Harvard Oriental Series

For nearly a thousand years the brilliant analysis of aesthetic experience set forth in the Locana of Abhinavagupta, India’s founding literary critic, has dominated traditional Indian theory on poetics and aesthetics. The Locana, presented here in English translation for the first time, is a commentary on the ninth-century Dhvanyaloka of Anandavardhana, which is itself the pivotal work in the history of Indian poetics.

A detailed discussion by the editor complements this critical edition and translation of the phonetical treatise (Pratisakhya) of the Saunaka Samhita, one of two versions of the second oldest Indian text, the Saunaka Atharvaveda. The 19th century edition of the text by W.D. Whitney has long been out of date; this reevaluation provides insights into early grammatical thought and helps to re-establish the textual tradition of the Atharvaveda.

This edition is based on new manuscripts of this important treatise on classical Sanskrit poetics. It was composed by the famous eleventh-century King Bhoja of Malwa (W. India), a patron of traditional learning. The text has never received a complete critical edition. It is important not only because of the theoretical treatment of the erotic sentiment (srngara) in classical Sanskrit texts. It is also a mine of quotations from extant and also from lost Sanskrit and Prakrit poetical texts.

Throughout Western Nepal, shamans continue to fulfill important therapeutic roles, diagnosing problems, treating afflictions, and restoring order and balance to the lives of their clients and their communities. Each of these efforts incorporates extensive, meticulously memorized oral texts. Containing three representative repertoires and over 250 texts, this bilingual (Nepali and English) volume includes both publicly chanted recitals and privately whispered spells of the area’s three leading shamans, annotated with extensive notes. These texts preserve the knowledge necessary to act as a shaman, and confirm a social world that demands continuous intervention by shamans.

The Caitanya Caritamrta is an early-seventeenth-century Bengali and Sanskrit biography of the great saint and Vaisnava leader Caitanya (1486-1533 c.e.), by the poet and scholar Krsnadasa, who has been given by Bengali tradition the title Kaviraja--"Prince of Poets."

The Samaveda contains the earliest tradition of music from India. It presents largely Rigvedic textual material in a form arranged for singing in the solemn Srauta ritual. Since the first editions by Theodor Benfey (1848) and Satyavrata Samasrami (1874-1899), there has been no complete, accented edition that also included all its important commentaries. The present edition is based on manuscripts collected from all over India and Europe. B. R. Sharma, Dean of Samaveda Studies, presents the accented text, its Padapatha, and the commentaries of Madhava, Bharata-Svamin, and Sayana in three volumes totaling 2,500 pages.

This is a critical edition of the Kramapatha and Jatapatha forms of recitational permutations of several sections of the Saunakiya Atharvaveda available in six rare manuscripts found in Pune, India. Such recitational variations for the Atharvaveda are no longer available in the surviving oral tradition in India, and hence the texts, critically edited here, provide rare access to these materials.

This book presents the earliest South Indian inscriptions (ca. second century B.C. to sixth century A.D.), written in Tamil in local derivations of the Ashokan Brahmi script. They are the earliest known Dravidian documents available and show some overlap with the early Cera and Pandya dynasties. The work includes texts, transliteration, translation, detailed commentary, inscriptional glossary, and indexes.

The Rig Veda is the oldest Indian and one of the oldest Indo-European texts. It is a collection of 1,028 hymns addressed to the gods, composed in highly poetic and notoriously difficult Archaic Sanskrit. Medieval Indian commentaries and especially the modern Western scholarship of the past 150 years have increasingly shed more light on its poetry, religion, and ritual as well as on its contemporary meaning. The Rig Veda has been translated in scholarly fashion only once during the twentieth century, and that was into German in 1951 by K. F. Geldner. Geldner’s volumes have long been out of print; they are reprinted here in one useful reference volume.

This volume is a study and edition of Bcom Idan ral gri’s (1227–1305) Bstan pa rgyas pa rgyan gyi nyi ’od. Likely composed in the last decades of the thirteenth century, this systematic list of Buddhist Sutras, Tantras, Shastras, and related genres translated primarily from Sanskrit and other Indic languages holds an important place in the history of Buddhist literature in Tibet.

Dating to the first half of the first millennium B.C.E., the Katha Aranyaka is a ritualistic and speculative text that deals with a dangerous Vedic ritual that provides its sponsor with a new body after death. In a new critical edition, Michael Witzel presents this work which transitions the Vedic ritual into the philosophy of the Upanishads. The text is preceded by an extensive introduction in English and followed by a German translation.

After one hundred years, the well-known Vedic Concordance of Maurice Bloomfield has finally been updated. The first edition, published in 1906, was a complete alphabetic index of all Vedic mantras then known. Several important texts belonging to the oldest stratum of Indian literature have been published since and are included in this new edition.

The poem was composed by the greatest modern writer in Newari language, Hrdaya (1906– 1982), while he was imprisoned by the autocratic strongly pro-Hindu Rana regime that governed Nepal from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. In nineteen long cantos, the Sugata Saurabha tells of the life of the Buddha, following the traditional accounts, but situates it in the strongly local context of Newar and Nepali Buddhism.

This volume is a bilingual collection of shaman oral texts from the Bhuji Valley of Western Nepal, in the original Nepali and with line-by-line English translation. Accompanying the book is a DVD of audio recordings of the shaman oral texts, supplementary texts not included in the published volume, videos of shaman performances, and additional video and photographic documentation of the social context in which these shamans are found.

The more than two dozen Rai languages in eastern Nepal, which make up the larger part of the Kiranti language family, are linguistically highly varied. This volume, which includes introductory chapters to Rai mythology and Rai grammar, for the first time brings together different variants of myths from various Rai languages, presenting them with linguistic glossings in interlinear translations. The book is of special interest to linguists, anthropologists, and folklorists with a focus on the Himalayas.

Bhaviveka (ca. 500–560 ce) lived at a time of unusual creativity and ferment in the history of Indian Buddhist philosophy. Bhaviveka’s “Verses on the Heart of the Middle Way” (Madhyamakahrdayakarika˙) with their commentary, known as “The Flame of Reason” (Tarkajvala), give a unique and authoritative account of the intellectual differences that stirred the Buddhist community in this creative period.

This book examines the revolution in Sanskrit poetics initiated by the ninth-century Kashmiri Anandavardhana. Anandavardhana replaced the formalist aesthetic of earlier poeticians with one stressing the unifunctionality of literary texts, arguing that all components of a work should subserve a single purpose—the communication of a single emotional mood (rasa). Attention was redirected from formal elements toward specific poems, viewed as aesthetically integrated wholes, thereby creating new literary critical possibilities.

This volume discusses the Bhaiksuki manuscript of the Candralamkara (“Ornament of the Moon”), a commentary of the twelfth century based on the Candravyakarana, Candragomin’s seminal Buddhist grammar of Sanskrit (fifth century). The discovery of the Bhaiksuki script and of all available written sources are described. The detailed study of this codex unicus of the Candralamkara is accompanied by a facsimile edition and extensive tables of the script, a long-felt desideratum in the field of palaeography. The Buddhist author of the commentary has been identified for the first time, and the nature of his treatise and its position in the Candra school of grammar have been expounded.

This book interprets the ethnography of the Mru and Khumi, Tibeto-Burmese speaking horticulturalists who practice swidden agriculture in the hills straddling Bangladesh, India, and Burma. Their material and spiritual cultures are described in detail here, from dwellings to religious rituals. Nearly a hundred color photographs provide illustration.

The fourth-century Sanskrit treatise Yogācārabhūmi is the largest Indian text on Buddhist meditation. In The Foundation for Yoga Practitioners, leading Buddhist scholars from across the globe offer a critical summary of the work, elaborate on its compositional background, and reveal its reception history in India, China, and Tibet.

Arte da Lingua Malabar, a sixteenth-century grammar of Tamil written in Portuguese by a Jesuit missionary, reflects the first linguistic contact between India and the West. This English translation by Jeanne Hein and V. S. Rajam also includes analysis of the grammar and a description of the political context in which it was written.