Orbis Indicus: Essays in Honor of Gerhard Oberhammer.

• Author: Clooney, Francis X.

This weighty volume honors Gerhard Oberhammer on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday. A collection of thirty-one essays by colleagues and former students in the field of Indology, it is a companion to Hermeneutics of Encounter,(1) which gathered twenty essays for this same purpose. Together, these two volumes aptly mark the significant contribution which Oberhammer has made to the study of India by his many books and essays (listed at the beginning of Orbis Indicus), by training and encouraging numerous younger scholars, Indian and Western, and by the monographs and volumes of occasional papers published by his De Nobili Research Library. During the past twenty-five years, his work has set the standard for a mature and refined Indological study which combines philological expertise with a willingness to address the larger theological and philosophical questions raised by this study. Perhaps more than any scholar alive today, Oberhammer is responsible for demonstrating how the study of India, in all its diversity, is essential to the human quest for understanding in all areas of the humanities.

The superb essays in Orbis Indicus appropriately celebrate the breadth and depth of this quest, although the very fact of their detail and diversity makes brief summation or detailed evaluation impossible here. The themes taken up traverse the range of Indian religious and philosophical thought, as a sampling will suggest: the cosmogonic aspect of Rg Veda X.72 (Harry Falk); a textual history of the upanisadic doctrine of the five fires (Lambert Schmithausen); Patanjali's definition of "word" (Albrecht Wezler); forms of Ganapati in Tibetan Buddhism (Gudrun Buhnemann); tantric sadhana among Buddhists and Pasupatas (Max Nihom), and the structure of sadhana in the Abhidharmasamuccaya (Ernst Prets); the poetic biography of a nineteenth-century Ceylonese Devadasi (Kamil Zvelebil); asparsayoga and yogic Angst in Gaudapada's Karikas (Walter Slaje); the sequence of paths (adhvan) in relation to diksa in Saiva Siddhanta (Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat); the understanding of atman and the rejection of duality in the Visnu Purana (Teun Goudriaan).

Some of the essays do work well together in making a more focused contribution. For example, the four on Purva Mimamsa advance our knowledge of key figures in that darsana, elucidate persisting difficult questions, and indicate areas for further study. Asko Parpola provides us with a second installment of his...