Return to search

Intertextual Readings of the Nyāyabhūṣaṇa on Buddhist Anti-Realism

This two-part dissertation has two goals: 1) a close philological reading of a 50-page section of a 10th-century Sanskrit philosophical work (Bhāsarvajña's Nyāyabhūṣaṇa), and 2) the creation and assessment of a novel intertextuality research system (Vātāyana) centered on the same work.

The first half of the dissertation encompasses the philology project in four chapters: 1) background on the author, work, and key philosophical ideas in the passage; 2) descriptions of all known manuscript witnesses of this work and a new critical edition that substantially improves upon the editio princeps; 3) a word-for-word English translation richly annotated with both traditional explanatory material and novel digital links to not one but two interactive online research systems; and 4) a discussion of the Sanskrit author's dialectical strategy in the studied passage.

The second half of the dissertation details the intertextuality research system in a further four chapters: 5) why it is needed and what can be learned from existing projects; 6) the creation of the system consisting of curated textual corpus, composite algorithm in natural language processing and information retrieval, and live web-app interface; 7) an evaluation of system performance measured against a small gold-standard dataset derived from traditional philological research; and 8) a discussion of the impact such new technology could have on humanistic research more broadly. System performance was assessed to be quite good, with a 'recall@5' of 80%, meaning that most previously known cases of mid-length quotation and even paraphrase could be automatically found and returned within the system's top five hits. Moreover, the system was also found to return a 34% surplus of additional significant parallels not found in the small benchmark. This assessment confirms that Vātāyana can be useful to researchers by aiding them in their collection and organization of intertextual observations, leaving them more time to focus on interpretation.

Seventeen appendices illustrate both these efforts and a number of side projects, the latter of which span translation alignment, network visualization of an important database of South Asian prosopography (PANDiT), and a multi-functional Sanskrit text-processing web application (Skrutable).:Preface (i)
Table of Contents (ii)
Abbreviations (v)
Terms and Symbols (v)
Nyāyabhūṣaṇa Witnesses (v)
Main Sanskrit Editions (vi)
Introduction (vii)
A Multi-Disciplinary Project in Intertextual Reading (vii)
Main Object of Study: Nyāyabhūṣaṇa 104–154 (vii)
Project Outline (ix)

Part I: Close Reading (1)
1 Background (1)
1.1 Bhāsarvajña (1)
1.2 The Nyāyabhūṣaṇa (6)
1.2.1 Ts One of Several Commentaries on Bhāsarvajña's Nyāyasāra (6)
1.2.2 In Modern Scholarship, with Focus on NBhū 104–154 (8)
1.3 Philosophical Context (11)
1.3.1 Key Philosophical Concepts (12)
1.3.2 Intra-Textual Context within the Nyāyabhūṣaṇa (34)
1.3.3 Inter-Textual Context (36)
2 Edition of NBhū 104–154 (39)
2.1 Source Materials (39)
2.1.1 Edition of Yogīndrānanda 1968 (E) (40)
2.1.2 Manuscripts (P1, P2, V) (43)
2.1.3 Diplomatic Transcripts (59)
2.2 Notes on Using the Edition (60)
2.3 Critical Edition of NBhū 104–154 with Apparatuses (62)
3 Translation of NBhū 104–154 (108)
3.1 Notes on Translation Method (108)
3.2 Notes on Outline Headings (112)
3.3 Annotated Translation of NBhū 104–154 (114)
4 Discussion (216)
4.1 Internal Structure of NBhū 104–154 (216)
4.2 Critical Assessment of Bhāsarvajña's Argumentation (218)

Part II: Distant Reading with Digital Humanities (224)
5 Background in Intertextuality Detection (224)
5.1 Sanskrit Projects (225)
5.2 Non-Sanskrit Projects (228)
5.3 Operationalizing Intertextuality (233)
6 Building an Intertextuality Machine (239)
6.1 Corpus (Pramāṇa NLP) (239)
6.2 Algorithm (Vātāyana) (242)
6.3 User Interface (Vātāyana) (246)
7 Evaluating System Performance (255)
7.1 Previous Scholarship on NBhū 104–154 as Philological Benchmark (255)
7.2 System Performance Relative to Benchmark (257)
8 Discussion (262)

Conclusion (266)

Works Cited (269)
Main Sanskrit Editions (269)
Works Cited in Part I (271)
Works Cited in Part II (281)

Appendices (285)
Appendix 1: Correspondence of Joshi 1986 to Yogīndrānanda 1968 (286)
Appendix 1D: Full-Text Alignment of Joshi 1986 to Yogīndrānanda 1968 (287)
Appendix 2: Prosopographical Relations Important for NBhū 104–154 (288)
Appendix 2D: Command-Line Tool “Pandit Grapher” (290)
Appendix 3: Previous Suggestions to Improve Text of NBhū 104–154 (291)
Appendix 4D: Transcript and Collation Data for NBhū 104–154 (304)
Appendix 5D: Command-Line Tool “cte2cex” for Transcript Data Conversion (305)
Appendix 6D: Deployment of Brucheion for Interactive Transcript Data (306)
Appendix 7: Highlighted Improvements to Text of NBhū 104–154 (307)
Appendix 7D: Alternate Version of Edition With Highlighted Improvements (316)
Appendix 8D: Digital Forms of Translation of NBhū 104–154 (317)
Appendix 9: Analytic Outline of NBhū 104–154 by Shodo Yamakami (318)
Appendix 10.1: New Analytic Outline of NBhū 104–154 (Overall) (324)
Appendix 10.2: New Analytic Outline of NBhū 104–154 (Detailed) (325)
Appendix 11D: Skrutable Text Processing Library and Web Application (328)
Appendix 12D: Pramāṇa NLP Corpus, Metadata, and LDA Modeling Info (329)
Appendix 13D: Vātāyana Intertextuality Research Web Application (330)
Appendix 14: Sample of Yamakami Citation Benchmark for NBhū 104–154 (331)
Appendix 14D: Full Yamakami Citation Benchmark for NBhū 104–154 (333)
Appendix 15: Vātāyana Recall@5 Scores for NBhū 104–154 (334)
Appendix 16: PVA, PVin, and PVSV Vātāyana Search Hits for Entire NBhū (338)
Appendix 17: Sample Listing of Vātāyana Search Hits for Entire NBhū (349)
Appendix 17D: Full Listing of Vātāyana Search Hits for Entire NBhū (355)
Overview of Digital Appendices (356)

Zusammenfassung (Thesen Zur Dissertation) (357)
Summary of Results (361)

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:82629
Date13 December 2022
CreatorsNeill, Tyler
ContributorsUniversität Leipzig
Source SetsHochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typeinfo:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion, doc-type:doctoralThesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, doc-type:Text
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Page generated in 0.0028 seconds