The founding project of a tradition is usually expressed in its early texts, but not always explicitly. What its authors say—especially in the passages in which they introduce the tradition—, what they omit and, above all, the way in which they communicate content (apart from its being true or untrue) reveals their inner concerns, their perception of the surrounding reality and the motivations, at least in part and aside from the ones given, that led them to write. The first steps taken in establishing traditions, and particularly their founding projects, are especially interesting for historical research, which does not merely record the facts but also explores their mystification and enquires into the reasons for this.

The Buddhist tantric system known as the Wheel of Time (Kālacakra), which spread through Northern India and Tibet around the beginning of the XI cent., is extremely interesting in this regard and has been studied relatively little according to the aforesaid perspective, which is the one I intend to explore here. Except for the premises necessary for my discourse (§ 1), I shall not reiterate the basic historical information on this system, for which I refer the reader to the contributions by John R. Newman.

It is possible to show that the system's authoritativeness was established by the early teachers of the Kālacakra and by the first Tibetan historiographers through a precise intellectual ‘operation’, which involved, among other things, the definition of the Scriptures and of the qualities that their interpreter should possess, the fixing of hermeneutical criteria and the choice of the main themes.

The information concerning the various manuscripts is uneven because we did not have direct access to all of them and, therefore, we could not examine each of them personally. In many cases we obtained photocopies or printouts of microfilms or photographs from the libraries, sometimes only for a limited portion of the manuscript. In such cases, we had to rely on the descriptive catalogue of each collection—when such a catalogue exists—and on the data recorded in it, which can sometimes be very scanty. This explains why such details as the exact content of the whole manuscript, its colophon(s), the size of its folios, etc., are missing in some of the following entries.

B1 Calcutta, Asiatic Society, MS III.E.17 (new number: Society collection 1455). Catalogue of Printed Books and Manuscripts in Sanskrit Belonging to the Oriental Library of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, compiled by Kunja Vihari Kāvyatīrtha under the supervision of Haraprasād Shāstrī, Calcutta, 1904, p. 46. Paper; Devanāgarī 85 folios; 25.5 × 11.5 cm. Incomplete (psū – 1.4). Partially worm-eaten, but readable.

B2 Rajshahi (Bangladesh), Varendra Research Museum, University of Rajshahi, MS 2569. Unpublished List of Manuscripts in the Varendra Research Museum Library (vol. 5). Paper; Beṅgāli script; 25 folios; 5 lines to a page. Incomplete (psū – 1.1). The scribe's name is given as Kālī Caraṇa. Nasals at the end of a sentence are always noted with anusvāra. Occasional reduplication of ra is found.

“I don't want to become immortal through my works. I want to become immortal by not dying.” This wise quip, or something like that, is supposed to have been said by the American film director and comic Woody Allan. Apart from the intended humor, there is a deeper, perhaps unintended, meaning underlying this statement. Conceptions of immortality contain both an individual and a social dimension. People do live on after their death in the memories of friends and relatives, in the lives of people they have touched, and in the products they leave behind, be they films, books, or children. These two dimensions are inextricably interwoven, I believe, in debates on and technologies directed at achieving immortality. They become even more interwoven because, in spite of Woody Allan's aspiration and in spite of ancient alchemy and modern medicine, all human beings die. So immortality is not about “not dying”, but about ways of postponing death and about coping with death at personal and ideological levels, coping which is, more often than not, intertwined with social memory. So we need not be surprised at recent news reports from Beijing announcing that the good old communist Deng Xiaoping had “joined the immortals”!

Ideas and aspirations, moreover, do not exist in a vacuum; they are influenced by and in turn influence the social and economic conditions of the time and thus exist in a creative tension with their underlying socio-economic matrix.

MỹSon is the largest and most important of Champa's religious architectural sites in Central Vietnam; its Hindu temple-towers, which have stood over nine centuries from the fourth or fi fth through the thirteenth centuries CE, include approximately seventy structures. This chapter will address a range of issues including art history, preservation work and Mỹ Son's cultural landscape within the framework of cultural resource management.

Mỹ Son Historical Site

Mỹ Son Sanctuary is located in Mỹ Son village, Duy Phú Commune, Duy Xuyên District, Quång Nam Province, at N15°31' and E108°34'. The site, which lies approximately 70km southwest of the city of Danang, and some 50km west of Hoi An Ancient Town, was rediscovered in 1885 by a group of French colonial soldiers. Ten years later, Camille Paris cleared the site and between 1896 and 1899, Louis Finot and Etienne Lunet de Lajonquière came to Mỹ Son to do research on the Cham inscriptions found there. In 1901–2, Henri Parmentier studied Cham art and in 1903–4, along with Charles Carpeaux, he carried out archaeological excavations in Mỹ Son (Art Absolument 2005, 28–33). These activities culminated in 1904 with Finot and Parmentier's article published in the Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême-Orient (BEFEO) which describes their efforts to decipher Cham inscriptions and remnants of Cham art found in Mỹ Son (1904, 805–977).

Due to Mỹ Son's signifi cant historical and architectural value, it was listed as a World Cultural Heritage site by UNESCO in December 1999.

Since many years we have been interested in a problem that worries many scholars in Indology: whether philosophy existed in ancient India (Tola, Dragonetti 1983).

It is our idea that philosophical thinking has been an important part of Indian tradition all along its history and that its origin can be traced back to the Vedic epoch. Of course we admit that in Vedic texts philosophical thinking still appears in a rudimentary form, as ‘preformations’—we could say—that were to be developed in later centuries.

We know that it is not easy to give a definition of the word ‘philosophy’, acceptable to all. The long series of articles concerning the notion of ‘Philosophie’, included in the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (v. 7, col. 572-926), shows the great number of opinions that have existed concerning this notion. We assume that philosophy basically is what in Indian technical terminology is called a darśana, a peculiar way of looking at the reality in which we live. This word is used to designate what Indians and indologists consider to be the Indian ‘systems of philosophy’. We shall examine later on the validity of the opinion that Western philosophy is characterized by rationality, free thinking and search of truth for its own sake, conceived as being the essential features of philosophical thinking.

Introduction

This chapter examines cultural and ecological resources found in northwestern Cambodia. These resources are not well developed or systematically managed. This chapter provides a template for development of the region based on its agricultural potential and cultural resources which might benefit the whole province of Banteay Mean Chey.

Background

Phnom Sruk is the name of a district and also the main town in the province of Banteay Mean Chey, northwestern Cambodia. In this chapter, Phnom Sruk will be used to refer to the town, which is a moated complex covering 1 square kilometer. Ancient highways, hydraulic features, temple sites, prehistoric sites, a bird sanctuary, and agriculture are the main features of Phnom Sruk. A systematic approach to the management of the potential presented by these resources particularly the cultural ones would benefit the local economy and decrease looting activities currently taking place in most archaeological sites.

Phnom Sruk is approximately 70km northwest of the great monumental complex and major tourist site of Angkor, and 300km northwest of the nation's capital at Phnom Penh. Tonlé Sap Lake lies 20km to the south, while the Dangrek mountain range is a similar distance to the north. During the rainy season waters from the Tonlé Sap (“Great Lake”) and mountains flood the lowland. The Stueng Sreng River flows from the Dangrek mountains to the Great Lake, 15km east of the town.

Among Gananath Obeyesekere's contributions to the study of Buddhism and Sri Lankan modernity, the notion of ‘Protestant Buddhism’ occupies a central place. Over the last thirty-five years, the expression has become standard equipment for conceptualizing the unlikely effects of the colonial encounter. What recommends ‘Protestant Buddhism’ is more than its perfect pitch. It hits the circumstances of the Sri Lankan collision with missionary activity dead on while also capturing the formal qualities —the hybridity, the modularity, the unintended irony and perverse effects— of Asia's interaction with Europe. The juxtaposition of Western form and indigenous tradition marks similar changes across Asia, and in that context ‘Protestant Buddhism’ is simply a token of a type, a hybrid notion itself that captures the hybridity of lives lived amidst disruption, disarray, and skillful invention.

Obeyesekere first made use of the idea in a 1970 essay. He says there that he means the notion in two senses. One, Protestant Buddhism is a set of norms and institutional forms derived from Protestant missionary practice. It includes ‘Young Men's (Women's) Buddhist Associations, Buddhist Army Chaplains, Sunday Schools for Buddhists (till 1965), missionary organizations and various types of Buddhist associations’ (Obeyesekere 1970: 61-62). Two, it was also Protestant in the lower-case ‘p’ sense of the word, protesting against both Christianity and Western political domination. Throughout the nineteenth century, Sinhalas, especially in Colombo and the Western Province, abandoned their traditional religion, dress, social practices, and language —sometimes because of the economic and social advantages of being a Christian (at least nominally), sometimes because of the dislocation that colonialism brought.

Louis Dumont (1960) has drawn our attention to the unique character of world renunciation in India. Renunciation (saṃnyāsa), it is claimed, is a negative state –as its very name suggests– a denial of all that makes society what it is. Being an anti-structure to the established society, it is defined not by what it is, but by its rejection of the social structures. This is what sets it apart from all other ascetic and religious institutions of the world.

Such a view, attractive as it may seem, is always subject to the criticism that it is an alien interpretation made under the influence of certain anthropological and sociological theories. It is, therefore, helpful to examine how the Indian renouncers themselves understood their condition as renouncers.

In the very extensive literature on renunciation, both orthodox and heterodox, rarely does one come across a formal definition of renunciation. However, a work entitled Yatidharmaprakāśa by Vāsudevāśrama (Ypra; Olivelle 1976–77) begins its discussion of renunciation with just such a definition. I will first give the Sanskrit text and its translation, and then examine how it helps us understand the significance and the essential features of world renunciation in the context of the traditional Indian society and social doctrine.

This essay will explore the socio-political and semiotic functions ascribed to specific forms of punishment by the author of the Mānavadharmaśāstra, a classical Sanskrit text which contains the first articulated discourse on the need for shaming punishment and brutal executions in public places. I will argue that we need to view this specific form of novelty in Sanskrit normative discourse as related to, and justified by, an historical and political necessity for controlling and restraining certain practices and intellectual attitudes of “inferior classes” (avaravarṇa) and other specific social strata. Hence, with this work I want to show how this discourse on public punishment is guided by the author's clear political awareness about the need to establish a thorough moral discipline in order to achieve social stability.

Moving from such premises, I suggest taking Manu's doctrine of public punishment as a key element of a broader cultural struggle intended to institute, or preserve, a specific form of “proper social/ritual conduct” (sadācāra). A struggle meant to produce, through norms and law, a self-balanced social world that, as such, does not exist.

First of all, in order to become aware of the epistemic potential of such forms of social control, we need to briefly revisit the history of the Sanskrit discourse on punishment.

A short social and political history of the classical Sanskrit discourse on punishment

The genesis and the form of a theory of punishment ought necessarily to be conceived inside a socio-systemic dynamism made of social relations and political interests which influence the configuration and the developments of that very theory.

In The Apotheosis of Captain Cook; European Mythmaking in the South Pacific, Gananath Obeyesekere makes a bold intervention in the debate on 18th century racism (Obeyesekere 1992). I would like to take this celebratory occasion to explore further the nature of racism by taking the systematic ideology of colonial rule that prevailed in the following century based upon hardening theories of race, hierarchy and evolution. The immediate antecedents to this ideology were burgeoning ideas about human evolution that were emerging during the Enlightenment. As the medieval doctrine of the Chain of Being was assimilated to the modern notions of progress, the savants ranked societies according to their supposed levels of achievement. The Europeans occupied the summit while the Africans were placed at the bottom, with the Orientals coming somewhere in between. However, to the savants of the Enlightenment European superiority was not inherent but a product of climate and social and political institutions (Boyd 1950; Stocking 1968; Barzun 1965; Curtin 1964, II; Burrow 1971; Gould 1981).

However in the next century, racial and evolutionary doctrines began to gel as European superiority was increasingly attributed to innate racial qualities. Race as a concept, in the sense that biological and cultural characteristics were intimately connected, first appeared in studies of social institutions in the 19th century. Its exponents were hardly unanimous in their definition of the word, but they all agreed that biological inheritance determined culture.

Introduction

The lower Mekong archaeological sites of Cheung Ek and Sre Ampil, located on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Cambodia possess good cultural resource management (CRM) potential. Their CRM potential extends well beyond normative archaeological research to include tourism, education, community development and involvement, and stakeholder identification and empowerment. Most importantly, the usage of the phrase CRM explicitly prioritizes proper management whether for preservation, pure research, educational endeavors (e.g. field schools, school tours, etc.), tourism promotion and development. Proper management is paramount and will benefit all stakeholders in many ways. Tradeoffs are expected and need to be carefully negotiated and accepted by all concerned stakeholders. These two sites constitute a backdrop to the consistent problems encountered in cultural resource management throughout Cambodia. This paper discusses these sites as unique phenomena and considers specific problems which exist at present. Additionally, it reviews general CRM issues throughout Cambodia, thus moving from specific to general issues throughout.

Both sites are vitally important for historical and archaeological research as well as tourism. Cheung Ek is popularly known as “the Killing Fields” because the Khmer Rouge disposed of victims in mass graves at particular locations in this site. Ironically, the mass graves were dug into an archaeological site containing vast amounts of pottery and might have included ancient burials. Few people understand that Cheung Ek also contains numerous archaeological remains suitable for addressing a broad spectrum of archaeological and historical questions in the larger context. Research and museum development will benefit local and international communities.

I have been engaged in preparing a critical edition of the Mānava Dharmaśāstra (MDh) for the past several years on the basis of over fifty manuscripts, nine commentaries, and citations in several medieval texts. As the editorial task nears its completion, I want to present before the scholarly audience some preliminary results of my close reading of and engagement with this text. These observations relate to the deep structure of the text, its authorship, and possible intervention of one or more redactors between the time of its composition and the period when we obtain manuscript and other evidence for the text.

Scholars traditionally have regarded the composition of the MDh as a gradual process at the hands of anonymous and successive compilers, editors, and copyists lasting for several centuries, the same sort of agent-less process that many have thought lay behind the composition of the great epic Mahābhārata. These compilers and editors, we are told, did nothing more than gather together proverbial sayings, moral maxims, and legal axioms that were floating in the mouths of people and handed down from generation to generation. The composition of the text is thus divorced from authorial intent and agency and from social, political, and economic context.