Saiva Rites of Expiation: A first edition and translation of Trilocanasivas Twelfth-Century Prayascittasamuccaya (with a Transcription of Hrdayasiva s Prayascittasamuccaya).

• Author: Geslani, Marko
• Position: Book review

Saiva Rites of Expiation: A first edition and translation of Trilocanasivas Twelfth-Century Prayascittasamuccaya (with a Transcription of Hrdayasiva s Prayascittasamuccaya). Edited and translated by R. SATHYANARAYANAN, with an introduction by DOMINIC GOODALL. Collection Indologie, vol. 127. Pondicherry: INSTITUT FRANCAIS DE PONDICHERY; ECOLE FRANCAISE DEXTREME ORIENT, 2015. Pp. 651.

The present work is a critical edition and translation by R. Sathyanarayanan of an 828-verse text by Trilocanasiva. The latter has been identified by Goodall as the twelfth-century abbot of a monastery in Tiruvenkatu and a disciple of Aghorasiva. The edition, based on eleven southern manuscripts in Grantha and Devanagari, thus adds to a growing corpus of textual resources for the study of Southern Saivasiddhanta. (Sathyanarayanan has also recently helped to edit Trilocanasivas Dhyanaratnavali and Aghorasiva's Pancavaranastava.) In the acknowledgements the editor credits the assistance of Goodall, who, we must assume, is also present in the "we" that appears in the notes to the translation.

Goodalls generous introduction (pp. 15-63) gives ample cause for a close study of this particular work, which represents an instance of a Saiva nibandha, the genre of "digests" better known from mainstream dharmasastra of roughly the same period. That is, the text compiles sources on the topic of expiation (prayascitta) from a range of Saivasiddhanta scriptures stretching back to perhaps the sixth century. While Trilocanasiva does not label his scriptural sources--as is typical of the traditional dharmanibandha--some of these can be identified based on a quite similar and slightly earlier work by Hrdayasiva, also called the Prayascittasamuccaya (distinguished by [superscript.SUP.H]), which gives textual attributions to many of the same verses. It is for this reason that a transcription of the latter work, based on a single Newari manuscript dated to 1157/8 A.D. (Cambridge University Library), is appended to this edition. This appendix adds significant heft, but is valuable in itself as a compendium of chapters from no less than thirty Saiva works, listed in the introduction (pp. 21-22).

The edited text (pp. 65-217), presented in Devanagari, is accompanied by an apparatus in three parts. One section contains variant readings, another lists additions, omissions, and marginalia from the manuscripts, and a third section contains references to source texts and other, at least...