Nachgelassene Werke, II: Philosophische Texte des Hinduismus.

• Author: Taber, John A.

In the introduction to his splendid and still-unsurpassed collection of translations of Buddhist texts, Die Philosophie des Buddhismus, Erich Frauwallner explains some of the problems that the translator faces in making Indian philosophical materials accessible to the Western reader. "In Indian philosophy of the earlier period," he writes (I translate from the German),

there are hardly any texts that were meant to present the teachings of the various systems to outsiders. That had to do with the oral tradition; indeed, spoken language in general played the dominant role in the philosophical and religious life of India. What has been preserved from that period consists essentially in aphorisms or short verses and, when it came to debates with opposing schools, polemical works. Neither of these is the kind of exposition we would like. The aphorisms offer the briefest of verbal aids for the memory, which were intended to be transmitted along with oral explanations and which therefore, without such explanations, are hardly intelligible. Moreover, they were not so much intended to fix the basic doctrines of the systems as depict the systems in their entirety, especially the details that easily escape memory and orthodox formulations of debated positions. The polemical texts, on the other hand, continue controversies that usually had already gone on for generations, with which the reader must be familiar if he is to understand specific points correctly. In these texts, too, that which is fundamental, the overall outline, is lost for all the details upon which the debate had come to focus. What is most important for us must, in the latter case as in the former, be laboriously extracted and only too often inferred from scattered remarks and allusions.(1)

Frauwallner himself, in Die Philosophie des Buddhismus, and now in this collection of Hindu philosophical texts, which was intended as a companion volume to the former but, for the complicated reasons explained by the editors in the preface, never saw publication in his lifetime, went further than anyone in overcoming these difficulties. In this review, however, I would like to consider, first and foremost, whether or not Frauwallner in fact entirely overcame them and what, if anything, further would need to be done. (I shall consider on another occasion certain aspects of Frauwallner's peculiar interpretation of the upanisads, implicit in his arrangement of translated upanisad passages in this anthology but fully developed only in the first volume of his Geschichte der indischen Philosophie.)

The anthology contains selections from the upanisads, the Moksadharma section of the Mahabharata, the Prasastapadabhasya, and the Nyayamanjari, as well as complete translations of the Samkhyakariku and the Vedanta chapter of the Sarvadarsanasamgraha. Thus, obviously, the schools of Hindu philosophical thought are not treated in the same comprehensive manner as are the Buddhist schools in Die Philosophie des Buddhismus. One cannot even say that we are given a representative sample of texts. No Yoga or Mimamsa writings are included, and only a fraction of the epistemological, metaphysical, logical, and linguistic issues that occupied Hindu thinkers in the classical period are covered. An anthology that really attempted to give an impression of the full range of Hindu philosophical thought would be at least triple this in length. Nevertheless, as the editors point out, Frauwallner does at least include texts from several genres: anonymous revelation, philosophical verse, commentary, and doxography. Of the principal styles of Hindu philosophical writing, only the sutra has been omitted. If nothing else, the volume is of considerable value just for its translations of the Samkhyakarika and the Vedanta chapter of the Sarvadarsanasamgraha.

Frauwallner's original translations have been improved in various ways by the editors. They have been checked against the most recent editions of the...