Indonesia. Dharma Pātañjala: A Śaiva scripture from ancient Java studied in the light of related Old Javanese and Sanskrit texts. By Andrea Acri. Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 2011. Pp. 615. Appendices, Plates, Notes, Bibliography, General Index, Index of Text Passages.

Abstract

Dharma Patanjala: A Saiva scripture from ancient Java studied in the light of related Old Javanese and Sanskrit texts By ANDREA ACRI Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 2011. Pp. 615. Appendices, Plates, Notes, Bibliography, General Index, Index of Text Passages. doi: 10.1017/S0022463413000453 Andrea Acri, in this handsomely published sixteenth volume of the Gonda Indological Series, presents his readers with an edition, translation and extensive commentary on the Dharma Patanjala, an Old Javanese Saiva scripture. The edition is based upon a single nipah-palmleaf manuscript, which according to its colophon was copied in 1467 in Antiraga, a place whose exact location is unknown. The manuscript was part of a pre-sixteenth-century collection of manuscripts from West Java which at some time prior to 1758 had found its way to the Merapi-Merbabu region of Central Java, in all likelihood as part of an exchange of manuscripts between religious hermitages (kabuyutan) located in these two regions. The Dutch colonial government purchased the collection in 1851 on behalf of the Royal Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences. It seems that the Sanskritist Rudolf Friederich, who was in the employ of the Royal Society to carry out archaeological and philological research, presented the manuscript of the Dharma Patanjala to his compatriot Karl Schoemann who resided in Bogor and Batavia between 1845 and 1851 when he was tutor to the children of Governor General Rochussen. The manuscript was incorporated in the Staatsbibliothek of Berlin after Schoemann's death in 1877. Acri provides both a diplomatic and critical edition of the text of the Dharma Patanjala. The diplomatic edition, he explains, is intended to reproduce the text of the work in a form as close as possible to the state in which the fifteenth-century scribe preserved the work. In the present publication we are given a facsimile reproduction of the original nipah-palm manuscript and a parallel diplomatic edition accompanied by paleographic and codicological remarks. Acri justifies the need for a diplomatic edition because our access to the Dharma Patanjala is reliant on a single manuscript which forms part of a manuscript tradition in West Java about which little is known. In this regard he reminds us that the practices that gave shape to the form in which such a work is reproduced reveal valuable information about both the socioeconomic background of the scribe and the aesthetic values of the civilisation he was part of. The critical edition on the other hand, he argues, is designed with quite another purpose in mind. It is geared to reproduce as nearly as possible the text in the form it had in the mind of the author and so one which can be meaningfully compared with other contemporary works in the Indonesian Archipelago, continental Southeast Asia and the South Asian subcontinent. Accordingly Acri's starting point for his critical edition is the observation--founded upon the evidence of the Dharma Patanjala itself--that the author was 'a learned master' conversant with Saiva doctrine on which he drew creatively when he composed his work. It is on this assumption that Acri argues that the gaps, inconsistencies and mistakes in the single extant manuscript we have of this work are due not to its author but occurred in the process of subsequent reproductions. This, he points out, is as true of similar works preserved in Balinese manuscripts as it is true of the early Sanskrit Siddhantatantras from the South Asian subcontinent. It is on this premise that Acri--contrary to the practice of earlier editors of works based on the witness of a single manuscript who limited their corrections only to those which resulted from 'errors of writing'--has proposed more ambitious emendations which are intended to restore 'the meaningfulness and logical coherence' of the original work. In this he has been guided first by evidence internal to the whole of the text he is editing, then, when possible, on the witness of parallel passages from other closely related Old Javanese tattvas and tuturs, and in the case of listings of doctrinal elements, he has made use of relevant Sanskrit works. …