Ulrich Schneider: Opera Minora.

• Author: Jamison, Stephanie W.
• Position: Book Review

Ulrich Schneider: Opera Minora. Edited by MARION MEISIG. Beitrage zur Indologie, vol. 39. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2002. Pp. xii + 273.

This welcome collection of twenty-two previously published articles by the distinguished Indologist Ulrich Schneider contains works from 1953 through 1988, ranging from brief notes in the nature of marginalia to substantial philological treatments of twenty-five pages or so. A number, many first published in Saeculum, concern general issues in the history of Indian philosophy, perhaps the best known and most influential of which is "Die altindische Lehre vom Kreislauf des Wassers" (1961, here pp. 65-75). These general treatments remind us how wide-ranging were the interests of an author who produced both an introduction to Buddhism (Der Buddhismus: Eine Einfuhrung, 1992) and one to Hinduism (Einfuhrung in des Hinduismus, 1989). It is always salutary to see the artificial walls that divide subfields of Indology so easily leapt over.

But even more rewarding to the reader may be the fine-grained, philologically exacting considerations of particular textual problems, especially the relations between variant but parallel passages in the Mahavastu and the Pali Jataka collection (a series of articles beginning with his first published work, "Uber das Atthisena-Jataka," 1953, here pp. 1-17), but dealing also with non-Buddhist texts (e.g., the Rig Veda in "Yama und Yami (RV X 10),"...