Dear Colleagues,
I am pleased to inform you about a new repository of searchable electronic texts of Dharmaśāstra commentaries and digests, hosted at the University of Texas. During the pandemic, Patrick Olivelle has been hard at work transcribing several important texts (thousands
of pages!), often comparing editions and providing text-critical notes. Although we intend to make these open texts (CC BY-SA) available later through a central repository such as GRETIL or SARIT, the proofreading process for texts of this size is time-consuming.
Rather than wait, however, we wanted to share the initial transcriptions of six texts, portions of which have been checked. They are offered to the Indological community as Google docs which can be downloaded in various formats. That format may be slower to
load, but it makes corrections by a group easy. In most cases, we have also been able to provide links to PDFs of standard editions of the same texts for easy cross-referencing. In any case, we hope the availability of these e-texts will facilitate future
research on Dharmaśāstra.
Please join me in a public expression of thanks to Patrick for his typically tireless scholarly efforts to make these texts available. All inquiries, suggestions, etc. should be sent to me, but users are warned that the texts are offered as-is and that we are
making continuous updates to the files.
Best,
Don Davis
Professor & Chair
Department of Asian Studies
University of Texas at Austin