Although the many extant Sanskrit versions of the story of King Śibi and the dove have been thoroughly studied, one version, from the Vahnipurāṇa, has so far escaped the attention of scholars. This paper presents a new, critical edition of the Sanskrit text, based on all available material — an existing edition, quotations, and a recently disco…[Read more]

Although he was the first professor of Tibetan in Europe as well as the chair of Sanskrit at the Collège de France, Philippe-Édouard Foucaux (1811-1894) is little remembered today; Bernard le Calloc’h, in a series of biographical articles on Foucaux, has described him as “un Angevin oublié.” Nevertheless, Foucaux’s published works, especial…[Read more]

This chapter provides an overview of how ancient and medieval texts, for which we do not possess the original, can be studied. It describes a method by which a text can be reconstructed from multiple manuscript witnesses, which contain textual variations. Arguments are also presented against reconstruction. Finally, it presents some emergent,…[Read more]

The “usefulness” of a critical apparatus depends both on the editor’s judgment of what to include or exclude and also on a given reader’s needs, which may or may not align with the editor’s critical principles. The challenge, then, is to make the critical apparatus flexible – to allow the reader to change the level of detail presented in the appar…[Read more]

If, as Jorge Luis Borges suggests, Idealist philosophy should be considered a branch of literary fantasy, then Arthur Schopenhauer’s Das Welt als Wille und Vorstellung is a fiction that is more logically perverse than any of Borges’ stories.