The catalog of EFEO Publications includes works on a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences (archaeology, history, anthropology, literature, philology, etc.), centered on Asia, from India to Japan.
These publications address both specialists, and a wider public interested in Asian civilizations and societies.
The Parākhyatantra
A Scripture of the Śaiva Siddhānta
Collection : Collection Indologie
Collection's number: 98
Editor: Goodall (Dominic)
Edition: EFEO, Institut français de Pondichéry (IFP)
Publication date: 2004
Status : Out of Print
36,00 €
ISBN : 2-85539-642-5
ISBN-13 : 978-2-85539-642-2
ISSN : 0073-8352
Width : 17 cm
Height : 21 cm
Weight : 1,5 kg
Number of pages : 670
Distributor : EFEO Pondichéry Contact : shanti@efeo-pondicherry.org, distributeur online : scholarswithoutborders@gmail.com, distributeur Chennai : jibh.rkc@gmail.com
Geography : India
Language : English
Place : Pondichéry
Support : Papier
Abstract
This volume furnishes one more previously unpublished document of the pre-tenth-century thought-world of the Śaiva Siddhānta, a religion that was spread across and beyond the Indian subcontinent. The Parākhyatantra dates from the period before the appearance of the most significant body of theological exegesis in the history of the school, namely the writings of the tenth-century Kashmirian lineage of Bhatta Ramakantha II. Only those chapters that deal with doctrine and yoga survive. Those on ritual and other aspects of religious practice have not been transmitted in the unique codex - a beautiful palm-leaf manuscript in minute Nandinagari script. Quotations from the text have been located in later literature, and a fully positive apparatus reports the readings of all sources. A complete English translation - the first to appear of an early Siddhantatantra - accompanies the Sanskrit text. The annotation draws on parallels with other Saiddhantika writings, both published and unpublished.
About the editor
Goodall (Dominic)
Member of the EFEO since 2000.
Dominic Goodall studied Greek and Latin, then Sanskrit at Pembroke College, Oxford. After finishing his BA (Sanskrit with Pali, 1990), he came to Hamburg for two years to learn medieval Tamil with Professor S.A. Srinivasan. He then returned to Oxford, to Wolfson College, where, under the guidance of Professor Alexis Sanderson, he produced a critical edition of the opening chapters of Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha’s tenth-century commentary on the Kiraṇatantra, which he submitted as a doctoral thesis in 1995 and subsequently published from Pondicherry in 1998. He was attached to the French Institute of Pondicherry as a junior researcher in 1996–1997 before returning to Oxford as Wolfson College Junior Research Fellow of Indology from 1998 to 2000. In 2000, he became a member of the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO, “French School of Asian Studies”). He became Head of the Pondicherry Centre of the EFEO in 2002, where he remained until April 2011.
Posted in Paris from 2011 to 2015, he gave lectures at the École pratique des hautes études (Religious Sciences Section), principally on Cambodian inscriptions in Sanskrit and on the history of Śaivism from unpublished sources. He is now once again posted in Pondicherry, where he continues to pursue his scholarly interests, in particular in Sanskrit poetry and in the history of the Śaiva Siddhānta.
Among his publications are editions and translations of works of poetry in Sanskrit and of hitherto unpublished Śaiva scriptures and theological commentaries.
He is currently a professor (directeur d’études) at the EFEO, co-editor with Dr. Marion Rastelli of the Viennese dictionary of tantric terminology, the Tāntrikābhidhānakośa, and a contributor to the Hamburg Encyclopaedia of Manuscript Cultures in Asia and Africa (EMCAA).
In May 2016, he was elected membre correspondent étranger de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.
