A Śabda Reader: Language in Classical Indian Thought. Historical Sourcebooks in Classical Indian Thought. Translated and edited by Johannes Bronkhorst. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Pp. ix + 360. Hardcover $95.00, ISBN 978-0-231189-40-8.
摘要
The whole of the premodern Indian world appears shot through with language. The analysis of language, first undertaken to preserve the sacred texts of the Brahmins, achieved such conceptual sophistication that it served as the model, directly or indirectly, for almost all traditions of systematic thought, regardless of religious affiliation. Language was implicated in all the most important philosophical debates, regarding the nature of reality and the foundations of knowledge, and became an object of philosophical debate itself. Given the enormous tangle of sources that address these issues, spanning several traditions of thought, and given their complexity, if not abstruseness, it would be difficult for anyone to produce a “historical sourcebook” on language in premodern India. That would require selecting primary sources that give nonspecialist readers a sense of what, exactly, Indian thinkers talked about when they talked about language, presenting them in accessible translations that nevertheless conveyed their sophistication, and contextualizing them in a historical narrative. If anyone could do that, it would be Johannes Bronkhorst. His Śabda Reader goes from the Brāhmaṇas (mid-1st millennium BCE) to Kauṇḍa Bhaṭṭa and Dharmarāja (17th c. CE) and an enormous range of texts in between, representing Buddhist, Brahmanical, Jain and skeptical (cārvāka) positions.
