Part of the 2019-2020 Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, “Śāstram: Form, Power, and Translation in Indic Scholasticism”
Venue: the Franke Institute for the Humanities
Open to all members of the Univeristy community
The domain of śāstra – disciplined, textualized systematic thought, composed in Sanskrit and other languages – forms premodern southern Asia’s greatest archive for the history of knowledge. The intellectual sophistication of these many domains and their intertextual complexity present formidable challenges to interpretation, often to the expense of framing wider questions about what could be termed śāstra’s micro- and macro-sociologies. In this two day symposium, leading scholars will present attempts to rectify this imbalance, seeking to offer preliminary theories and case studies of its worldly existence from Kashmir to Java, and from antiquity into the medieval period.