Sorry, I intended to send this to the list but initially sent it only to Jonathan. Here it is.

I have not entered this discussion yet, but given that we have turned to the fruitful discussion of plagiarism in the ancient world (not just India), a book that many of you may find interesting and illumination is Ehrman's work on early Christian literature. It is not on plagiarism per se (which passes of others' work as one's own) but the opposite, forgery, (which tries to pass of one's own work as that of someone else).

Bart Ehrman, "Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics" (OUP, NY, 2013). 

Best,

Patrick Olivelle

On Jul 25, 2015, at 3:45 PM, Jonathan Silk <kauzeya@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Friends,

In the hope of gaining something academically useful out of what otherwise might (have already) become a sort of mud slinging fight, I would like to mention the now increasingly well studied area of "text reuse." 

Of course, this is in part behind the project of E. Prets, and it is conceptually behind plagiarism detection software etc., but it should be noted that there is considerable work being done with regard to Classical Studies, and to my knowledge (I'm not sure if this has been published yet) on Arabic World Histories. I myself am interested in this approach to what I see as the modularity of Buddhist scriptural literature, although the notion of modular composition is not exactly the same as text reuse as generally understood.

For a general overview of 'historical text reuse', one might see as a start http://etrap.gcdh.de/?page_id=332

I mean here only to point out an additional resource (not the website in particular, but the notion) to frame this discussion in what may be a helpful direction.

Best, Jonathan

--

J. Silk
Leiden University

Leiden University Institute for Area Studies, LIAS

Matthias de Vrieshof 3, Room 0.05b

2311 BZ Leiden

The Netherlands

copies of my publications may be found at

http://www.buddhismandsocialjustice.com/silk_publications.html

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