Divyavadana

[jonathan silk]

The "Japanese scholar" who is working on Divya is HIRAOKA Satoshi, of Kyoto
Bunkyo University <hiraoka at mbox.kyoto-inet.or.jp>. He has published quite a
bit on the text, almost all in Japanese however. He did publish several
years ago a list of the published translations of chapters, including
translations into Japanese; I have the article at home, however, so I can't
give you the details. (I can ask him if he has it on disc, and perhaps post
it to the list, although the Japanese stuff would become garbage, I guess,
since it is probably in JIS code...).

Hiraoka will be at the AAR meeting in San Francisco in November, so those
who are in North America and interested in talking Divyavadana -- here's
your chance!

-- By the way, my understanding of Hiraoka's plan is that he expects to
work chapter by chapter (not in order, however) through the text,
consulting Tibetan and Chinese parallels, and publishing annotated
translations as he goes -- and then at the end of that process publish the
whole thing revised and so on.

What he is *not* going to do, which would be wonderful to have done, is to
go back and take another look at the MSS.  For one thing, it is clear that
there is not "the" Divyavadana, but rather several more or less closely
related collections of stories -- this issue has been discussed (sorry
folks!  again in Japanese!) by IWAMOTO Yutaka in his study of Avadanas.
(Some remarks also in his German version of the Sumagadhavadana.) [Any
Indologists out there starting to get the idea it might not hurt to learn
Japanese?]  In addition, Cowell and Neil worked in a day when not much was
known about so-called BHS, and there is much to be corrected in the texts,
both on the basis of new MS evidence (like that available from the
German-Nepal project) and as conjectural emendation.


Jonathan Silk
SILK at wmich.edu

*******************
Outside of a dog, books are a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too
dark to read.