Dear David,

 

In your mail to the Indology list at 2 September you referred to the Ānandāśrama Series edition of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra (i.e., the Yogasūtra together with the so-called Yogabhāṣya) by Kāśīnātha Śāstrī Āgāśe as being “in effect a critical edition”, since it is based on twelve manuscripts, giving variant readings in footnotes. I fully agree with you that this edition is useful since it presents a fairly intelligible Sanskrit text and some variants from manuscripts and printed editions in footnotes. But the edition is still is not a critical edition in the modern academic usage of the term “critical edition”. Kāśīnātha Śāstrī Āgāśe did not explain the method he used to generate the main text of his edition, and he was apparently completely unaware of the fact that the different text versions transmitted in the four manuscript and four printed edition that he used for the PYŚ are the result of changes that occurred during the history of the transmission of the PYŚ in writing. For a more comprehensive characterization of this edition, see the introduction to my critical edition of the Samādhipāda of the PYŚ (Maas 2006, to which you kindly referred) on p. xxiii– xxiv. In any case, all manuscripts and printed editions at  Āgāśe's  disposal transmit a fairly similar text, i.e. the vulgate version of the PYŚ. Not a single witness used by Āgāśe transmits the "Southern Version" of the PYŚ which frequenlty has a better text quality than the vulgate (see see my article “On the written transmission of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra” here).

 

The edition of the PYŚ by Vimala Kanartaka (1992, No. 21 in Maas 2006) that you mention, is also not a critical edition in any technical sense of the word. The main text in Karnataka’s edition is virtually a reproduction of the main text in the edition by Nārāyaṇamiśra (Varanasi 1971, no. 15. in Maas 2006) with only 11 deviation in the first chapter. As a comparison of the variant reading that Kanartaka reported in the footnotes of her edition with the original witnesses shows, her apparatus is not very reliable (see Maas 2006: xxxi f.).

 

With best wishes,

 

Philipp

__________________________

Dr. Philipp A. Maas

Research Associate
Institut für Indologie und Zentralasienwissenschaften

Universität Leipzig

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https://spp1448.academia.edu/PhilippMaas

Am So., 2. Sep. 2018 um 21:01 Uhr schrieb David and Nancy Reigle via INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info>:

Dear Dhaval Patel,

If you just want to get an idea of what is in the various commentaries, any edition will do. But if you need to do serious research, commentaries that are well edited and accurately printed are necessary. In the case of the Vyāsa commentary, several editions are available. About the early editions, here is what James Haughton Woods wrote in the Preface to his 1914 English translation (p. xi):

"The most accessible and the most carefully elaborated of these books is the one published in the Ānandāçrama Series and edited by Kāçīnātha Shāstrī Āgāçe. Variants from twelve manuscripts, mostly southern, are printed at the foot of each page; and Bhojadeva's Vṛtti is appended; also the text of the sūtras by itself and an index thereto. Another edition, in the Bombay Sanskrit Series, by Rājarām Shāstrī Bodas, is also an excellent piece of work. I have, however, made use of the edition by Svāmi Bālarāma (Calcutta, Saṁvat 1947, A.D. 1890; reprinted in Benares A.D. 1908) because it is based on northern manuscripts and because of the valuable notes in the editor's ṭippaṇa."

The edition by Svāmi Bālarāma was very hard to find. I finally had a friend make a photocopy of the 1908 reprint at the Harvard University Library, apparently the copy previously used by Woods. The Ānandāśrama Series edition has been reprinted several times, but the reprints are re-typeset, introducing new typographical errors. So I photocopied the original 1904 edition at the University of Chicago Library. The original 1892 Bombay Sanskrit Series edition was also hard to find in North America, but I was able to photocopy it from the American Oriental Society Library at the Yale University Library. Scans of all three are posted here, along with a few other commentaries on the Yogasūtras: http://prajnaquest.fr/blog/sanskrit-texts-3/sanskrit-hindu-texts/

Since the Ānandāśrama Series edition was edited by Kāśīnātha Śāstrī Āgāśe from twelve manuscripts, giving variant readings in footnotes, it is in effect a critical edition. However, the first critical edition that was called such is that by Vimala Karnatak, Pātañjala-Yoga-Darśanam, four volumes, Varanasi: Banaras Hindu University & Ratna Publications, 1992. It includes the commentaries by Vyāsa, Vācaspati-miśra, and Vijñāna-bhikṣu. It also includes her own Hindi exposition.

More recently the first volume of a critical edition by Philipp Maas was published: Samādhipāda: das erste Kapitel des Pātañjalayogaśāstra zum ersten Mal kritish ediert = The first chapter of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra for the first time critically edited, Aachen: Shaker, 2006. This is a very thorough critical edition of the Yogasūtras and Vyāsa's commentary, together forming the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, using all available sources. We anxiously await further volumes of this definitive critical edition.

Best regards,

David Reigle

Colorado, U.S.A.