A Digital Critical Edition of the Nyayabhasya

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Eliahu Franco
• Subject Area: Asian Studies
• Term: since 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 279803509

The Nyaya (“logic”) is one of the most important traditions of classical Indian philosophy. Its foundational treatise, the Nyayasutra, consists of five chapters and is ascribed to sage Aksapada. It was basically finalized by anonymous redactors in the second half of the fourth century and was commented upon shortly afterwards by Paksilasvamin Vatsyayana. His commentary, the Nyayabhasya, is of crucial importance not only for our understanding of the early phase of Nyaya philosophy and for reconstructing the earliest form of the Nyayasutra, but also for expanding our knowledge of the teachings of other philosophical traditions of the classical period, of whose literature only a fraction has survived. In spite of this undisputed significance for the study of the history of Indian philosophy, the Nyayabhasya has not yet been critically edited. The need for a methodologically refined critical edition of this commentary has been amply demonstrated by earlier DFG and FWF-funded projects focused on chapters 1 to 2 and 5. The nine-year DFG long-term project aims to establish a critical text of chapters 3 and 4 which deal in dialectical form with central issues relating to metaphysics, epistemology, theology and soteriology. Out of 41 manuscripts available for chapter three, 15 core manuscripts selected on stemmatic grounds have been used to establish its critical text in the first two project phases. In the final phase, the critical edition of chapter four will be achieved on the basis of the already documented text of 21 among a total of 39 available manuscripts. The text-critical and text-historical work on the two chapters is enriched by phylogenetic analyses of the texts of the primary witnesses, and the consideration of the evidence provided by secondary witnesses and selected printed editions. In addition to the printed critical edition of the two chapters, a major aim of the project is the state-of-the-art digital publication, and thereby wide dissemination, of a novel critical edition of their text, accompanied by a documentation of the text versions of all primary and secondary witnesses and the selected printed editions, as well as detailed manuscript descriptions. It will be published on the innovative web platform Brucheion which is being developed for the project and will, after its completion in the project’s final phase, allow free access to the texts and the possibility of investigating the variance of the many extant versions of the two chapters. Brucheion will also function as an open-access multi-user web-based Virtual Research Environment for critical work based on a large number of manuscripts. The critically established text will form a well-founded exhaustive source for future studies on classical Nyaya philosophy and the basis of a new philologically informed translation of the Nyayabhasya. Moreover, the project will make a substantial contribution to the introduction of Digital Humanities and Digital Philology into the discipline.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Austria, India
• Cooperation Partners: Dr. Martin Gluckman; Dr. Andrey Klebanov; Professorin Dr. Karin Preisendanz