Dear Colleagues,

Max Müller has an anecdotic reply from 1899, reporting in fact the visits of Indians to Paris in the 1840s, when he was a pupil of Burnouf:

My Indian friend Dvarkanath Tagore, though not learned, was very intelligent, and a man of the world. He rather looked down on the Brahmans, and when I asked him whether he would have to perform penance, or Prayascitta, after his return to India, he laughed and said, "No. I am all this time feeding a large number of Brahmans at home, and that is quite penance enough!" The real penance was, of course, the Pancagavya, the five products of the cow which the penitent had to swallow before he could be readmitted to his caste; and these products were not only milk, sour milk, and clarified butter, but likewise other products, such as Mutra and Gomaya. That penance still exists, and many of our Indian visitors have had to undergo it after their return, though at present the five products of the
cow are reduced to infinitesimal proportions and swallowed in the shape of a gilded pill.

Auld lang syne, Second series: My Indian friends, London: Scribner, 1899, p. 12.

With every good wish,
Eugen Ciurtin
(Institute for the History of Religions, Bucharest)

2016-10-14 14:12 GMT+03:00 Manu Francis <manufrancis@gmail.com>:

Dear Dominik,


Whatever the history of the ban on sea travel, the “bank” (of a river, but also of an ocean) metaphor is also used to describe learned people. See pāradṛśvan (M-W: “one who has seen the oppositive shore, far-seeing, wise, completely familiar with or versed in”), i.e. one who understood the whole thing. Droṇa for instance is described in a Pallava inscription as bāṇāstravedacaturarṇṇavapāradr̥śvā, literally “who has seen the other bank of the fourfold ocean that the Veda about the bow is.”


Attaining mokṣa is reaching the other bank of the “ocean of saṃsāra”. In a buddhist context, the Buddha recollected all his previous lifes, before his nirvāṇa.


As for more on ocean as vastness, totality, completude, see the title Kathāsaritsāgara, or the very conventional description in epigraphy of universal sovereigns as ruling or being famous up to the three/four/seven oceans, i.e. in the whole world. See also some of the birudas of Narasiṃhavarman II Pallava (8th c.): Jñānasāgara, “Ocean of knowledge”, Kalāsamudra, “Ocean of artistic skills”.


With very best wishes.


--


Emmanuel Francis
Chargé de recherche CNRS, Centre d'étude de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud (UMR 8564, EHESS-CNRS, Paris)
http://ceias.ehess.fr/
http://ceias.ehess.fr/index.php?1725
http://rcsi.hypotheses.org/
Associate member, Centre for the Study of Manuscript Culture (SFB 950, Universität Hamburg)
http://www.manuscript-cultures.uni-hamburg.de/index_e.html
https://cnrs.academia.edu/emmanuelfrancis

2016-10-14 12:03 GMT+02:00 Matthew Kapstein <mkapstei@uchicago.edu>:
Some of the social complexity of sea travel in and out of 19th c. India, focusing on Kolkata
and Mumbai (and Canton), is of course now entertainingly reborn in Amitav Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy......

Matthew Kapstein
Directeur d'études,
Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes

Numata Visiting Professor of Buddhist Studies,
The University of Chicago


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--
Dr E. Ciurtin
Secretary of the Romanian Association for the History of Religions

Publications Officer of the European Association for the Study of Religions
www.easr.eu

Lecturer & Secretary of the Scientific Council
Institute for the History of Religions, Romanian Academy
Calea 13 Septembrie no. 13 sect. 5, Bucharest 050711
Phone: 00 40 733 951 953