[INDOLOGY] Perso-Indica Workshop: Indic Texts and Islamicate Culture, Tokyo, 6/10/2018

Tue Jul 31 11:17:35 UTC 2018

The Third Perso-IndicaWorkshop

Indic Texts and Islamicate Culture from theGhaznavid 
to the Sultanate Periods 
Tokyo, October 6th 2018, 13:30-17:30

Program

13:30–13:35   Nobuhiro Ota (ILCAA): Openingaddress.

13:35–13:50   Fabrizio Speziale (EHESS): Introduction to the Third Perso-Indica Workshop.
 13:50–14:30   Noémie Verdon (Swiss National Science Foundation): “Al-Bīrūnī’sKitāb Pātanğal and Kitāb Sānk: Methods and Strategies of Translation.” 
14:30–15:10   Satoshi Ogura (ILCAA): “RevisitingSanskrit Epic-Purāṇic Elements in Rashīd al-Dīn’s History of India.”

15:10–15:25   Break

15:25–16:05  Fabrizio Speziale (EHESS): “Šihāb al-Dīn Nāgawrī’s Šifā al-maraż: Reconsidering Greco-Arabic and Ayurvedic Theories of the Humours in14th century India.”

16:05–16:45 Kazuyo Sakaki (Hokkaido MusashiWomen’s College): “Ways for liberation – The early textual transmission of Indiantraditional science in Persian works.”

16:45–17:00  Michio Yano (Kyoto Sangyo University):General comments.

17:00–17:30Discussion.

Venue: Tokyo University ofForeign Studies, Hongo Satellite Campus, 5 floor seminar room, 2-4-10, Hongo,Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo.

Co-hosted by ILCAA Joint Research Project: “Culture and Society in Early Modern South Asia: Cross-Linguistic Comparative Studies of Literary and Religious Texts”

Organisation and contacts: SatoshiOgura (ogura at aa.tufs.ac.jp) - Fabrizio Speziale (fabrizio.speziale at ehess.fr)

http://www.perso-indica.net/events-news/34

Abstracts

]  NoémieVerdon (SwissNational Science Foundation, Berne), “Al-Bīrūnī’s Kitāb Pātanğal andKitāb Sānk: Methods and Strategies of Translation.”

The Perso-Muslimpolymath al-Bīrūnī lived in Central Asia between the tenth and the eleventhcenturies CE. His monograph on India, the Taḥqīqmā li-l-Hind (ca. 1030), isparticularly remarkable, as the scholar describes Indian religion, sciences,literatures and customs in an extremely exhaustive, meticulous and objectiveway; which remains unparalleled for his time. In this work, al-Bīrūnīabundantly quotes two texts related to classical Sāṃkhya and Yoga philosophieswhich he had also translated from Sanskrit to Arabic. The two texts are respectivelytitled in Arabic the Kitāb Sānk andthe Kitāb Pātanğal. As for theformer, extracts of it are scattered in the Taḥqīqmā li-l-Hind; which remains our only source of knowledge of this work. Acomplete manuscript of the latter exists today and was edited by Hellmut Ritterin 1956. Several established scholars, such as Carl Edward Sachau (1888),Richard Garbe (1894; 1917), Junjiro Takakusu (1904) or Schlomo Pines and TuviaGelblum (1966; 1977; 1983; 1989) attempted to identify the Sanskrit sources ofthese translations. Their efforts however never reached conclusive results.

After an introductionto al-Bīrūnī’s life and intellectual context, the presentation will focus onthe methods and strategies he adopted when composing the Kitāb Sānk and the KitābPātanğal. Rather than proposing a literal translation, al-Bīrūnī isoffering his own interpretation of Indian philosophical concepts to aPerso-Muslim readership. During this process of cultural translation, thescholar negotiated a great deal with his Sanskrit sources. The presentationwill analyse several passages of his interpretations and discuss the possibleSanskrit sources of the two Arabic translations.

] Satoshi Ogura (ResearchInstitute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University ofForeign Studies, Tokyo), “RevisitingSanskrit Epic-Purāṇic Elements in Rashīd al-Dīn’s History of India.”

The Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīḫ or The Compendium ofChronicles is a Persian historical work composed by Rashīd al-Dīn Faḍl AllāhHamadānī (d. 718/1318), a vizier who served to Ilkhanid rulers Ġāzān (r.1295–1304) and Öljaitü(r. 1304–16), comprising a history of the Turks and Mongols, and a history ofGenghis Khan’s family up to Ġāzān’s death (volume one), the history of Öljaitüwhich is now missing and the so-called the histories of the people of the world(volume two), and a geographicalcompendiumwhich is too missing (volume three). The history of India arranged at the endof volume two is in two parts (qism):the first part contains (i) the measures of time and eras; (ii) the geography;(iii) brief histories of Delhi and Kashmir; and (iv) the kings who ruled ineach of the four epochs in Indic thought (yuga). The second partcontains (v) the beliefs and thoughts of Indic religions; (vi) the life andteachings of Śakyamuni; (vii) explanations about hells (dūzaḫ), heavens(bihišt), and metempsychosis (tanāsuḫ) in Buddhist thought; and(viii) the description of diffusion of Buddhist schools and other Indicreligions in India and Mongolia at the beginning of the fourteenth century.This chapter ends with (ix) a note on Rašīd al-Dīn’s refutation of the beliefof metempsychosis from an Islamic viewpoint. 

    By contrast to the second part which hasattracted scholars’ interest due to its descriptions on Buddhism, the firstpart has less studied after a series of treatises by Karl Jahn. Indeed, thefirst part provides a unique depiction of the ancient history of India thatcolligates the contents of multiple Sanskrit epics and purāṇas including the AitareyaBrāhmaṇa, the Mārkandeya Purāṇa, the Raghuvaṁśa, the Rāmāyana,and the Mahābhārata, according to the chronological order of the Indianconcept of time of four yugas, making slight alternations to the storiesin the sources; the concept of the your yugas in the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīḫis based on the information given by the Kitāb al-Hind of Abū Rayḥānal-Bīrūnī, and the contents of each Sanskrit epics and purāṇas were given by aKashmiri Buddhist monk Kamālašrī. In this presentation I will focus on how thestories in the abovementioned Sanskrit epics and purāṇas are chronologicallyarranged and altered in writing Rashīd al-Dīn’s history of India. In addition,I will explore a profile of Kamālašrī as an informant of epics and purāṇas inspite of being a Buddhist.

]  FabrizioSpeziale (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Center for South AsianStudies, Paris), “Šihāb al-Dīn Nāgawrī’s Šifā al-maraż: Reconsidering Greco-Arabic and Ayurvedic Theories ofthe Humours in 14th century India.”

The fundamentalconcepts of the theory of humours of the Greco-Arabic thought are often seen asstatic and a-historical entities whose identity and function were defined onceand for all in the classical sources. This paper questions this view by lookingat the Šifā al-maraż, a Persianmedical handbook written in India by Šihāb al-Dīn Nāgawrī in 790/1388. In thefirst chapter, Nāgawrī proposes a shift of perspective in the classicalcategorisation of humoural pathology of the Arabic and Persian texts. Hisproposal is based on a combination of Muslim and Indian physicians’ viewsthrough the assimilation of notions of the latter into the conceptual frameworkof the former. Nāgawrī’s audacious proposal addresses a key question, since theclassification of humours constitutes a central element of the doctrinalidentities of both the Avicennian and the Ayurvedic schools. Moreover, a closerreading of this chapter raises the question of whether Nāgawrī’s intent was torevise both doctrines at the base of his hybrid nosography. His model can beread not only as a key adjustment to the Greco-Arabic view but also as areconsideration of the Ayurvedic theory which does not count blood among thehumours.

]  KazuyoSakaki (HokkaidoMusashi Women’s College, Sapporo), “Ways for liberation – The early textualtransmission of Indian traditional science in Persian works.”

In the context oftantric tradition, astrological and divinatory knowledge were required forseekers of liberation. In India, astrology has been a part of the political,cultural, and social apparatus, and received ideological foundations in theVedic tradition. It has been developed as one of the important knowledgesystems as Vedic auxiliaries. In Islamic world, due to the contact withHellenistic sciences, when the classification of knowledge systems wasformulated, astrology was classified into foreign sciences. In medieval Islamicsociety, despite of the debate between the pros and cons of astrology,inherited from Hellenistic doctrines and other foreign sources, it remained aspopular practice among the people regardless of rank just as in the pre-Islamictimes. In the early stage of the intercultural communications among Iranian,Arabic, Greek and Indian intellectual traditions, astrological knowledge wastransmitted through translation activities. However, the source texts, even in the field of science, were subjectedto undergo the transformation in their own socio-cultural context, and thetranslated texts were widely transmitted in their transformed shape beyond theiroriginal context. In order to provide textual evidences of literarytransformation and various ways of transmission, we will examine two scholarlyworks of renowned astrologers from Ujjain, i.e., Varāhamihira and Narapati. Inthe case of Varāhamihira’s Bṛhatsaṃhitā, al-Bīrūnī made success in hisintertextual studies and ‘Abd al-‘AzīzShams-i Bahāʾ Nūrī showed his intentional neglect to appeal tohis target audience. As one of the source texts of the Amṛtakuṇḍa, the Narapatijayacaryā,having inherited traditional knowledge systems, transmitted the science of svarato Islamic spiritual seekers for liberation and was incorporated inencyclopedic works as one of the indigenous knowledge systems in India. In thecontext of translation studies, both cases will provide typical examples ofknowledge translation strategies.

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