THE AUTHORLESSNESS OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL SŪTRAS

مرکز و کتابخانه مطالعات اسلامی به زبان های اروپایی

منو

" THE AUTHORLESSNESS OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL SŪTRAS "
Ferenc Ruzsa

Document Type	:	AL
Record Number	:	811691
Doc. No	:	LA99365
Main Entry	:	Ferenc Ruzsa
Title & Author	:	THE AUTHORLESSNESS OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL SŪTRAS [Article]\ Ferenc Ruzsa
Title of Periodical	:	Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae
Date	:	2010
Volume/ Issue Number	:	63-4
Page No	:	427--442
Abstract	:	It has been generally recognised that the extremely important philosophical sūtras, most of them the oldest surviving texts of Indian philosophical schools, contain some interpolated material. In this paper the suggestion is put forward that their compositeness is of a far more fundamental nature, i.e. during the period of their formation — that could be half a millennium — they were not texts proper but memory aids for students. They must have been something like our handouts (but purely oral at the beginning), with different additions, deletions and interpretations in different places and times, without any fixed order or set number of contributors. The edited form of these texts that has come down to us derives from a late collector-editor who most probably wrote some sort of commentary as well on the sūtras. This unusual textual history suggests that we cannot really speak about the authors, the time of their writing or even their relative priority. Moreover, often there is no point in speaking about the true meaning of a given sentence or paragraph, as it may have had several ones in different historical contexts, and there is no available standard to establish which interpretation is more fundamental or original.