Book Review Encyclopedia Of Indian Philosophies

Author(s): Johannes Bronkhorst
Publisher: Johannes Bronkhorst

Page 6

BUCHBESPRECHUNGEN / COMPTES RENDUS
723
philosophy is however far smaller than 63 or 85. This fact must be held partly responsable for a feature that will strike anyone who leafs through the book: the large number of empty or nearly empty pages. The explanation is as follows: Each author gets a section, each section starts on the right hand page, and sections about authors who have written nothing of interest about philosophy (or whose works have not yet been studied, or even edited) range between short and very short. The result is more than seventy (!) completely empty pages in Part Two, and about as many that are more than half empty. This is not only regrettable for ecological reasons. The empty pages, as well as the pages that begin a new section, carry no page aumbering. Long stretches of the book under review are therefore without a single page number. Yet the index at the end refers to these. The practical use of the book is in this way seriously impeded.
Pp. 433-548 contain a "Bibliography on grammar (vyäkarana)", compiled by Karl H. Potter. Unlike the main parts of the book, this bibliography deals with grammarians in general, not only with philosophers among them. Surprisingly, this bibliography contains no entry more recent than 1983. Even more surprisingly, the information it contains has not been systematically used by the authors of Part Two. This is strikingly illustrated in section 11 of Part Two (p. 199). The whole of this section reads: "PRAMEYASAMGRAHA. The unknown author of a lost commentary on the Vākyapadiya called Prameyasangraha must have lived about A.D. 1000." No notes, no references. The bibliography (G900, p. 475) is better informed: "Prameyasarngraha on book 2 of Bhartshari's Vākyapadiya ... Edited by Wilhelm Rau. Munich, 1981." But not even the bibliography is aware of the review of Rau's edition in Kratylos 27, 1982 (1983), pp. 78-81, which shows that the Prameyasarngraha is not a commentary but an independent work, and that it is almost certainly younger than the commentator Punyarāja.
Unfortunately this is not the only lacuna in the bibliography, even where publications from before 1983 are concerned. Major works such as Pierre Filliozat's translations into French of the Mahābhāsya (first volume published in 1975) and Kielhorn's English translation of the Paribhāsendusekhara are missing. The only critical edition of Bhartrhari's Väkyapadiya, by W. Rau, which is arguably the single most important work to be mentioned in this bibliography, is described incorrectly as "with word index" (p. 469); the book contains a påda-index. (A word-index has been published separately by W. Rau in 1989.)
The bibliography, in spite of these and other shortcomings, will be gratefully used by all those who are interested in the Indian grammatical tradition. Yet its lack of connection with the other parts of the book in which it is published will be experienced as disturbing. Part Two, to give another example, dedicates one of its sections to Yaska's Ninukta, the bibliography, as against this, announces that "... sciences, such as ninukta, are not covered" (p. 433). Panini's date is "350 B.C.?" according to the bibliography (p. 441), about the fifth century B.C.