Monday, April 22, 2013

Jayanta's Nyāyakalikā: a new edition by Kei Kataoka

Apart from his major work, the Nyāyamañjarī, and of a lost Nyāyapallava, Jayanta dedicated to Nyāya also a short handbook, the Nyāyakalikā. This has the main advantage of being a handy and comprehensive summary of Nyāya topics, and often also of the Nyāyamañjarī itself, with which it has frequent parallels. I have used the Nyāyakalikā to make sense of difficult passages in the last chapters of the Nyāyabhāṣya (see here).

However, until now, the Nyāyakalikā has only been once edited by G. Jhā. After this usual pioneer of Nyāya study (and many other fields of Indian philosophy), the Japanese professor Hiroshi Marui has dedicated to the Nyāyakalikā two studies. Now, Kei Kataoka has finished a critical edition of the first part of the Nyāyakalikā. It is published on The Memoirs of Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, No. 163 (2013) and you can find it here.

As usual with Kei Kataoka's editions (about which, see here), this one has the additional value of two apparatuses of parallel passages, one dedicated to the parallels within the Nyāyamañjarī and the other to parallels within Nyāya in general. I especially appreciate this feature, since it collocates the text within its history (and makes sure that the edition does not only rely on stemmatics or similar criteria).

What do you put/like to read in a critical edition? Do you also value secondary witnesses?

For other posts on Kataoka's editions and methodology see, among others, here (on his edition of Nyāyamañjarī on apoha), here (on his usage of commentaries, which might seem slightly unexpected if one thinks of the importance of the apparatus of secondary witness), here (on his translation technique).



2 comments:

Dominik Wujastyk said...

Nice to see yet another of Kataoka's editions made using TeX and (L)EDMAC (Lavagnino and Wujastyk, 1997, http://tug.org/edmac/).

I would be glad to see acknowledgement of EDMAC's use in publications like these.

Best,
Dominik

elisa freschi said...

You are right, Dominik, and I am sincerely sorry to say that when I have been working with Kei I did not think about it. Perhaps adding a note to the downloaded package? Something like "This package is free, but this does not mean that people have not spent days and nights working on it. Please acknowledge their work while using it"?

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