A verse from Vairōcana’s “Rasikaprakāśana” (29)

I was reorganizing my notes for an unpublished anthology of Prakrit verse by one Vairōcana (a Buddhist) and I came across the following gīti verse (no. 29, of 448): दुल्लहसुअणमिलावो उच्चलिउं अहव उच्चलावेउं ।जाण मणे विप्फुरए को ताण समो हु णीरसो भुअणे ॥ २९ ॥ dullaha-suaṇa-milāvō uccaliuṁ ahava uccalāvēuṁ ~jāṇa maṇē vipphuraē kō tāṇa samō…

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A. N. Upadhye’s teachers

What was the intellectual formation of such a great textual scholar as A. N. Upadhye? B. K. Khadabadi says in his short monograph on Upadhye: From Dr. P. L. Vaidya he received a sense of the importance of, and an interest in, Prakrit literature and language, which had largely been created and developed by Jain…

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Parsing Tamil verse: some observations

As I am learning more about Tamil meter, I have been very interested in Kevin Ryan’s suggestion (Phonology 34.3 [2017]: 581–613) that the metrical units of Tamil verse consist of a strong position and a weak position which are subject to weight-mapping of different strictness. The Tamil metrical tradition doesn’t distinguish between a strong and…

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Metrics and Combinatorics: Number or Saṅkhyā

The fifth combinatorial technique that Hēmacandra describes is called saṅkhyā, which simply means “number”: it gives the number of possible combinations of light and heavy syllables for a verse of k positions. This is the simplest of all of the techniques. For samavr̥tta meters, which have an equivalent number of positions in each line, the…

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Metrics and Combinatorics: The Mēruprastāraḥ

We’ve seen one example of “spreading out” metrical patterns according to a certain rule in order to determine the number of possible patterns that can be made with k syllablic positions. There is a different procedure for determining the number of patterns, among the total, that contain a given number of light or heavy syllables….

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On Gāhāsattasaī W191

Verse 191 in the Gāhāsattasaī reads: ciraḍiṁ pi aṇāantō lōā lōēhĩ gōravabbhahiā sōṇāratulē vva ṇirakkharā vi khandhēhĩ ubbhanti People who don’t even know the alphabet [?] are popularly taken to be worthy of honor. They’re like a goldsmith’s scales: even though they are unlettered, they’re carried on one’s shoulders. The comparison in this verse depends…

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Metrics and combinatorics: uddiṣṭaḥ or “indicated”

We have gone over the first two of six standard combinatorial techniques, prastāraḥ or “spreading out,” and naṣṭaḥ or “lost.” The third technique was developed to answer the following question. Suppose the sequence of light and heavy syllables in a given combination has been indicated (uddiṣṭaḥ). How can we find out the serial number of…

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