Nakula}

% Make the tilde into a normal letter of the alphabet

\def\maketildeletter{\catcode`\~=11 }

% Return tilde to being the default TeX "active" character for hard space

\def\maketildeactive{\catcode`\~=13 }

\def\dev{\maketildeletter\textsanskrit \aftergroup\maketildeactive}

Here's how you use it:

input: {\dev sa~njaya uvaaca}. What did Dr~Sañjaya say?

output: सञ्जय उवाच. What did Dr Sañjaya say?

where that space betwen "Dr" and "Sañjaya" is hard, and you can't break a line there.

Enjoy.

Wellcome Library: The Test of Time

2010-08-03T19:22:00.000+01:00

Wellcome Library: The Test of Time: "Last year we brought you news of The Test of Time, a BBC Radio 4 series in which present day scientists reflected on the work of their ancie..."

Switching from Devanāgarī to Roman with a single command

2010-07-06T19:56:00.001+01:00

I have to admit even I am startled by the success of this.
In the input file below, I changed the single command:

\setdefaultlanguage{sanskrit}

\setdefaultlanguage{english}

and the result was the following:

How do I install RomDev mapping for XeLaTeX (Unicode transliteration -> Devanāgarī)?

2010-07-06T18:03:00.005+01:00

[Update, February 2011: Somdev has moved his blog to http://pratibham.blogspot.com/.]

Somdev Vasudev's RomDev mapping is installed as follows:

The actual mapping file is published by Somdev in his blog, here:
http://sarasvatam.blogspot.com/2010/03/updated-teckit-romdev.html
[Update Feb 2011: now at http://pratibham.blogspot.com/2010/03/updated-teckit-romdev.html]
Cut and paste this text, and save it in a Unicode file called RomDev.map. Save that file in a place which XeTeX can "see," e.g., something like local/texmf/fonts/misc/xetex/fontmapping/
You now need to compile the human-readable *.map file into a binary *.tec file, so that XeTeX can read it directly. This is done by the program Teckit, which you can get here:
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=TECkitDownloads
I'm working with Ubuntu GNU/Linux. For me, the command is,

teckit_compile RomDev.map -o RomDev.tec

I'm afraid I don't know the Windows or Mac command invocation.
Now you have a file in a place like
local/texmf/fonts/misc/xetex/fontmapping/RomDev.tec
Run the command that rebuilds the database of files that TeX knows about. In Linux it's
sudo mktexlsr
That's it! XeTeX and XeLaTeX can now see, and make use of the RomDev mapping, that converts Unicode transliteration into Devanāgarī, as exemplified in my earlier blog posts below.

A minimal edition of a Sanskrit verse, using XeLaTeX and Ledmac

2010-07-06T15:27:00.005+01:00

And here's the input for the above:

\documentclass{book}

% Set up things for XeLaTeX, and Devanagari.

% Simplified version of http://cikitsa.blogspot.com/2010/07/xelatex-for-sanskrit.html

\usepackage{polyglossia} % the multilingual support package

% Next, from the polyglossia manual:

\setdefaultlanguage{sanskrit} % this is mostly going to be Sanskrit,

\setotherlanguage{french} % with some French embedded in it,

\setotherlanguage{english} % and some English.

% These will call appropriate hyphenation.

\usepackage{xltxtra} % standard for nearly all XeLaTeX documents

\defaultfontfeatures{Mapping=tex-text} % ditto

\setmainfont{Gandhari Unicode} % could be any Unicode font

% Now define the Devanagari font:

% John Smith's Sahadeva, input using standard UTF8 transliteration

\newfontfamily\sanskritfont [Script=Devanagari,Mapping=RomDev]{Sahadeva}

% Now come the commands for the critical edition formatting:

\usepackage{ledmac}

% customizations to Ledmac, and macros to make life easier.

\def\Variant#1{\Afootnote{\relax#1}}

\def\Lemma#1{\lemma{\relax#1}}

\let\Reference=\Bfootnote

\let\Grammatical=\Cfootnote

\let\Tibetan=\Dfootnote

% in a real edition, I'd probably also make

% abbreviations for \textfrench (perhaps \tf) etc.

\def\Omission#1{$\langle$#1$\rangle$}

\def\ScribalDeletion#1{{\rm[\kern-.15em[}#1{\rm]\kern-.15em]}}

\def\hardspace{\texttt{\char`\ }}

\def\And{{\rm\penalty-1\quad$\mid\mid$~}} % divider between variants to the same lemma

% more customizations: make the A notes

% (\Variants and \Lemmas)into two-column format,

% and make the B notes (\Reference) normal footnotes.

% changes to stuff cut-and-pasted from ledmac.sty:

\makeatletter

\renewcommand*{\twocolfootfmt}[3]{%

\normal@pars

% \hsize .45\hsize

\hsize .49\hsize

\parindent=0pt

\tolerance=5000

\raggedright

\leavevmode\hangindent1.5em\hangafter1

\strut{\notenumfont\printlines#1|}\enspace

{\select@lemmafont#1|#2}\rbracket\enskip

#3\strut\par\allowbreak}

\foottwocol{A}

\renewcommand*{\normalfootfmt}[3]{%

\normal@pars

\parindent=0pt \parfillskip=0pt plus 1fil

\hangindent1.5em\hangafter1

{\notenumfont\printlines#1|}\strut\enspace

{\select@lemmafont#1|#2}\rbracket\enskip#3\strut\par}

\footnormal{B}

\makeatother

\firstlinenum{1}

\linenumincrement{1}

% and here begins the edition:

\begin{document}

\chapter*{yogaśatakam}

\large

\section*{\textenglish{The example verse by itself}}

\textenglish{From \emph{Yogaśataka: Texte m\'edical attribu\'e

\`a Nāgārjuna\ldots par Jean Filliozat} (Pondich\'ery, 1979), pp.\,1, 59:\par}

\bigskip

kṛtsnasya tantrasya gṛhītadhāmna-\\

ścikitsitādviprasṛtasya dūram|

vidagthavaidyapratipūjitasya\\

kariṣyate yogaśatasya bandhaḥ|| 1||

\bigskip

\section*{\textenglish{The example verse, with apparatus}}

% we could use the \stanza command, but I haven't bothered.

% I find that the judicious use of indentation

% and newlines helps enormously to see what's what.

% Using a good "folding editor" would be even better.

\begingroup

\beginnumbering

\autopar

\edtext{

\edtext{kṛtsnasya}{

\Variant{%

\textfrench{N1 détruit, C1 }kṛtas tasya,

\textfrench{C2 }kṛtasya.}

\Tibetan{\textfrench{T \emph{mth'yas}, ``sans limite, immense''
traduit }kṛtsnasya.}}

tantrasya

\edtext{gṛhītadhāmna-}{

\Variant{\textfrench{Ca, JK }dhamnā.}}\\

\edtext{ścikitsitā}{

\Lemma{cikitsitād} % not ``ścikitsitā'', of course. We're preserving
the sandhyakṣaras.

\Variant{\textfrench{C1, C2 } cikitsitāt.}

\Tibetan{\textfrench{T \emph{gso-spyad} ''pratique de la
thérapeutique''. Ordinairement

\emph{gso spyad} est ``investigation del la th.''}}}% comment sign to stop a break after the conjunct

\edtext{dviprasṛtasya}{

\Lemma{viprasṛtasya} % as above with cikitsitād.

\Variant{\textfrench{Ca} cikitsitārthaprasṛtasya, \textfrench{C1, C2}
viprasutasya.}}

\edtext{dūram}{

\Variant{\textfrench{Ca} dūrāt}}|

\\ \indent

% the above line is annoying. Because the whole verse is

% inside an \edtext{} macro, in order to get the

% \Grammatical note naming the upajāti verse, we have to

% avoid having paragraph breaks, which are not allowed

% inside \edtext{}.

% instead, we use \\ (newline) and \indent (paragraph indent)

% to get the same visual effect. A nasty kludge.

vidagdhavaidyapratipūjitasya\\

\edtext{kariṣyate}{

\Variant{\textfrench{N1} karikṣete.}}

yogaśatasya bandhaḥ|| 1||

}{\Lemma{}\Grammatical{Upajāti.}}

\par % necessary to stop \autopar complaining. Thanks to Alessandro Graheli.

\endgroup

\end{document}

XeLaTeX for Sanskrit

2010-07-05T16:00:00.004+01:00

% This is a Unicode file.
\documentclass[12pt]{article}

\usepackage{multicol} % just to get narrow columns on one page

\usepackage{polyglossia} % the multilingual support package 

% for XeLaTeX - includes Sanskrit.

% Next, from the polyglossia manual:

\setdefaultlanguage{english} % this is mostly going to be English text, with

\setotherlanguage{sanskrit}  % some Sanskrit embedded in it. 

% These will call appropriate hyphenation.

\usepackage{xltxtra} % standard for nearly all XeLaTeX documents 

\defaultfontfeatures{Mapping=tex-text} % ditto

\setmainfont{Gandhari Unicode} %could be any Unicode font

% Now define some Devanagari fonts:

% John Smith's Nakula, input using Velthuis transliteration

\newfontinstance 

\velthuis [Script=Devanagari,Mapping=velthuis-sanskrit]{Nakula}

% John Smith's Sahadeva, input using Velthuis transliteration

\newfontinstance

\sahadeva [Script=Devanagari,Mapping=velthuis-sanskrit]{Sahadeva}

% John's Sahadeva, input using scholarly romanisation in Unicode

\newfontinstance

\sahadevaunicode [Script=Devanagari,Mapping=RomDev]{Sahadeva}

% Microsoft's Mangal font (ugh!), input using standard romanisation in Unicode.

\newfontinstance

\mangal [Script=Devanagari,Mapping=RomDev]{Mangal}

% Somdev's RomDev.map is used above to get the mapping 

% from Unicode -> Devanāgarī.  Zdenek Wagner's velthuis-sanskrit.map 

% is used to get the Velthuis->Devanāgarī mapping.  These are the files

% that XeTeX uses to make all the conjunct consonants without needing 

% any external preprocessor (like the old devnag.c program).

% % Set up the font commands:

%

\newcommand{\velt}[1]{{\velthuis \textsanskrit{#1}}} 

\newcommand{\saha}[1]{{\sahadeva\textsanskrit{#1}}}

\newcommand{\sahauni}[1]{{\sahadevaunicode\textsanskrit{#1}}}

\newcommand{\mangaluni}[1]{{\mangal\textsanskrit{#1}}}

% \textssanskrit, above, is a Polyglossia command that gets Sanskrit hyphenation right.

% ... and here we go!

\begin{document}

\begin{multicols}{2} % narrow cols to force plenty of hyphenation

\large % ditto.

\begin{enumerate}

\item[1]

With Xe\LaTeX\ it's easy to typeset Velthuis encoded Devanagari like the following example, without using a preprocessor:

\velt{sugataan sasutaan sadharmakaayaan pra.nipatyaadarato 'khilaa.m"sca vandyaan|

sugataatmajasa.mvaraavataara.m kathayi.syaami yathaagama.m samaasaat||} Bodhicaryāvatāra 1,1.

NB: automatic hyphenation.

\item[2]

A different Devanāgarī font:

\saha{sugataan sasutaan sadharmakaayaan pra.nipatyaadarato 'khilaa.m"sca vandyaan|

sugataatmajasa.mvaraavataara.m kathayi.syaami yathaagama.m samaasaat||} Bodhicaryāvatāra 1,1.

\item[3]

Another sentence: \saha{ratnojjvalastambhamanorame.su muktaamayodbhaasivitaanake.su|

svacchojjvalasphaa.tikaku.t.time.su sungandhi.su snaanag.rhe.su te.su||} 2,10.

\item[4]

Now, thanks to Somdev's RomDev.map, we can input in Unicode, using standard scholarly transliteration, and get Devanāgarī generated for us automatically:

\sahauni{āsīdrājā nalo nāma vīrsenasuto balī||\par }

\item[5]

Plain Unicode input, no tricks:

āsīdrājā nalo nāma vīrsenasuto balī||

\item[6]

Plain Unicode romanisation input, no tricks:

\mangaluni{āsīdrājā nalo nāma vīrsenasuto balī||\par }

Plain Unicode Devanāgarī input, no tricks:

{\mangal आसीद्राजा नलो नाम वीरसेनसुतो बली|\par}

\end{enumerate}

\end{multicols}

\noindent

English and Devanāgarī are both doing okay. The only thing that isn't hyphenating well yet is Sanskrit in roman transliteration.

Other nice stuff becomes easy.  E.g., define a command \verb|\example| that prints a romanised word in Nāgarī, and then repeats it in romanisation, in parentheses:

\verb|\newcommand\example[1]{\sahauni{#1}~(\emph{#1})}|\newcommand\example[1]{\sahauni{#1}~(\emph{#1})}

Input: \verb|\example{ekadhā}|

Output: \example{ekadhā}

\end{document} 

%that's all folks!

Early Indian MS evidence for "zero"

2010-04-04T10:08:00.002+01:00

Early Indian document with ref. to zero

The Bakhsālī manuscript was unearthed by a peasant in 1881 in the village of Bakhshālī about eighty kilometers north-east of Peshawar. The scribe wrote it in the Śāradā script on birch-bark using a pen with a flat, rectangular tip. The most recent research shows that this is the earliest Śāradā manuscript ever discovered, and suggests that it may be datable to as early as AD 700, although a date of 1200 has been proposed in the past. The mathematical work recorded in the manuscript is probably from the seventh century, and appears to have been composed in the Gandhāra
district. The manuscript describes the foundations of arithmetic, including approximations of square roots, rules of inversion and proportion, the rule of three, various forms of equations, and a series of example problems on fiscal, taxation, travel, and geometrical topics (Hayashi 1995). It also uses a dot to symbolize zero, possibly making it the earliest written occurrence of this sign in India.

---
T Hayashi, The Bakhshali manuscript : An ancient Indian mathematical treatise (Groningen, 1995).

TeXWorks for linux

2010-04-04T09:58:00.003+01:00

TeXworks is a nice editor with an emphasis on multilingual use, simplicity and rapid document preview. It is from Jonathan Kew, author of XeTeX.

Binary downloads for Mac and Windows are available from the TeXworks home page. For Ubuntu Linux, there's a PPA here.

The Origins of Zero

2010-04-04T09:44:00.004+01:00

In 1998, I wrote the following letter to the editor of the New Scientist magazine, in response to an article that appeared on 25 April 1998 by Ian Stewart, entitled Zero, Zilch and Zip.

---------- cut -------------

From ucgadkw@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk Sun May 3 15:28:53 1998
Date: Sun, 3 May 1998 15:28:52 +0100 (BST)
From: Dominik Wujastyk
To: letters@newscientist.com
Subject: Ian Stewart: Zero, Zilch and Zip

Dear Sir,

Ian Stewart writes engagingly about the origin of the mathematical zero
and place-value notation ("Zero, zilch and zip", 25 April, p 41), but he
suggests that these two concepts are connected, when they are in fact both
logically and historically separate. You can count reasonably succesfully
with place-value notation but no explicit zero, and vice versa.

Ian Stewart is also quite wrong in saying that "place notation was born
probably in India, maybe with Arab help, not too long after AD 200".

Three key elements -- a decimal base, place-value, and zero (I abbreviate
this to "DPZ") -- occurred separately at earlier times both in India
and in other parts of the ancient world. In particular, the Babylonians
were using a place-value system, with a space for the null value, in the
second millennium BC, but their base for counting was sixty, not ten. By
the time of Alexander the Great, they were even using a special symbol for
this null value. From perhaps as early as the third century AD the Mayans
also used place-value and zero, but with the base twenty. But it does
indeed seem to have been the Indians who first combined these key elements
together to form the basis of the arithmetic system that has come down to
the modern world.

The Arabs did not have anything to do with the invention, and indeed Arabs
only arrived in India about five hundred years later than Stewart
suggests. The Arabs (or rather, the Muslims of the Middle East)
certainly did transmit knowledge about zero and the place-value notation
to Europe, but they learned it all from the Indians. We call our numerals
"Arabic", it is true, but Arabic writers called them "Hindu", meaning
"Indian".

The Indian numerals are first mentioned outside India in the year 662,
when the Syrian bishop Severus Sebokt, annoyed by the intellectual
arrogance of immigrant Greek scholars, reminded them pointedly that other
nations were also very learned, such as the Hindus with their admirable
systems of astronomy and arithmetic, including calculating with nine
symbols.

Indian works on arithmetic, translated from the original Sanskrit in to
Arabic (perhaps through Persian or Syriac), began to reach the Islamic
world in about the eighth century. The first book known to us from outside
India that demonstrates Indian methods of calculating with nine digits and
zero was composed in the ninth century, probably in Baghdad, by
al-Khwarizmi (whose name, through the medieval Latin and Old French, gives
us "algorism" and "algorithm"). From about AD 950 on, many Arabic works
demonstrating these new Indian methods of working out arithmetical
problems, including fractions, were circulated under the name "al-Hisab
al-Hindi', or "Indian calculation". After 1100, Latin translations of
Al-Khwarizmi's work spread throughout the centres of medieval learning in
Europe, which is how the the Indian DZP system ultimately reached us
today.

The earlier history of this number system in India is not perfectly clear,
but the Indian astronomer Aryabhata, born in 473, was the first to
describe the decimal place-value system explicitly, in a chapter of a work
in which he also discusses algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. Before
him, the third-century author Sphujidhvaja seems to be the first author to
describe the use a symbol for zero in the decimal place-value system.

It is often claimed that the adoption of the DPZ system was a great
epistemological change heralding the opening of vast new mathematical
horizons, and a leap forward in knowledge generally. I do not see why a
notational change of this type should be seen as so important, and there
is little actual historical evidence of such an effect. The counting
system that has become second nature to us may seem consummate, but surely
that is only a matter of what we are used to, what we have been taught
from childhood. The Babylonians, using a non-DZP system, constructed vast
tables of astronomical and arithmetical parameters which required
extraordinary amounts of calculation, but we see no evidence that they
were hampered by having a sexagesimal (60-based) and not a decimal system.
Early Greek arithmetic was decimal, but was conducted without recourse to
the use of zero. Sometimes a non-DZP notation can be positively helpful:
to add ten and ten in Roman (X + X = XX) does not even require knowledge
of another symbol, nor any notational manipulation beyond writing the
symbols more closely together. What could be easier? That quintessence
of modernity, the digital computer, abandons the internal use of decimals
entirely, using only binary digits, or bits. The feeling that the DZP
combination is in some way "better" than any other system is surely no
different in principle from any other chauvinistic belief, such as that
that one's own mother language -- whatever it may be -- is the easiest,
best, and most expressive language in the world.

In areas where sexagesimal (60-based) counting still lurks in our own
mathematics, such as in the 360 degrees in a circle, we suffer no
epistemological harm. That a right angle has ninety degrees has not held
our civilization back in any obvious way, though measurment in radians is
of course routine in higher maths.

If some future government, politically desperate for a "British Sausage"
issue, decides to go for total, all-out decimalization and legislates that
a circle shall have ten degrees, there may be a leap in learning, but it
may in a direction of five degrees.

Yours faithfully,

Dominik Wujastyk

--
Dr Dominik Wujastyk, FAX/voice: +44 171 611 8545/8467
Wellcome Institute for URL: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucgadkw/
the History of Medicine, Email: d.wujastyk@ucl.ac.uk
Wellcome Trust, 183 Euston Road, Trust URL: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk
London NW1 2BE, England.

First Rule of History:
History doesn't repeat itself -- historians merely repeat each other.

JabRef

2010-03-09T10:49:00.006Z

Good! The new beta of JabRef, 2.6b3, now has a properly-working interface to JSTOR. One can search by keyword for JSTOR entries, and JabRef lists the hits and lets you import whatever you want to your bibtex database. JabRef even helpfully marks possible duplicates. Very nice indeed, especially for us humanists.

Get your JabRef here: http://jabref.sourceforge.net/

At the moment, JabRef and Mendeley seem to be moving forward fast. They approach the problem of bibliography management slightly differently, and offer different feature-sets. However, both are emerging as seriously useful tools.

2009-11-27T17:05:00.002Z

Just discovered http://www.textualscholarship.org/
as well as the website of Birmingham's ITSEE: http://www.itsee.bham.ac.uk/index.htm

Ztree under Ubuntu with Wine

2009-11-10T08:44:00.002Z

The Gnome launcher for Ztree command line is
wineconsole --backend=user /path/to/Ztree/ZTW.EXE

Up The Junction

2009-11-10T08:40:00.003Z

Under Windows, Dropbox wants everything it backs up to live in its own directory on your hard drive. Not soft/sym-links, but actual files.

However, if you're running Windows and have an NTFS drive, then you can in fact make "hard" soft links to your Dropbox directory without having to actually copy everything physically into the that directory. The tool is Junction, which handles hard links under NTFS. NTFS supports this natively, but MS in their wisdom never distributed a public tool to handle this feature.

Vienna University AKH on a bright Autumn morning

2009-10-27T09:12:00.002Z

The Institute for South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies is straight ahead, through an archway and to the right.

... and now iBus

2009-10-22T23:45:00.003+01:00

The latest release of Ubuntu, 9.10 Karmic Koala, has just come out and has replaced SCIM altogether with another system called iBus. However, everything seems to work almost identically from the user's point of view, and the tricks I mentioned earlier still make everything work. m17n also works with iBus.

LaTeX, Unicode, Kile, TeXmaker, Ubuntu Gnome, and SCIM /SKIM

2009-10-14T19:01:00.005+01:00

I run Ubuntu GNU/Linux, with the Gnome windows manager. Kile is the most sophisticated LaTeX editor under Linux at present, and TeXmaker is also very good and has the added advantage of being cross-platform.

TeXmaker installs easily with aptitude, but Kile asks for the whole TeXlive distribution to be downloaded as dependencies. This is fine, as far as it goes. But the TeXlive distributed through aptitude is terribly out of date (2007). So it's quite reasonable to get a more recent TeXlive from TUG and install that. But then Kile still wants to install the old 2007 one through aptitude, and everything gets mess. Luckily, it's possible to fool aptitude into thinking that it's TeXlive is already installed. So now you've got Kile and and up-to-date TeXlive. Great, you think.

Until you start trying to type Unicode (you are using XeLaTeX, aren't you?).

Under GNU/Linux, you can use SCIM and the m17n input method, especially the excellent sa-translit and sa-devnag keyboard handlers to enter Unicode roman transliteration or Devanagari very quickly and easily, rapidly swapping keyboards with ctrl-space. It's great.

But Kile and TeXmaker are written using the QT toolkit, like many applications that are written for the KDE environment rather than Gnome. This means that SCIM doesn't immediately work with them. Blast.

Okay, it's deeply buried on the net, but there is an answer to this too, and it works. It's here.

Hooray! Kile, TeXmaker, TeX Live 2008, Ubuntu 9.04, Gnome, SCIM, m17n, all working fine.

I have to say, though, this should all be much easier, and should be done through aptitude.

Footnote:
After installing or uninstalling other language-related stuff in Ubuntu, sometimes iBus stops working. This can be fixed by going to System/Administration/Language Support and making sure keyboard input method is set to "ibus". Sometimes this tool also installs parts of the language support that are missing.

Also, if your writing area still give the ibus message "no input window", it can be aanecessary to right-click your mouse, select "input methods" and set "ibus".

Radio 4 broadcast

2009-09-08T03:04:00.002+01:00

Episode 1 of "The Test of Time", on Suśruta's surgery:click here.

Academia.edu

2009-02-18T12:25:00.002Z

I'm exploring the use of the new Academia website. My area is here.

Ballantyne's 1855 edition of the Mahābhāṣya

2008-09-08T16:44:00.013+01:00

I'm glad to have found Ballantyne's edition of the Mahābhāṣya with Kaiyaṭa and Nāgeśa's commentaries, in the Digital Library of India. The edition is from Mirzapore, 1855 (bibliographical details).

Here are some representative pages from it:

Title page:

Mahābhāṣyam

bhāṣyapradīpena vivaraṇena ca sahitaṃ

kāśyāṃ rājakīyapāṭhālaye śrīmadvālaṇṭainnāmaka-

tadadhyakṣaprestais tatratyaiḥ

***

śrīnārāyaṇaśāstridevadatta-

durgodattaśarmabhirvyākaraṇapaṇḍitaiḥ

śrīmaccaturvedahīrānandaśarmabhir

alaṅkārapaṇḍitaiś ca saṃśodhitaṃ

sāṃkhyaśāstrādhyāpakaśrīmatkāśīnāthaśāstribhir

nidhyātaṃ

***

mirjāpurapattane trivedidurbaliśarmaṇā saṃśodhya mudrākṣariar upanibaddhaṃ

bhāratavarṣīya-

paścimottarapradeśādhyakṣaniyogān mudritam

// san 1855 īsvī //

So now we know that Ballantyne was aided by Nārāyaṇaśāstrī [and?] Devadattadurgodattaśarmā, specialist(s) in vyākaraṇa, and with Caturveda Hīrānandaśarmā, an alaṅkāra paṇḍit. These pandits

edited the text. The sāṃkhya professor Kāśīnāthaśāstrī reflected upon the

text (nidhyātaṃ), which presumably means that he edited the text for content.

The text was edited and typeset in Mirjāpurapattana by Durbaliśarmā.

And here are the first two and the last pages of the text:

Yet again on Goldstücker's Mahābhāṣya editions

2007-10-12T13:38:00.003+01:00

A few weeks ago I went into Cambridge University Library and had a look at Goldstücker's editions of the Mahābhāṣya. The entry by Haas in the BL catalogue (see previous blog post) gives no sense of the sheer physical size of these publications. These are seriously big volumes. They filled all the shelves of a delivery trolley. They gave me a sense of some quixotic mission in Goldstücker's mind, that somehow reproducing these raw, unprocessed mss in London, at enormous cost, could achieve a socio-political end, could establish in Europe a renewed respect for India's intellectual traditions.

There are three publications here, each being an unadorned photocopy (in modern terms) of a Sanskrit manuscript in Devanāgarī script:

Mbh. 1 vol.
Mbh with Kaiyyaṭa. 3 vols.
Mbh with Kaiyyaṭa and Nāgeśa. 2 vols.

Here are some notes:

1. Patanjali's Mahābhāshya. Reproduced ... samvat, 1751. In one volume.

The first 20 ff. of this ms. (pp. 2-41) are from a different ms. than the remainder. Ends: iti ata parāṇivo yathānyāsam iti kaścātra ... ukāraśca na tau staḥ yad iha tau syātāṃ//

p.43, scribe's fol. 8r,: tāv evāyam upadiśet nanu

It's a lovely Jaina ms, magnificently written.
Ends, v.2, p.697: saṃvat 1751 varṣe poṣaśukla trayodaśyāṃ tithau vudhāvasare śrīsarasāmadhye likhitā pratiriyaṃ ṣrī kharataragacche śrīśrī ṣagaracaṃdrasūrisāṣāyāṃ vācanācārya śrīsukhani?dhāna?gaṇīnāṃ tacchiṣyavācanācārya ... āṇaṃdadhīra likhitaṃ ... ṣrījinadattasūri jnnakuśalasūriprasādāt/

2. Title page:

Patanjali's Mahābhāshya with Kaiyyaṭa's Bhāshyapradīpa ... from an undated manuscript. In three volumes.

Vol.3, p.2218 has post-colophon:
kāṣyāṃ gṛhītaṃ makarasthe gurau saṃvat// iti mahābhāṣye aṣṭamo dhyāyaḥ// ṣrī rāhakaṣṇāya namostu// rāmamahābhāṣyasya pustakam idam āhnika 7

3. Title page:

Nāgojibhaṭṭa's Bhāṣyapradīpoddyota on Kaiyyaṭa's Bhāshyapradīpa. Reproduced by photo-lithography under supervision of Professor T. H. Goldstücker from a manuscript dated samvat, 1871. In two volumes. London: India Museum 1874. (Camb. UL. S833.a.87.6)

This is a ms. of saṃ 1811, sāke 1676 [AD 1754] vakratuṇḍasamīpe, manikarṇikāghāt, kāśī, copied by Udaigaja kāyastha.

Therefore, it looks as if G. may have misread 1811 as 1871. Or perhaps the printers who prepared the t.p. (after G. had died) made the mistake.

2007-08-29T17:54:00.001+01:00

The Dānasāgara of Ballālasena (ca. 1200) includes a number of interesting and important remarks on the nature of Sanskrit scholarship, methods of teaching and learning, the creation of manuscripts and their donation to temples, etc. The displayed passage describes textual criticism (ed. B. Bhattacharya, 1953, Bibliotheca Indica 274, pp.४८०-८१).

More on early editions of the Mahābhāṣya

2007-08-14T00:21:00.002+01:00

The 1876 Catalogue of Sanskrit and Pali Books in the British Museum, by Haas, p.100, contains the entries on the right for Mahābhāṣya editions:

Thus, there was the beginning of an edition by Ballantyne in 1855-1856, which is very early. Although this is only a small part of the whole text, the Navāhnika is a seminally important part of the work. It is interesting to see that even in this very early edition, the commentary of Kaiyaṭa and the subcommentary of Nāgeśa are included. Ballantyne usually worked in close collaboration with paṇḍits, whom he was generous in acknowledging. I will be interesting to know with whom he produced this edition.

Then there's an edition fifteen years later, in Varanasi in 1870. This looks like a real "paṇḍit's" edition, also with the important commentary of Kaiyaṭa but with only notes from the editors and from Nāgeśa and by the paṇḍits themselves. Its production, just over a century after Nāgeśa Bhaṭṭa's death, and in his home town, is likely to embody at least to some extent a direct lineage of the interpretation of the text from the great Varanasi grammarians of earlier times, including Vaidyanātha Payaguṇḍa, Nāgeśa and Bhaṭṭoji Dikṣita.

And then the 1876 Haas catalogue gives the entry on the left, which refers to the lithograph discussed in my post of October 16, 2007, about the lithographer William Griggs and the shockingly expensive lithograph he produced. Haas has identified or corrected the date of the manuscript (saṃ 1751 = AD 1808/9). I have not seen the edition yet, but I would hazard that the manuscript is part of the old IOLR collection in the BL. This lithograph was published in London in 1874, in a limited edition of 50 copies. There's this copy in the British Library, and I would expect to find copies in Oxford and Cambridge at least.

So now we know that the impulse behind this old lithographic edition came from Theodore Goldstücker (1821-1872), who was at that time a professor at University College London, having been invited to move from Germany to England by H. H. Wilson in 1850. Goldstücker was a "Forty-Eighter" in the sense of being a refugee from the German Revolution of 1948-1949. This lithograph edition of the Mahābhāṣya was published posthumously.

It would seem, though, that even at the time of its publication, the London edition has already been partially superseded by the Varanasi edition of four years earlier. However, the London edition provided the whole of Nāgeśa's subcommentary, where the Varanasi edition only gave extracted notes, so it certainly pushed the boundary of knowledge forward.

Goldstücker had earlier written a book about Pāṇinian grammar that was important and impressively penetrating for its time. The title of the 1861 edition of the book in the BL online catalogue is Panini, his place in Sanscrit Literature ... A separate impression of the preface to the Fac-Simile of MS. No. 17 in the Library of Her Majesty’s Home Government for India, etc. (BL classmark 14092.cc.4.). The text had first appeared as a preface to his edition of the Mānava-kalpa-sūtra, and was only published as a separate book in 1861. It was reprinted in Allahabad in 1914, Benares 1965, and may still be reprinted occasionally in India.

The excellent entry on Goldstücker in the DNB written by Nick Allen (doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/10925) throws valuable light on the interaction between Goldstücker's personality and his scholarship. He had a private income, and never drew a full salary from any university. Goldstücker functioned on the pattern of an eighteenth-century enlightenment gentleman scholar, in Steve Shapin's sense (A Social History of Truth), free from the prejudicial taint of employment and thus able to pursue truth impartially. He was very clever, very talented, and very hard-working. But his ambitions for scholarly achievement were so high that he judged much of his own writing to be unready for actual publication. Although kind and friendly on a personal level, he engaged in severe, even savage, criticism of other published Western scholars, but published little of his own work. Several of his books, including the Mahābhāṣya edition, were in fact facsimile or typeset reproductions of Indian scholastic manuscripts. In his introduction to one such edition, of the Jaiminīyanyāyamālāvistara by Mādhava, Goldstücker lays out his intention to publish a European equivalent of the famous Bibliotheca Indica series, with a special mission of publishing the manuscripts of the Colebrooke collection in the British Museum and, if possible, manuscripts from the Sarasvati Mahal library in Thanjavur that would be brought from Thanjavur to London by His Serene Highness Prince Frederic of Schleswig-Holstein, who was a Sanskritist.

As Allen notes, "For so learned a scholar Goldstücker's output was disappointing, and exercised only limited influence." Several of his main research projects ballooned in size and detail out of all proportion, becoming entirely unwieldy and impossible to complete or to publish. Thus he left a trail of unfinished works behind him. Two volumes of his minor articles and lectures were published posthumously in London in 1879. His papers were deposited in the British Museum, with a stipulation that they would not be published until after 1920, but by that time the Great War and subsequent scholarly progress and shifts in perspective meant that his works would no longer be viewed as worth the labour of editing and publication. As Allen further noted, "Critics have also said that, for all his zeal and fastidiousness, he lacked sound judgement, and was insufficiently critical of native Indian scholarly tradition." Golstücker held enormous admiration for the tradition of Sanskrit scholarship in India, and believed that Indian culture and society would gain immeasurably through the recovery of its ancient intellectual achievements, and that this was most appropriately achieved through a synthesis of Indian and European scholarly effort. Yet his own efforts to achieve his goals and to advance Sanskrit scholarship were, finally, Quixotic: grandiose, severe, and ultimately vain when compared with his undoubted talents.

Critical edition typesetting

2007-07-30T13:40:00.000+01:00

Some years ago, John Lavagnino and I wrote the EDMAC
software for typesetting critical editions. EDMAC was an application for use with plain TeX. Later, adaptations were made to allow EDMAC to work with LaTeX etc. More recently, the ConTeXt package, also based on TeX, has been developing methods for handling critical edition typesetting.

Idris Hamid, Colorado State University, recently gave this talk at the TUG 2007 conference, San Diego, about doing critical editions using ConTeXt.

Ayurvedic Man

2007-07-13T20:36:00.000+01:00

The famous "Ayurvedic Man" image (Wellcome Library Iconographic Collection 574912i) that has appeared on several book covers and in several publications, is owned by the Wellcome Library, London, and a low-res version can be viewed on their website. I wrote a small article referring to the image recently, in the journal Medical History.

As a result of a recent query about the texts that surround the image, I can now report that the texts are citations from the Bhāvaprakāśa of Bhāvamiśra, the 16th century physician who lived in North India, perhaps Varanasi. For more information on Bhāvamiśra, see G. J. Meulenbeld, Indian Medical Literature, IIa: 239--46.

The Bhāvaprakāśa texts cited in this painting almost all come from BhP 1.1. prakaraṇa 3 (garbhaprakaraṇa).

Earliest edition of the Mahābhāṣya?

2006-10-16T19:52:00.001+01:00

William Griggs (1832–1911) was the inventor of a photolithographic process. The DNB entry on him has the following extraordinary information:

Griggs was as successful in bringing down the price of reproducing old manuscripts and letterpress texts as he had been in reducing costs in chromolithography. His production of fifty copies of the Mahabhasya (the standard authority on Sanskrit grammar), consisting of 4674 pages (1871), was carried out for £6000 less than the estimate for a tracing of the original manuscript by hand, an enormous sum at the time. More widely known were his Shakespeare quartos, with critical introductions by Frederick James Furnivall and others, in forty-three volumes (1881–91); hand-traced facsimiles of the same works by E. W. Ashbee, superintended by James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, had been sold at more than eight times the price.

I was unaware of this piece of printing history, and it would be interesting to find out who commissioned this particular work, and to see copies of the photolithograph. It seems implausible that it would have cost much more than £6000 to commission scribes to copy out the Mahābhāṣya in the late 19 century. Griggs worked in London, in close association with the India Office.

... on the history of Indian food

2006-10-07T19:17:00.000+01:00

Oh, on the subject of the history of Indian food, one mustn't forget the rather wonderful publications of K. T. Achaya.

Amar Singh, Maharaja of Kanota and his cooking diaries

2006-09-29T20:11:00.000+01:00

Amar Singh, the Maharaja of Kanota, near Jaipur,
has been the subject of a study by the Rudolphs: Reversing the
Gaze: Amar Singh's Diary, A Colonial Subject's Narrative of
Imperial India. Edited and Commentary by Susanne Hoeber
Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph with Mohan Singh Kanota.
Boulder: Westview, 2002 (good review by Michael Fisher).

Amar Singh's diaries, covering 1898-1905, are about 89 vols,
each with 800 pages. I think Amar Singh was probably a little
eccentric. His diaries are very, very detailed, and not always
interesting. Except, of course, that in the mass of detail, there
are inevitably nuggets. He was a prominent and even eminent
military man, so one finds details of his meetings with
important players of the time, though what he writes about
them often extends only to what colour gloves they wore, or
which side of the carriage they got out.

Anyhow, I discovered this diary many years ago, through
accidentally meeting Mohan Singh Kanota (I stayed at the
Narain Niwas hotel in Jaipur, must have been in the 1980s),
and being taken out to Kanota to see the old man's library.

Although the Rudolphs have focussed on the diaries, it is
less well known that Amar Singh was also a passionate cook.
Or, perhaps, "supervisor of cooking" (as he was a supervisor
of photography also). His favourite hobby was to sit on the
veranda in the evening and direct a team of cooks in making
up dishes using recipes from classical sources. He drew on
many culinary traditions, including those recorded in Persian
and Sanskrit. Predictably, he wrote everything down. So along
one wall in the family home in Kanota there are many metres
of Amar Singh's cooking diaries. It is multilingual, with
text in Persian, Hindi, and Sanskrit. Possibly English, I
can't remember.

I am not aware that anyone has written about Amar Singh's
cookery diaries. His ordinary diaries have been microfilmed
and are on deposit at the University of Chicago library. I
don't know whether the cookery diaries were also filmed;
probably not.

This leads me on to mention the classical tradition of Indian
cookery, Skt. pākaśāstra पाकशास्त्र("Cooking Science"). There's
not much written about this, with one exception. Meulenbeld
notes 34 of the texts on this subject in his History of
Indian Medical Literature, IIa, part 9.1 (pp.415-20), and
gives detailed accounts of the contents of several of them.

As Meulenbeld points out, "pāka पाक" means a "linctus", as well
as "cookery", so not all the works on pāka śāstra are
actually on "medical cookery"; some are on linctus formulae.

Works on cookery in the Pāka Śāstra tradition seem to date
from AD 1200 and perhaps earlier. One of the earliest is the
Pākadarpaṇa पाकदर्पण or Nalapāka नलपाक ascribed to King Nala. It's a
work in 760 verses divided into 11 chapters, intended to inform
the cooking in a royal kitchen.

intratext.com

2006-08-22T20:30:00.000+01:00

I've just discovered www.intratext.com. An interesting service. Already has some trs. of Sanskrit and Pali texts. Has the Skt text of the RV in ITRANS format. Thought-provoking. Should we all jump on board?

Isidore of Charax

2006-06-27T21:49:00.000+01:00

I've been doing a bit of work on Isidore of Charax's Parthian Stations. Thinking out loud, really, about the actual route, and what kind of communications might have been possible between the Mediterranean/ME and Afghanistan/India in the centuries around the beginning of the Common Era.

See http://tinyurl.com/fffzz/

Appaya Dikshita and Nilakantha Dikshita

2006-05-25T11:16:00.000+01:00

Appaya Dikshita (b. ca.1520,
d. 1592) transfers his copy of the Devimahatmya to his grand nephew Nilakantha Dikshita (1580--ca. 1644), just before he passes away. This happened at Cidambaram.

The account of Appaya's deathbed transfer of his
cultural and spiritual heritage to the twelve-year-old Nilakantha is
given in the biographies of Nilakantha, the
Srinilakanthadhvaricaritam of Appaya, the
Sriappayadiksitendravijaya, both composed by Appaya's
nineteenth-century descendant Sivananda Yogindra. The former text
is translated and reprinted by Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat,
Oeuvres Po'etiques de Nilakantha Diksita I (1967), pp.7, 349. P-S Filliozat also
gives information from the latter text and other sources,
(ibid., 4).

My thanks to Yigal Bronner for drawing my attention to this image.
We're working to find out its source.

Govinda Dikshita and his wife Nagamba

2006-05-25T09:58:00.000+01:00

This painting of Govinda Dikshita and his wife Nagamba is on one of the walls of the Pattiswaram Temple, near Kumbakonam. It appears to be recent, or recently repainted. It is in a chamber not far from the statues of GD and N. Picture taken in 10/2005.

N. S. Vayaskara Mooss

2006-04-16T12:44:00.000+01:00

N. S. Vayaskara Mooss (1912-1986).

V. M. C. Sankaran Nambudiri

2006-04-16T12:40:00.000+01:00

At the age of about 85 (in October 2005), V. M. C. Sankaran Nambudiri is one of the most respected teachers of ayurveda in Kerala today, and a great expert in Viṣavidyā. Pictured here at his home near Trissur, with his daughter and grandson Brahmadattan (on the bed behind him), and his pupils (Dr Madhu in the white shirt). See also the documentation at PADAM .

Agni, Pattiswaram Temple

2006-04-16T12:08:00.000+01:00

Agni, in current worship in the Pattiswaram temple, Kumbakonam district, S. India

Google Earth kmz file of some S Indian cultural centres

2006-04-14T18:16:00.000+01:00

Here's a set of Google Earth data for some cultural centres near Kumbakonam and Thanjavur in southern Tamil Nadu:

S Indian cultural centres.

Once you have Google Earth running with these place markers, click once on a marker for info (in some cases). Double-click to zoom in for a specific closeup and angle.

Enjoy!

DW

Pattiswaram images

2006-04-14T17:16:00.001+01:00

Nāgāmba, Govinda Dīkṣita's wife.

Wrestling

The gopuram from the first inner courtyard

Govinda Dīkṣita, the great paṇḍit

Sarasvatam

2006-01-23T18:04:00.000Z

Today I discovered Somadeva Vasudeva's blog, http://sarasvatam.blogspot.com/
and that inspired me finally to set up my own blog. However, I'm far from sure that I'll use it.

Hello World!

2006-01-23T17:51:00.000Z

Hello World!