Friday, May 20, 2016
Friday, March 6, 2015
Latin Expressions for Buddhist Philology
• Ipsissima verba
Those who are interested, for whatever reasons or motives, in understanding the ipsissima verba (“the very words”) of any given past Buddhist author or the conceived ipsissima verba of the Buddha, has no choice but to rely on Buddhist philology. One does Buddhist philosophy because one wants to do so. But one does Buddhist philology because one has to do so. An important issue for the Buddhist philologists is the retrievability of the ipsissima verba of the Buddha and the methodology and feasibility of such an endeavor.
• Scriptura continua
The phenomenon of scriptio continua (“continuous script”), also known as scriptura continua or scripta continua, that is, a style of writing without spaces or other marks between the words or sentences, is not common in Tibetan scriptology. One possible reason for this may have been the fact that Tibetan language is a monosyllabic language. To be noted is that in Tibetan, there is no such thing as “word-separator/divider” but rather “syllable-separator/divider.” Of course phrases, sentences, sections, chapters, and works (in the case of a multi-text volume) in Tibetan usually are separated by certain signs or marks. Occasionally in some Tibetan stone inscriptions, however, one does seem to observe the phenomenon of scriptura continua (to a certain degree).
Buddhist Philology = Buddhist Textual Scholarship
An Extract from the draft of my lecture:
For
David C. Greetham, who defines the term “textual scholarship” in his book Textual Scholarship: An Introduction
(1994), it is, in his own words, “perhaps a field somewhat like the old
‘philology’ of an earlier dispensation.” The employment of the term “textual
scholarship” has obviously been intended by him to “co-opt” it “for the
procedures of enumerative bibliographers, descriptive, analytical, and
historical bibliographers, palaeographers and codicologists, textual editors,
and annotators—cumulatively and collectively perhaps a field somewhat like the
old ‘philology’ of an earlier dispensation, the technical and conceptual
recreation of the past through its texts, specifically the language of those
texts.”[1]
Greetham himself seems to have been inspired by G. Thomas Tanselle, for he
states:[2]
In part, the employment of the term “textual
scholarship” in this general sense is a recognition (as G. Thomas Tanselle put
it in his inaugural address to the Society for Textual Scholarship in 1981)
that “textual criticism” is associated with the “great tradition of classical
and biblical [studies, and] forms but one branch of textual scholarship as a
whole” (“Presidential Address,” Text
1, [1984]: 2). In part, it is a recognition that the various contributions of
palaeographers, codicologists, bibliographers, editors and so on, are related
to what elsewhere Tanselle has called the “single great enterprise” (Rationale of Textual Criticism.
Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1989: 46) common to them all—the historical
investigation of texts as both artifactual objects and conceptual entities, and
the reconstruction of those stages in the transmission that have not survived.
Further on, Greetham defines “textual scholarship” as
“the general term for all the activities associated with the discovery,
description, transcription, editing, annotating, and commenting upon texts.
Textual scholarship thus has wider reference than ‘textual criticism’ (that
part of the discipline concerned with evaluation and emendation of the reading
of the texts), may involve any of the technical fields listed in the opening
sentence.” The fields that he has been referring to in his opening sentence
are: bibliography (i.e. enumerative, systematic, descriptive, analytical,
historical, and textual), textual analysis, textual criticism, textual editing,
documentary editing, social textual criticism, epigraphy, paleography,
codicology, diplomatics, philology, historical criticism, and higher and lower
criticism.
Presupposing the definition of “textual scholarship” we have just seen, we
may even understand “Buddhist philology” in its widest sense as “Buddhist
textual scholarship,” which may be defined here as an academic discipline
within the domain of the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften),
(a) whose ultimate goal is the investigation and explanation of the
intellectual history (Geistesgeschichte)
and intellectual culture (Geisteskultur)
of a society impregnated with Buddhist religion and philosophy, (b) whose main
research material consists of written texts (or written sources) transmitted
through the medium of manuscripts, xylographs, epigraphs, modern books, and so
on, and (c) whose methodology is defined by the employment of
historical-philological tools and techniques, which presupposes a profound
knowledge of the languages and cultures in which the pertinent texts have
originated and through which they have been transmitted and disseminated.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)