Reflections on INDOLOGY (I of III)

[Dr. Dominik Wujastyk]

PART I (of III)
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My dear fellow INDOLOGists :-)

I have been off the net--except for fragmentary opportunities here and
there--since the end of October.  I sent out a message on 18 November,
saying that I was back in the loop, but everything promptly went dim
again until after Christmas.  A few days ago I fetched all the INDOLOGY
files from 25 Oct to the present, and ploughed through the lot.  There
remains about a week's worth of stuff around Christmas that is still in
a black hole somewhere, and I gather from the grapevine that it contains
a gauntlet that I have to pick up, so there is plenty to look forward
to!

Seeing almost three months' worth of INDOLOGY in one go, after not
participating at all for a while, has given me a chance to sit back and
think a little about the nature, conduct and future of INDOLOGY.  I
don't know if you were a member of HUMANIST in Willard McCarty's days,
but he used to do a sort of annual report on the list which was
unfailingly delightful reading.  I think of that and immediately want to
give up. Anyhow, perhaps some more modest reflections on a shorter
period may be possible.

To give you my conclusion right at the beginning, I don't propose any
major change to the way INDOLOGY functions at the present time, although
I am reviewing the options for tighter control of membership and
content.

During the period under review, there were perhaps two major happenings:

1/ Lance Nelson's forwarding of the VHP/United Path message and the
   responses to that;

2/ the announcement by Michio Yano of Professor Tokunaga's release of
   the MRFs of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.

After a pleasant pastoral lull in which the etymology of "monsoon" was
debated in soothing terms, Lance forwarded a message about American
fundraising for VHP-America to INDOLOGY on 30 October.  Within a day or
two, an acrimonious debate was in full monsoon flood.  The volume and
acerbity continued to grow until by the 4 November people were beginning
to talk about resigning from the group (and being lambasted even for
that idea!). Although the message was from David Ludden, and Lance had
even ensured that the mystic string "(fwd)" appeared in the subject
line, much vitriol was still directed at him.

The VHP-related postings went on getting longer and nastier through the
first half of November.  Some members tried to raise the tone by
introducing scholarly questions or otherwise distracting participants in
the argument with apparently unrelated talk of maitraksajyotikas and the
like, but to no avail.  Then, on 14 Nov someone posted a message that
stopped the VHP discussion dead in it's tracks.  Not a single further
posting on the topic appeared.  This was bigger than the VHP.

Michio Yano announced that Prof. Tokunaga and his team had typed into
machine readable files THE ENTIRE RAMAYANA AND MAHABHARATA.  News of
this achievement met with a rapturous response from those who realized
just how hard such a job is, just how important the contribution is for
future literary, grammatical, syntactic and semantic studies of these
monumental texts, and finally how outstandingly generous it was of Prof.
Tokunaga to make the work freely and openly available.  I add my deepest
admiration and gratitude to Prof. Tokunaga and his students.

There was a delightful period when an INDOLOGY subject-thread was
entitled "The Incredible Professor Tokunaga".  And I think the medal for
first result from Prof. Tokunaga's e-texts to appear on INDOLOGY goes to
*Alex Passi* (or is that Carlo, or Giuseppe?) who noticed that the
ancient Indian Molotov Cocktail, or bhusundi, is frequently mentioned in
the Mahabharata, but not once in the Ramayana.  That Ravana had it easy!
Just think if someone had given the monkeys a bhusundi!

There followed some discussion about the availability and file format of
the epics, and then INDOLOGY returned to its normal fare with
discussions about the meaning of the Buddha as a Hindu avatar,
Indo-Aryan initial consonant clusters, and the past habitual in Tulu and
Tibetan.  Frances Pritchett posted an extremely useful survey of Indic
computer fonts, a job that had been crying out to be done for ages, and
which is now admirably achieved. One notable posting from Leonard
Zwilling appeared in mid-December, having apparently been posted on 1st
August.  Where's your computer, Leonard?  Mars?

And then there was the scare about an email virus.  Could everyone
please PRUNE their postings, and not set your mailer to automatically
tack incoming messages on to the end of your reply?  The virus scare was
false, but messages about it used up enough bandwidth to constitute a
minor danger all of their own.

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to be continued ...