Wednesday, June 08, 2016

How "open" is "Open Access"

As the Open Access model becomes increasingly important for public knowledge dissemination, some agencies with vested interests have begun to complicate matters by introducing hybrid publishing models.  Some of these are not fully in the interests of authors or readers.

PLOS has a great discussion about the issues at stake, and they refer to the OAS brochure, which is provided in many languages.

The second page of this OAS brochure is very short, clear and helpful.  Recommended!


Friday, April 22, 2016

On the use of parentheses in translation

This deserves a fuller discussion; I'm just doing a quick note here, arising out of a conversation with Dagmar and Jason Birch.;

My thinking is influenced by my teachers Gombrich and Matilal, both of whom had a lot to say about translation, and by reading materials on translation by Lawrence Venuti and Umberto Eco (Mouse or Rat?).  There's a huge literature on translation, including specific materials on Skt like Garzilli, E. (Ed.) Translating, Translations, Translators from India to the West.  Cambridge, MA, Harvard Univ., 1996.

I wonder about the heavy use of parentheses by Indologists.  One does not see this in English translations from French, say, or German.  Or even Latin or Greek.  What are we up to?  I can distinguish several reasons for parentheses in English trs. from Skt. 
  • Fear.  We are asserting to the reader that we know what we're doing, and making our word-choices explicit.  This is a defence against the small voice in our brains that says "professor so-and-so won't accept a fluent, uninterrupted translation from me, seeing it as bad.  I'll get criticised in public."
  • Habit.  We see others doing it and absorb the habit.
  • Germanism.  Venuti has shown compellingly, in The Translator's Invisibility, how different linguistic audiences receive translations differently.  English readers and reviewers approve strongly of translations of which they can say, "it reads as naturally as if the author had written in English."  German readers are different, and want to experience a sense of foreignness in their translations; if a translation reads fluently in German, they feel there is some deception being carried out. Since so many translations from Sanskrit were done by Germans, English readers like us get used to the "German" presuppositions of the nature of translation, and simply carry on in that idiom.  See the attached Kielhorn example.  

The Kielhorn exemplifies another major problem, that Matilal used to talk about passionately.  If you read Kielhorn's tr. leaving out the parentheses, it's gobbledegook. Matilal said that if one has to use parentheses, then the text not in parentheses should read as a semantically coherent narrative.  This is because the Sanskrit is a semantically coherent narrative.  To present an incoherent English text is a tacit assertion that the Sanskrit is incoherent.  In which case, we should see parentheses in Sanskrit too.  Sometimes we do, as in Panini's mechanism of anuvṛtti, when parts of previous sutras are tacitly read into subsequent ones.  Anuvṛtti is doing similar work to that done by parentheses.  So Vasu's translation of Panini uses parentheses in a valid way, I would argue.
What are valid reasons for parentheses?  I would say that very, very rarely it is justified to put a Skt word in brackets when not to do so would be seriously confusing or misleading for the typical reader, or when the Skt author is making a tacit point.  "He incurred a demerit (karma) by failing to do the ritual (karma)."   Or, in the RV, "The lord (asura) of settlements has readied for me two oxen ."(Scharfe 2016: 48).

Then there's the psychology of reading. For me, this is one of the important reasons for not using parentheses or asides of any kind.  I've never articulated this before, so what follows may be a bit incoherent.​  When I watch my mind during reading, I absorb sentences and they create a sense of understanding.  It's quite fast, and it's a flow.  As I go along, the combination of this flow of sentences and the accumulation of a page or two of it in memory produces the effect of having a new meaning in my mind, of having understood a semantic journey shared with me by the author.  But when there are many parentheses, that flow is broken.  The reading becomes much slower, and I often have to read things several times, including a once-over skipping the parentheses.  This slow, assembly-style reading is not impossible, and one may gain something.  But one loses a lot.  What's lost is the larger-scale comprehension, and the sense of a flow of ideas.
What I find works for me as a reader and writer is to avoid the branching of the flow of attention while reading.  Branching is often done through parenthetical statements, -- and through dashed asides -- (and through discursive footnotes), but not citation footnotes.  In my mind, it's like travelling in a car and taking every side road, driving down it for two hundred metres and then coming back to the main road, and continuing just until the next side road, etc.  As a writer, I find it quite easy to avoid branching.  I do it by thinking in advance about the things I want to say, and then working out a sequence in which I want to present them so that the reader gets the sense of connection.  Cut-n-paste is very helpful.
I'm not sure whether the above is totally personal to me, or a widely-shared phenomenon.  I've never read anything about this topic.  I have read about eye-movements during reading, and the relationship of this to line-length and typeface design.  I should look around for material on the psychology of comprehension during reading.  There must be something out there.

Wendy Doniger, who writes well, said last year:
I sound out every line I write, imagining the reader reading it, and never imagining as the reader certain scholars, who shall remain nameless, who might be watching with an eagle eye, poised to pounce on any mistake I might make; no, I always imagine the reader as my father, on my side. I try to be that person to my students, who are otherwise vulnerable to an imaginaire of hostile reception that can block their writing, as it keeps some of my most brilliant colleagues from publishing. My father saved me from that.
-- Scroll.in "A Life of Learning"

References

  • Eco, U. Mouse or Rat: Translation as Negotiation.  Phoenix Press, 2004
  • Garzilli, E. (Ed.) Translating, Translations, Translators from India to the West.  Cambridge, MA, Harvard Univ., 1996.
  • Scharfe, H. "Ṛgveda, Avesta, and Beyond—ex occidente lux?"  Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2016, 136, 47-67.
  • Venuti, L. The Translator's Invisibility: A History Of Translation.  London, New York, Routledge, 1995

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Re: Against the petition against Pollock

A petition that started this business was posted on change.org.  I noticed it on 26 Feb.
The background causative issues include present government policies in India towards national culture, and the publication of the book by Rajiv Malhotra (USA) called The Battle for Sanskrit.  I haven't seen the book, but it appears to be an attack on Sheldon Pollock's scholarship.   Malhotra is a rich American who funds attacks on American scholars of Indian studies etc.

My response to the petition was posted to the INDOLOGY forum on 27 Feb.:
Some media responses:

Friday, February 05, 2016

Babylonians used geometrical methods, 350-50 BCE

"Ancient Babylonian astronomers calculated Jupiter’s position from the area under a time-velocity graph" / Mathieu Ossendrijver

Science  29 Jan 2016:
Vol. 351, Issue 6272, pp. 482-484
DOI: 10.1126/science.aad8085

Abstract

The idea of computing a body’s 
displacement as an area in time-velocity space is usually traced back to 14th-century Europe. I show that in four ancient Babylonian cuneiform tablets, Jupiter’s displacement along the ecliptic is computed as the area of a trapezoidal figure obtained by drawing its daily displacement against time. This interpretation is prompted by a newly discovered tablet on which the same computation is presented in an equivalent arithmetical formulation. The tablets date from 350 to 50 BCE. The trapezoid procedures offer the first evidence for the use of geometrical methods in Babylonian mathematical astronomy, which was thus far viewed as operating exclusively with arithmetical concepts.



BBC Report

Sophisticated geometry - the branch of mathematics that deals with shapes - was being used at least 1,400 years earlier than previously thought, a study suggests.
Research shows that the Ancient Babylonians were using geometrical calculations to track Jupiter across the night sky.
Previously, the origins of this technique had been traced to the 14th Century.
The new study is published in Science.
Its author, Prof Mathieu Ossendrijver, from the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, said: "I wasn't expecting this. It is completely fundamental to physics, and all branches of science use this method."

For the rest of the BBC report, see:

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Primitive Man

Greater lack of cultural values than that found in the inner life of some strata of our modern population is hardly to be found anywhere.

-- Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (2ed, 1938), p.198.

Friday, January 15, 2016

Cranial surgery on Bhoja

Bhojadeva Bhiṣajām


The king cleansed his head at a tank, but a baby goldfish (śaphara-śāvaḥ) got into his skull.  Physicans couldn't cure the pain, so the king prepared to die, and banished all the physicians from the kingdom, throwing their medicines into the river.
Indra told the Aśvins about this, and they went to the king's court, disguised as brahmans.  They make the king unconscious with moha-cūrṇa and took his skull out and put it in a skull-shaped basin.  They removed the fish and threw them into a dish.  They reassembled his skull with glue, and woke him up with a reviving medicine (sañjīvanī) and showed him the fish.

Saradaprosad Vidyabhusan (ed.) भोज-प्रबन्धः श्रीबल्लाल विरचितः The Bhoj-Prabandha of Sree Ballal (With English Translation) (Calcutta: Auddy & Co., 1926), pp. 222-228. 
See also the tr. by Louis Gray in the AOS series, New Haven, 1950.

The Bhojaprabandha Ballāladeva of Benares, apparently 16th century (so not to be confused with Ballālasena the father of Lakṣmaṇasena, ruler of Bengal). 

Cleverness and Goodness are a rare combination in a person

From the भोजप्रबन्धः बल्लालसेनेन विरचितम् 

मनीषिणः सन्ति न ते हितैषिणो
हितैषिणः सन्ति न ते मनीषिणः |
सुहृच्च विद्वानपि दुर्लभो नृणां |
यथौषधं स्वादु हितञ्च दुर्लभम् ||५८||



Wisdom is knowledge together with goodness. -- S. Wujastyk

Friday, December 11, 2015

Linux Mint swapfile

Getting the swap file working in Linux Mint.  Using LVM

sudo /sbin/mkswap /dev/mapper/foobar [e.g., mint--vg-swap_1]
sudo swapon -a

Monday, December 07, 2015

Brandolini's Law

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Research funding in Canada

Funding sources

See also

Friday, January 23, 2015

Canada tops the list of yoga interest worldwide

According to Google's metrics on search trends, the keyword "yoga" is searched for more in Canada than in any other country in the world.  And within Canada, the top "yoga" locations are Vancouver and then Calgary.



Tuesday, December 16, 2014

GNU Freefont fonts and XeLaTeX

The problem

There's been a long-standing issue about using the Gnu Freefont fonts with XeLaTeX.  The fonts are "Free Serif", "Free Sans" "Free Mono", and each has normal, italic, bold and bold-italic versions.  
These fonts are maintained by Stevan White, who has done a lot of support and maintenance work on them.  
These fonts are of special interest to people who type Indian languages because they include nice, and rather complete Devanāgarī character sets in addition to glyphs for
  • Bengali
  • Gujarati
  • Gurmukhi
  • Oriya
  • Sinhala
  • Tamil
    and
  • Malayalam
The Gnu Freefonts are excellent for an exceptionally wide range of scripts and languages, as well as symbols.  See the coverage chart.

At the time of writing this blog, December 2014, the release version of the fonts is 4-beta, dated May 2012.  This is the release that's distributed with TeXLive 2014, and is generally available with other programs that include or require the FreeFonts.

But the 2012 release of the FreeFonts causes problems with the current versions of XeTeX.  Basically, the Devanagari conjunct consonants in the 2012 fonts are incompatible with the current XeTeX compositing engine. (For the technical: Up to TL 2012 XeTeX used ICU; since TL 2013 it's used HarfBuzz.)

In the last couple of years, Stevan has done a great deal of work on the Devanagari parts of the FreeFonts, and he has solved these problems.  But his improvements and developments are only available in the Subversion repository.   For technically-able users, it's not hard to download and compile this pre-release version of the fonts.  But then to make sure that XeTeX calls the right version of the FreeFonts, it's also necessary to weed out the 2012 version of the fonts that's distributed with TeX Live 2014.  And that's a bit hard.  In short, things get fiddly.

Now, Norbert Preining has created a special TeX Live repository for the Subversion version of the FreeFonts.  TeX Live 2014 users can now just invoke that repo and sit back and enjoy the correct Devanagari typesetting.

New warning June 2017: 
the procedure below is no longer supported.  Don't do it.

WARNING
Be warned that the version distributed here is a development version, not meant for production. Expect severe breakage. You need to know what you are doing!
END WARNING

Here follow Norbert's instructions (as of Dec 2014).  Remember to use sudo if you have TeX Live installed system-wide.

The solution. A new TeX Live repository for the pre-release Gnu FreeFonts

Norbert says (Dec 2014):

Here we go: Please do:
tlmgr repository add http://www.tug.org/~preining/tlptexlive/ tlptexlive
tlmgr pinning add tlptexlive gnu-freefont
tlmgr install --reinstall gnu-freefont
You should see something like:  
[~] tlmgr install --reinstall gnu-freefont
...
[1/1, ??:??/??:??] reinstall: gnu-freefont @tlptexlive [12311k]
...
Note the
@tlptexlive
After that you can do  
tlmgr info gnu-freefont
and should see: 
Package installed:   Yes
revision:    3007
sizes:       src: 27157k, doc: 961k, run: 19769k
relocatable: No
collection:  collection-fontsextra
Note the
revision: 3007
which corresponds to the freefont subversion revision!!!

From now on, after the pinning action, updates for gnu-freefont will
always be pulled from tlptexlive (see man page of tlmgr).
 

Reverting the change:

In case you ever want to return to the versions as distributed in TeX Live, please do
tlmgr pinning remove tlptexlive gnu-freefont
tlmgr install --reinstall gun-freefont


Thank you, Norbert!

Thursday, November 13, 2014

The complicated history of some editions of Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga

[This is a lightly-revised version of some posts to the INDOLOGY forum sent in November 2014] 


The Visuddhimagga was edited and then published twice in Roman script in the first half of the 20th century.  By Caroline A. F. Rhys Davids for the PTS, published 1920 & 1921, and by Henry Clarke Warren for HOS, posthumously published in 1950.  Neither edition refers to the other. 
Some discussion of these editions is offered by Steve Collins in, "Remarks on the Visuddhimagga, and on its treatment of the Memory of Former Dwelling(s) (pubbenivāsānussatiñāṇa)," Journal of Indian Philosophy (2009), 37:499–532.

Warren met Caroline's husband, the distinguished scholar Thomas Rhys Davids,  in Oxford in 1884, as stated in Lanman's Memorial notes, and was greatly influenced by him.  Warren's work was done long  before that of Caroline Rhys Davids, since Warren died in 1899.  But why wouldn't Dharmananda Kosambi have mentioned Caroline RD's edition in his 1927 preface to Warren's?  It's understandable that Warren's brother Edward wouldn't have known about Caroline RD's edition, when he wrote his pathetic Foreword in 1927, since he was not an indologist.  Why did Warren's edition take 23 years to be printed, even after Kosambi had finished his editing of the MS?  1950 looks like five years after the war, which is understandable.  But that doesn't explain the twelve years of inaction before the war (and after the editing).  Since Warren had paid for the HOS to exist, one would have thought some priority might have been given to publishing his work.

And why didn't Caroline RD mention Warren's work?  Warren had used one of her husband's manuscripts of the VM, so she would surely have had some awareness of Warren's work.  And Thomas Rhys Davids was alive until the end of 1922, and was aware of his wife's work on the VM, since she gave him some pages for checking, some time before the end of 1920 (mentioned in her foreword).  Caroline RD also knew that Warren had published a subject analysis of the VM in the JPTS in 1892, although she appears not to know his article "Buddhaghosa's VM" of the same year, or his "Report of Progress" on his work on the VM, published in 1894.   She mentions Warren in her afterword on p. 767, but only as the author of Buddh. in Tr. (1896), which incidentally contains a 50 passages translated from the VM. 

I would have expected the translator Ñanamoli to say something about all this in his translation, but he doesn't.  He just says he's using both editions.  Perhaps there are book reviews from the later 1920s or 1950s that explain matters, I haven't looked yet.

Has anyone systematically compared the two editions for variants?  Caroline RD's edition is a reproduction of four earlier printed editions, two from Rangoon, two from Ceylon; Warren worked from MSS, two Burmese and two from Ceylon.  All of Warren's MSS came from sources in the UK, so it must have been known in England, and certainly to Thomas RD, that Warren was working on this text.


As mentioned, Dharmanand Damodar Kosambi (not to be confused with his son Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi) worked on Warren's edition of the Visuddhimagga.  Dharmanand's work was finished in 1911, but the book took until 1950 to appear.

Meanwhile, Dharmanand went back to India, and in 1940 he published in Bombay an edition of the Visuddhimagga in his own name, work that he had begun in 1909. It was based on the same manuscripts as Warren's work, plus reference to two printed editions from SE Asia, perhaps the same as those used by Caroline Rhys Davids.  Dharmanand said, in his Preface,

The sources used for the present edition are primarily the same as those employed for the Harvard edition, consisting of four excellent manuscripts: two Burmese, two Singhalese.  In addition, I have used one printed edition in Burmese and one in Siamese Characters ; while generally not so good as the first of the Burmese manuscripts, these contain an occasional superior reading. To reduce the bulk of this volume, I have omitted all variants ; the best alternative readings, however, will be given with my own commentary-in the volume to follow.
Dharmanand's Visuddhimagga edition has been transcribed and published as a web document.

So there are three editions of the Visuddhimagga published between 1920 and 1950, with entangled editorial histories:
  1. Caroline Rhys Davids, 1920, based on 4 printed editions
  2. Dharmanand Kosambi, 1940, based on 4 MSS and 2 editions
  3. Henry Clark Warren, 1950, based on 4 MSS
    Warren died in 1899, leaving his edition almost complete.  Kosambi was invited by Lanman to bring it to a publishable state, which he and Lanman did together, completing that between 1910 and 1911. Nothing then happened for fifteen years.  Then Lanman and Kosambi settled some dispute, and Kosambi saw the work through the press in 1926-1927.  But the work remained unpublished until 1950 [Preface].
Warren's actual editorial work on the text preceded that of both the others.  But it was only published after their editions.

For his 1940 edition, begun in 1909, Kosambi used the same MSS as Warren had used 40 years earlier.  Two of these MSS were personally procured by Warren from England, by correspondence with Thomas Rhys Davids and with Dr Richard Morris [as Lanman says], and a third was personally lent by Henry Rigg.  Did Kosambi really, separately, gain access to the very same privately-owned MSS?  Or were they still in Cambridge MA when he worked  there after Warren's death?  Or did Kosambi use Warren's unpublished text in constituting his own edition.  It is hard to imagine that he would not do so, since the work was done and lay there before him.

I should mention that for all these editors it was a matter of importance that their editions were produced in this or that script.  Caroline Rhys Davids' edition was mainly undertaken in order to produce a Roman-alphabet version of the pre-existing Burmese- and Ceylonese-script editions.  She showed little engagement with actual text-critical tasks.  Warren was engaged with both text-criticism and with the idea of transliteration.  Warren's edition prints MS readings.  Kosambi also cared about script, producing his edition in Devanagari, thus intending specifically to reach a readership in India.  Kosambi also engaged in text-critical tasks to the extent that he applied Paninian grammatical thinking to the construal of the text, especially in matters of sandhi.  But Kosambi omitted to print any variants from the manuscripts, which means that his edition cannot be used as a critical edition, since he denies the reader the opportunity to think critically about his editorial choices and their alternatives.  

The secondary literature contains references to an edition of the Visuddhimagga by Dharmanand Kosambi (and not Warren) published by OUP in London in 1950.  I think this is probably just an error.

Thursday, August 07, 2014

Linux Mint 17, Cinnamon, Firefox 31 = freeze

I've been very happy with Linux Mint 17, and the Cinnamon GUI.
Except for the occasional system freezes.  This happened usually when I was swapping between windows (alt+tab), and required a re-login.

I've spent some time looking around the web and trying to diagnose the problem.  I've found one change that seems to have cleared up the problem, and I am not aware that anyone else has mentioned it yet.  I've uninstalled Firefox (31), and replaced it with Google Chrome.  I haven't had a freeze since doing that.  Fingers crossed.

Wednesday, July 09, 2014

Kuṭipraveśam rasāyanam

In the Compendium of Suśruta (Suśrutasaṃhitā), there is a passage describing rejuvenation through the use of Soma, which is taken over a period of four months while living in a special hut (4.29.10).  The description is very dramatic, and I translated it in my book The Roots of Ayurveda.(2003: 125-131).

Two accounts of a parallel therapy occur in Caraka's Compendium (Carakasaṃhitā).  In one version, the patient akes Soma and spends six months naked in a greased barrel (6.1.4-7).  In another, he enters a hut, as in Suśruta's account, but Soma is not involved.  (See Roots, 2003: 76--8.)

In my discussion in Roots, I drew a parallel with the Aitareyabrāhmaṇa 1.3 in which a Soma ritual involving rebirth is described (the passage was kindly pointed out to me by David Pingree).

Now I have identified another passage that seems to be about the same ritual.

Pātañjalayogaśāstra (sūtras and bhāṣya)

In the Pātañjalayogaśāstra (i.e., the Yoga Sutras and the Bhāṣya commentary, all by Patañjali), there is a sutra that lists the means by which super powers may be attained.  Sutra 4.1 says:
super powers (siddhi) come from birth, drugs, mantras, asceticism, and meditative integration (samādhi)(janmauṣadhimantratapaḥsamādhijāḥ siddhayaḥ).  
Explaining this, Patañjali (not Vyāsa) says, in his Bhāṣya,
by using drugs means using rejuvenations (rasāyana) in the houses of the Asuras, and so on.
(oṣadhibhir asurabhavaneṣu rasāyanenety evamādiḥ).
No further explanation is given, and we are left to wonder what the "houses of the Asuras" might be.

Śaṅkara

The commentator Śaṅkara, in his Vivaraṇa, expands on this passage in a significant way. He says (1952 edition, pp. 317-18):
oṣadhibhir asurabhavaneṣu rasāyanena  somāmalakādibhakṣaṇena pūrvadehānapanayenaiva/

by means of drugs in the houses of the Asuras
by elixir, by consuming Soma, emblic, and so on, completely without the removal of the previous body.  
 
[I am grateful to Philipp Maas for improving this translation. -- October 2016]

The use of the word "soma" suggests that this commentator is putting together the idea of rasāyana entioned in the Bhāṣya with the specific rasāyana treatment described by Suśruta (and, more briefly, Caraka).

Asurabhavana

The only place that Asurabhavana "home of the Asuras" is mentioned with any regularity is in the Pāli literature of the Buddhist Canon.  For example, in the Mahā Suññata Sutta (Majjhimanikāya 122/3, tr. by Piya Tan; tr. by Thanissaro Bhikkhu), the Buddha is described worrying about the fact that worldly people live in too-crowded conditions for proper meditation.  Asura bhavana is described as being ten-thousand yojanas wide, and is included in a listing of the various parts of the universe where living creatures live (and are crowded).  Asurabhavana is therefore a geographical location in the Buddhist universe.

In one of the British Library Stein Tibetan manuscripts, IOL Tib J 644, Vajrapāṇi is described entering an Asura Cave in order to meditate.  See J. Dalton and Sam van Schaik (2006), Tibetan Tantric Manuscripts from Dunhuang: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Stein Collection at the British Library. Brill, Leiden, Boston, p. 291.

Vācaspatimiśra

Explaining Patañjali, the commentator Vācaspati (as so often) is guessing at the meaning on the basis of his general knowledge (e-edition at SARIT): 
oṣadhisiddhim āha --- asurabhavaneṣv iti/ manuṣyo hi kutaś cin nimittād asurabhavanam upasaṃprāptaḥ kamanīyābhir asurakanyābhir upanītaṃ rasāyanam upayujyājarāmaraṇatvam anyāś ca siddhīr āsādayati/ ihaiva vā rasāyanopayogena yathā māṇḍavyo munī rasopayogād vindhyavāsīti/

He states the super power of drugs: "in the houses of the Asuras." Because a human, for a certain reason, who has reached the house of an Asura, is served an elixir by the attractive Asura girls.  After taking it, he achieves the state of never aging or dying, and other super powers.  Alternatively, by taking elixirs in this actual world, like the sage Māṇḍavya took up residence in the Vindhya mountains through the use of elixirs.

Sanskrit Vidh - On alchemical transubstantiation versus piercing

[This reproduces a post by me to the INDOLOGY list, earlier today]
I am trying to firm up the idea that vedh- means convert, transmute, or (for the philosophers among us, perhaps) transubstantiate.
The Rasaratnasamuccaya is a kind of late-ish nibandha text that brings together, organizes and medicalizes the earlier, more tantric alchemical literature.  Meulenbeld argues that it is datable to the sixteenth century (HIML IIA 670).  Earliest dated MS: 1699 CE.  This text is not bad as a representative of the developed ("classical"?) rasaśāstra tradition; one would expect less standardization of vocab. in earlier texts.
At Rasaratnasamuccaya 8.94-95 there is a definition of śabdavedha

from blowing of iron, with mercury in the mouth, there is the creation of goldenness and silverness. That is known as Word-vedha.
and the commentator makes it even more explicity that this is transmutation, using pari-ṇamRasaratnasamuccayabodhinī on 8.95:


... tat lauhakhaṇḍaṃ svarṇādirūpeṇa pariṇatam//
that bit of iron is converted into the form of gold etc.
... yatra vedhe svarṇādirūpeṇa pariṇamet sa śabdavedha ityarthaḥ//
Word-vedha is where it converts with the form of gold etc. ...
The operation being described here is not unclear.  The alchemist puts a piece of mercury in his mouth and blows on a piece of iron.  It becomes golden or silvery.  This "becoming" is "vedha."

The Bodhinī authors were Āśubodha and Nityabodha (hence the witty title), the sons of Jīvānanda Vidyāsāgara Bhaṭṭacārya, and the Bodhinī was published in Calcutta in 1927.  So it's arguable that their interpretation was influenced by 19th-20th century thought.  However, their commentary is very śāstric and elaborate (note the Pāṇinian grammatical parsing, "dhama dhāvane ityasmāt lyuḥ" (>P.1.3.134 and pacādi ākṛtigaṇa).  And as Meulenbeld points out, they cite an exceptionally wide range of earlier rasaśāstra texts (HIML IIA 671-2).  Their interpretations are based on a close reading of classical rasaśāstra literature.  At the very least, one can say that their view represents the understanding of learned panditas in turn of the century Calcutta, that vedha meant pariṇāma, or transmutation.

Saturday, July 05, 2014

The Origins of a Famous Yogic/Tantric Image (part 2)


In a post in February this year I talked about the origin and spread of the famous "lines of energy" image.  I asserted that this image was created by or for Yogini Sunita.

I had a memory of having seen the image reproduced in Mircea Eliade's book, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, or in one of Daniélou's books.  I looked at the issues of Eliade's books available to me, and at Daniélou's
Yoga: Mastering the Secrets of Matter and the Universe, that is on my bookshelf, but the image wasn't there.

Now, I can report that I've solved both these puzzles in a stroke.  In the Vienna Indology library last week, I came across an Eliade book that I'd forgotten, Patanjali et le Yoga (Paris, 1962).  And look at the cover!

Eliade reproduces the image inside the book:


Eliade captions the image "La matière, la vie, l'esprit."  As an aside, I have argued and taught in the past that anyone who says "body, mind and spirit" is reproducing a meme from Western New Age thought, and not anything specifically Indian.  The threefold division of Man in the original Sanskrit sources is normally "body, mind and speech."

In the acknowledgements at the back of the book, Eliade attributes this image to Alain Daniélou's "Yoga: Méthode de réintégration (Éditions de l'Arche), pp. 171, 179 et couverture."  Eliade doesn't give a date for the Daniélou edition he copied from, but the edition will turn up sooner or later.  It was first published in 1951.


newspaper article about Sunita
From http://www.pranayama-yoga.co.uk/
So, this image was used by Daniélou, as early as 1951, and following him, by Eliade in 1962.

The earliest edition of Yogini Sunita's book that I can find is 1965, and she only arrived in England in 1960, and started her first yoga classes that year, as reported in this newspaper clip.

So perhaps the whole story of this image has a prehistory before Yogini Sunita.  Perhaps she reproduced the image from Daniélou, or even Eliade.

Update April 2019

Here's the image in a 1949 English translation of Daniélou's book.  The caption says "with permission from 'Kalyan' Corakhour".  Kalyan was a well-known Sanskrit and Hindi journal published by the Geeta Press in Gorakhpur since 1926.  So the trail now leads to an issue of Kalyan from before 1949.  Some issues have been scanned and are at Archive.org.

Update January 2022

Found it!  After an afternoon of scanning back issues of Kalyan, I located the image in the 1935 issue

Unfortunately, the image available in the scan is folded over, so the whole image is not visible.  But the visible parts are definitely identifiable as the bottom half of the famous Danielou-Eliade-Sunita image. It's nice to see that it is in negative, which explains why it was negative in the early reproductions.  This is a bold idea by the Kalyan illustrator.  Later printers have preferred to reverse the image to positive.  In the volume, the illustration is on page 560 and illustrates an article by Svāmī Śrīkṛṣṇacalled "प्राणायामविषयको मेरा अनुभव"(My experience in the area of Prāṇāyāma") (pp. 554-561). 

This issue of Kalyan was dedicated to the theme of Yoga, which is no doubt why it came to Danielou's attention, over ten years later.  It contains other interesting illustrations, including pictures on pp. 389-392 copied without attribution from Haṃsasvarūpa's Ṣaṭcakranirūpaṇa (Muzaffarpur, Bihar: Trikutivilas Press, 1903?).  See Wujastyk 2009: 201-204 for further background on this work 

In the same issue of Kalyan, there is an unexpected article on mesmerism and hypnotism by Dr Durgāśaṅkarajī Nāgara, "मेस्मेरिज्म् और् हिप्नाटिज्म्" (pp. 538-544) that gives a history of the techniques, its use at St Thomas's hospital in London, illustrations of magnets and practitioners, and a discussion of electrical flow, the scientific basis, methods of magnetic pass, deep breathing, etc.

 

Monday, May 19, 2014

Open letter to MLBD about their publishing Mein Kampf

Update, 21 May 2014
Motilal Banarsidass responded graciously, rapidly and positively to this letter and the petition, and agreed to stop distributing the book.


Friday, March 21, 2014

Notes on the Ukrainian crisis

The Nuland-Pyatt recording

[The following is an extract, authored by me, from the WikiPedia page on this topic.  My text has been deleted four or five times by someone with a Russian-sounding name, NazariyKaminski, or by a now-deleted user called RedPenOfDeath and other sock-puppets.  So I am placing the text here, for the record.]


Friday, February 28, 2014

The Origins of a Famous Yogic/Tantric Image (part 1)

Mark Singleton
Ellen Goldberg
I'm delighted by the arrival from the bookshop of my copy of the excellent new book Gurus of Modern Yoga edited by Mark Singleton and Ellen Goldberg (ISBN 978-0-19-993872-8).

Full details of the book can be had from Peter Wyzlic's indologica.de website.





Yogini Sunita's Pranayama Image

Suzanne Newcombe
Suzanne Newcombe's chapter, "The Institutionalization of the Yoga Tradition: `Gurus' B. K. S. Iyengar and Yogini Sunita in Britain," is an outstanding description and evaluation of the impact of two yoga teachers in the UK.  One of Suzanne's subjects is Yogini Sunita (aka Bernadette Cabral), originally a Catholic from Bombay.  Although tragically killed by a car at the early age of 38, her work is kept alive by her son Kenneth Cabral and other yoga teachers (http://www.pranayama-yoga.co.uk).

Yogini Sunita published a book in 1965 called Pranayama, The Art of
Relaxation, The Lotus and the Rose (Worldcat).  It contained an illustration that has gone on to become one of the most famous and iconic images in yoga publishing.  The image is a line drawing in black on a white background showing the outline of a seated, cross-legged meditator superimposed on a wild network of lines, with annotations in Devanagari script. The Sanskrit word प्राणायाम (prāṇāyāma) "breath control" labels the image in the top right-hand corner.  The smaller writing, along the lines, is more or less illegible in all the reproductions I have been able to examine.  I can just discern the Devanagari alphabet being spelt out (अ आ इ ई उ ऊ ए ओ ऐ औ अं अः ...) on the right clavicle.  But the rest of the writing is unclear.  I am not confident that it is even real text, although it looks superficially like Devanagari or Gujarati script.  Only an examination of the original artwork or a good reproduction would settle the matter.

Yogini Sunita's signature
Yogini Sunita was not a confident Devanagari writer, as is evidenced by her signature in the preface to her book (in Devanagari, "yodinī saunīṭā").  She could not have produced the Pranayama the drawing herself, and must have commissioned it from a source or collaborator with a confident knowledge of Sanskrit and the Devanagari script, perhaps in Bombay.

Yogini Sunita's illustration has been reproduced almost endlessly in books and now on the internet, and there are multiple modifications and interpretations.  One of the more common is a negative version, with white lines on a black background.  Others are coloured, simplified, and interpreted in various creative ways.  It appears in various contemporary yoga-themed mashups.  The word प्राणायाम is often masked out.  The image is often shown as a representation not primarily of breath control, but of the nodes and tubes of the spiritual body (cakras and nāḍīs).

Suzanne Newcombe describes how Yogini Sunita's early death meant that her methods and ideas did not spread as widely as those of other 20th century yoga teachers.  Nevertheless, the Pranayama illustration from her 1965 book has become one of the most widely-known images of yoga in the 21st-century (Google images).

Update, July 2014: now see part 2 of this article