Diptagama: Edition critique (Tome III).

• Author: Davis, Richard
• Position: Book review

Diptagama: Edition critique (Tome III). By Marie-Luce Barazer-Billoret, Bruno Dagens, and Vincent LefevrE, avec la collaboration de S. Sambandha sivacarya et la participation de Christele Barois. Collection Indologie, vol. 81.3. Pondichery: InstItut Francais de Pondichery, 2009. Pp. viii+701.

Two Saiva Teachers of the Sixteenth Century: Nigamajnana I and His Disciple Nigamajnana II. By T. Ganesan. IFP Publications Hors Serie, vol. 9. Pondichery: INSTITUT FRANCAIS DE PONDICHERY, 2009. Pp. xviii + 274.

These two volumes continue the distinguished and ever-growing publication series of the French Institute of Indology at Pondicherry in the field of South Indian Saiva studies. For over a half century now French and Indian scholars (with an occasional British director) have collaborated in an extraordinary project to collect, edit, publish, and translate the Sanskrit manuscripts of the Saiva Agamas and their ancillary works. This effort has resulted in a long list of critical editions of the Agamas and related texts, starting with the 1961 edition of the Rauravagama by N. R. Bhatt. It is appropriate that the concluding volume in this critical edition of the Diptagama be dedicated to Bhatt, who as Chief Pandit at the French Institute over many years was the pioneer most directly responsible for laying the groundwork on which this proliferation of studies rests.

One of the twenty-eight "root treatises" of the South Indian Saiva textual tradition, the Diptagama is a massive work. The lengthy third volume reviewed here covers forty-nine chapters, and brings to completion the full text of one hundred eleven chapters. (The first two volumes were reviewed in this journal in 2008, JAOS 128.1, pp. 158-59.) The editors have consulted more than forty manuscripts in their reconstruction of the Diptagama, and have come up with an edition that is as organized and authoritative as is possible, given the diversity of the text's manuscript corpus. They recognize that the ordering of chapters in this volume is not altogether satisfactory, and that some chapters would fit more suitably in the earlier treatments of pratistha that are contained in the previous volumes.

The most notable sustained topic in the third volume is the mahotsava, the "great festival" that is so distinctive of South Indian temple culture. The Diptagama devotes fifteen continuous chapters to the matter (chapters 79-93), and adds several more later on that may reflect new developments in...