Bhagavatstutivarṇana Or the Description of the Praise of the Divine
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Bhagavatstutivarṇana or the Description of the Praise of the Divine A Critical Edition of Text and Commentaries, and Annotated Translation of the Sixth Canto of Ratnākara’s Haravijaya Dissertation zur Erlangung des Grades Doktor der Philosophie der Fakultät für Geisteswissenschaften Universität Hamburg vorgelegt von Peter Pasedach 2017 1. Gutachter: Harunaga Isaacson 2. Gutachter: Dominic Goodall 3. Gutachter: Csaba Dezs}o Disputation: 2. Februar 2018 Preface The present work has a history of a few years, some of which might be of interest to the reader, and telling which will give me an opportunity to thank some of the many people I owe thanks to. Sometime in Hamburg in early summer 2008 I started looking into the options for my M. A. thesis, and discussed them with Harunaga Isaacson, whom I should thank for his guidance and support in all these years, as well as for the many reading sessions of the Haravijaya. I was interested in the topics of Tantra and Yoga, but as I expressed the desire to improve my Sanskrit, he suggested to look into works of Kāvya, and particularly the Haravijaya. I got Durgaprasad and Parab 1890 from the AAI library, sat down by the Alster lake, and was awed. The sound of Ratnākara’s Vasantatilakā-verses was beautiful, but I hardly understood anything. I had thought my Sanskrit was already quite good, but now this was a challenge! The sixth canto could have been an option already then, but the availability of MSS in the Bodleian libraries at Oxford, among which an autograph manuscript of Rājānaka Ratnakaṇṭha’s Laghupañcikā commentary on it’s first sarga as well as a manuscript of Utpala’s Haravijayasāravivaraṇa commentary, reaching up to somewhere in the third sarga, some preliminary photos of which were thankfully provided by Kiyokazu Okita, suggested to start at the beginning: The first canto being a description of Śiva’s city and of himself, the second canto a depiction of Śiva’s Tāṇḍava dance, which I would edit together with these two previously unedited commentaries. Thus with Ratnakaṇṭha’s infamous handwriting I got a very rough introduction to reading manuscripts. Most of 2009 I spent in India, staying some months at Varanasi, reading the text with S. N. Mishra with whom I had already read some Sanskrit on a previous visit in 2005. I also had the pleasure to read the beginning of this sixth canto with him, together with Utpala’s commentary, at another shorter stay in Varanasi in Winter 2011/12. Unfortunately he passed away a few months later. I shall thank also Sadananda Das for making the initial contact to him, as well as for his teaching in Spoken Sanskrit. Late spring 2010 I finally travelled to Oxford to see the manuscripts fromM. i ii PREFACE A. Stein’s collection in the Bodleian library in Oxford. I was in the lucky position to be able to see and photograph almost all relevant manuscripts, for which I owe thanks to Gillian Evison. Upon the completion of my M. A. in 2011 I felt that my work on the Haravijaya had only just begun, and I was eager to do some manuscript search in India. I was aware of the MSS used by Rama (1982), I had found a few entries in the online database of namami.org, and the library of the Raghunath temple in Jammu which holds the collection of the former Maharaja-family of Kashmir sounded to be a promising place. And of course I would have to visit the Sanskrit department of Chennai University which houses the New Catalogus Catalogorum Project. Thus, after acclimatising in Delhi for a few days, and booking some train tickets, the first manuscript library to be visited was that of the Rajasthan Ori- ental Research Institute (RORI) in Jodhpur. After some apparently necessary administrative preliminaries, in which I got ample scope for practising my Hindi, I was finally given access to a MS containing the Haravijaya in full, together with Alaka’s commentary. The library staff were very cooperative in taking photos of the manuscripts, and while I had bought a new digital camera for the trip unfortunately its battery was not quite sufficient, which led to some problems. The next stop was Jammu. The state of Jammu and Kashmir having an insurgency problem, the level of security measures around the Raghunath temple was high, and my Delhi prepaid SIM card did not work. Also here I got ample scope to speak Hindi. At the temple library I was told that I need to get permission from the Dharmarth trust through which the family of the former Maharajas of Kashmir administer the temple. I was thankfully given a room in the temple guesthouse and permission to take photos of all the relevant MSS, but in the end I did not use them, as they were rather recent copies of rather bad quality. I did take photos of more useful manuscripts for some other people, and filled up my stocks of walnuts and dried apricots which were the main item in the shops around the temple. I returned to Delhi to visit the National Museum, where Dr. Tripathi was most helpful in giving me access to the MS of the Haravijaya kept there, which I was able to photograph. I shall also thank Mrinal Kaul for the extensive information about the manuscript libraries in India he provided me with. In Delhi I also visited the office of the National Manuscript Mission, where I could see some impressive manuscript conservation efforts being taken, but unfortunately I was not ableto get further information about Haravijaya MSS. Having in the meantime become quite sick I decided to spend some weeks in Kerala to recover. From there I made the trip to Chennai to visit the New Catalogus Catalogorum project, headed by Siniruddha Dash, whom, and whose team I shall also thank for further communication via email regarding manuscripts iii and libraries. At the NCC office I found two interesting references, a mention of a twelfth century palm leaf MS of the HV in Jaisalmer, which would thus be by far the oldest one, and a reference to a MS of Utpala’s commentary at the BHU library in Varanasi. My health having recovered, the next stop was Pune, where at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute quite a few manuscripts of the Haravijaya and Alaka’s commentary are kept. Of these I had photocopies made, which however took quite some time, such that, even though I stayed in Pune for about two weeks, only a part of the MSS copies were finished so that some of these I did notget until 2013, but I had really placed a hurge order including manuscripts for other people as well. I shall thank Shreenand Bapat and Mr. Belkar of the BORI for making it all happen eventually. I also visited the libraries of the Bharat Itihas Sanshodak Mandal and Anandashram, but did not find anything of relevance to the Haravijaya there. Finally I travelled to Jaisalmer, but at the Jain temple complex I was only allowed to see the catalogue of the MSS held there, the MSS are kept in a basement which is only opened when their scholar monks are there. I was eventually given the mobile number of Pundarika Vijaya, one of them, who then connected me to Vijay B. Shah of the Jain Library in Koba, where on the evening of my arrival day I was given photographs of microfilms of that ancient MS, which essentially I could have gotten from Germany if I would have had the right contacts in the beginning. Anyway it was an interesting travel, and I shall thank Vijay B. Shah and the Jain Library in Koba for their hospitality. Next I travelled to Varanasi, where in the BHU library I then found the most important manuscript for my present research, which covers the sixth canto of the Haravijaya including the commentary of Utpala, for which it is the only witness known so far. On the basis of this find the decision was made to work on the sixth canto of the Haravijaya. I also visited the Sampurnanand Sanskrit University, but was not able to find anything of relevance there. In the summer term 2012 Harunaga Isaacson read parts of the Haravijaya’s sixth canto in class, using a draft of the present edition. In these readings also other (visiting) scholars participated, from which the present work profited considerably. I shall mention and thank Kengo Harimoto, Andrey Klebanov, Kiyokazu Okita, Gaia Pintucci. Also Alexis Sanderson was present in one session. For the second half of 2012 I thankfully was on a field scholarship of the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) at their centre in Pondicherry, where I was reading, among others, with Dominic Goodall, Sathyanarayana Sarma, Manjunath Bhat and SAS Sarma. Also Csaba Dezső temporarily joined our readings. Returning to Hamburg in early 2013 the edition was in an advanced stage of readiness already then. But that far I had been able to draft only a very prelimi- iv PREFACE nary translation, and that also only for about the first half of the canto. Reading sessions with Harunaga Isaacson continued every now and then, and eventually, the completion taking much longer than one might have wished for, also due to other obligations that came up in the meantime, while surely much can and will still be improved, it has now come to the point at which it can be released. A very incomplete list, I am afraid, of a few more people I wish to thank for one thing or another in connection to this work: Diwakar Acharya, Arun K.