Debate and rational argumentation in Sout Asian Buddhism

The Vadanyayatika, written by the important South Asian Buddhist scholar Santaraksita (ca. 725788 CE), is a commentary on the Vadanyaya (The Rules of Debate) by Dharmakirti (ca. 6th/7th century). In this text, concepts related to scholarly and public debate are defined, in particular the classification of defeat situations. The goal of the project is to prepare a diplomatic and critical edition of the Vadanyayatika. Its first edition, published by R. Sankrityayana in 19351936, is based on a single manuscript that the editor discovered in the Kundeling Monastery in Lhasa. New studies of the manuscript conducted under improved scholarly and material conditions have shown that the first edition, as well as a printed edition by D. Shastri from 1972, needs to be improved in many regards and that a critical edition which applies the methods of historical-critical philology is a desideratum. Through a general cooperation agreement between the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the China Tibetology Research Center in Beijing, this project will benefit from access to excellent copies of the above manuscript. The editorial work will apply latest methods being developed by current digital textual scholarship and will follow TEI/XML guidelines. This machine-readable data format, which has an internationally standardized markup system, makes it possible to document a texts inherent attributes systematically, as well as to easily manipulate data for publication, export data and archive it long term. Santaraksitas commentary is significant not only for interpreting the Vadanyaya, but also for our historical understanding of Buddhist polemics during the early medieval period (5001200 CE), a phase of considerable diversification. Apart from a few individual studies that have examined selected passages, most of Santaraksitas references to intra-Buddhist and Brahmanical schools, such as the Nyaya, Samkhya, Mimamsa and Vaiyakarana, as well as quotations of textual fragments from lost philosophical works, have not been systematically explored by modern scholars, partly due to the lack of a reliable edition. Among other things, this project will also focus on the textual fragments from lost works found in Santaraksitas work to gain an idea of his sources and reconstruct some of the early history of these philosophical traditions. This historical and critical edition should serve as a reliable basis for expanding our understanding of Santaraksitas philosophy. Applying internationally recognized technologies and standards of digital philology will assure that the results of the project are credible and accessible, thus providing a solid basis for future digital research and collaboration.

Project P30827-G24 involved research on early religio-philosophical interactions between Brahmanical and Buddhist intellectuals in South Asia. The project undertook historical studies of relevant Buddhist philosophical texts in combination with philological groundwork on one particular work, a text composed by the Madhyamaka philosopher Shantarakshita (ca. 725-788) bearing the title Vadanyayatika (henceforth VNT, "A Commentary on the Rules of Debate"), which is a commentary on Dharmakirti's (between 550-660) Vadanyaya (henceforth VN, "The Rules of Debate"). Although a Sanskrit editio princeps of the VNT was published in the 1930s by Rahula Sankrtyayana based on an old codex unicus, the "Kundeling manuscript", that first edition is problematic in many respects. The original plan was to provide the basis for a better critical edition of the VNT through a reliable diplomatic edition of the manuscript using not only manuscript material, but also the Tibetan translation of the work by Kumarashribhadra (ca. 1100) as an ancillary source and related testimonies. The discovery of hitherto unknown manuscripts of both the VN and VNT led to a change of the original work plan. These incomplete and partly damaged manuscripts in the collection of Drepung Monastery in Lhasa were identified by Ernst Steinkellner. Due to substantial variations contained in these manuscripts, they have proven quite significant for the textual criticism of the VN and VNT. Within the framework of the project, a new critical edition of the VNT was prepared for the first third of the text. First steps to encode this critical edition with four apparatuses according to TEI/XML standards were undertaken in collaboration with Dr. Patrick McAllister. Due to the work plan changes, refining this encoding demanded a longer timeframe. It thus will be undertaken by Dr. Yasutaka Muroya as part of his new FWF project P 34842 "Dialectics, Logic and Philosophy in Indian Buddhism". The project also examined Shantarakshita's own cross-references and allusions to his other works, above all to his Tattvasangraha (henceforth TS). There has long been a controversy regarding the relative chronology between the VNT and the TS. The above examination revealed an important clue suggesting that the TS predates the VNT. This corroborates Erich Frauwallner's assessment that the VNT is a relatively mature work. This hypothesis will be presented in a contribution to the forthcoming volume Sanskrit Manuscripts in China IV, which is being edited by Francesco Sferra et al. The diplomatic edition of the first third of the Vadanyayatika (currently 242 pages), together with a description of the newly discovered manuscript's physical and paleographical features, will be submitted in 2021 for publication in the Beijing-Vienna joint publication series "Sanskrit Texts from the Tibetan Autonomous Region".