[INDOLOGY] Latest issue of the Journal of Gandhāran Buddhist Texts

[Stefan Baums]

Dear Diego,

thank you very much for your kind words. Commenting only on the
features that you mention:

> the *chāyā*, the English translation, and the gloss of certain
> technical terms

Over on Gandhari.org, we are not convinced, at this point, of the
usefulness of rolling out Sanskrit chāyās for all items, since of
course in historical terms Gāndhārī sources vary widely in their
degree of affinity to the Sanskrit tradition. But we do provide
Old Indo-Aryan etyma and (Buddhist Hybrid) Sanskrit parallels
wherever available in our Dictionary articles and the
corresponding word popups in the running texts.

On the other hand, English translations, image-text linking at the
akṣara level for sychronized scrolling and the generation of
paleographic charts, and syntactic analysis are very much in
progress of being added to Gandhari.org, and were one of the main
motivators for the development of the READ software (for which I
would like to give a shoutout do its wonderful programmer Stephen
White in Venice) that we are now using as a new backend.

Something we are always interested in adding (with all due credit
to the photographers or other sources) is additional visual
documentation for the items. This is especially hard to come by
for newly-discovered (or -acquired) manuscripts, photos of which
are often withheld from the public by whichever scholar is working
on the definitive edition of them until said edition is done,
which can take decades. Arguably, general availabilty of
manuscript images as soon as they are made would be useful for
purposes other that that one edition, such as for surveys of
manuscript formats or for paleographic samples. There are notable
exceptions, such as the Library of Congress scroll (CKM 261):

   https://gandhari.org/corpus/ckm0261

fantastic images of which were released into the public domain by
the Library of Congress recently, while the edition of the
manuscript is still in progress, without causing the end of the
world, or any major disturbance in the force, as far as I can
tell.

All best wishes,
Stefan

-- 
Stefan Baums, Ph.D.
Institut für Indologie und Tibetologie
Ludwig‐Maximilians‐Universität München