JUST RELEASED by joint publication of Institut Français de Pondichéry / Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient, Pondicherry, India
An
Enquiry into the Nature of
Liberation : Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṭha’s Paramokṣanirāsakārikāvṛtti,
a commentary on Sadyojyotih's
refutation of twenty conceptions of the liberated state (mokṣa).
For the first
time critically edited, translated into English and annotated by
Alex
Watson, Dominic Goodall, S.L.P. Anjaneya Sarma,
Collection Indologie n˚ 122,
Institut Français de Pondichéry / Ecole française
d’Extrême-Orient, 2013, 508
p.
Language: Sanskrit, English. 900 Rs (38 €). ISBN (IFP): 978-81-8470-195-1. ISBN (EFEO): 978-2-85539-130-4.
This book
presents a short philosophical treatise in which twenty rival
theories of the
liberated state (mokṣa) are
introduced and countered,
and a long, discursive commentary that explores and develops the
arguments that
the treatise advances or implies. The original treatise
comprises fifty-nine
Sanskrit verses composed by Sadyojyotih (c. 675–725 AD), the
earliest
named Śaiva philosopher of the Mantramārga of whom works
survive. The
commentator, Bhaṭṭa Rāmakanṭha
(c. 950–1000 AD), was a
Kashmirian whose writings systematised the doctrines of the
classical Śaiva
Siddhānta, for some centuries the dominant school of tantric
Śaivism.
Presented here
is a first critical edition of these interlinked works and a
richly annotated
English translation. A lightly annotated introduction lays out
clearly the
ideas that the edited texts expound. Their study casts light not
only on the
history of Śaiva thought, but also on a number of
religio-philosophical
doctrines for which little other testimony survives.
Keywords: Liberation
(mokṣa),
Śaiva siddhānta, Indian philosophy, Hindu theology, Śaivism,
Sanskrit
philology, Sadyojyotih, Rāmakanṭha
For order
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