Current Research Projects

Korea-Germany Research Network for Indian and Tibetan Classics (Workshop)

International project cooperation
German part: funded by German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG))
Duration: 1 year
Start: 2024/1/1
Project leader: Prof. Dr. Jowita Kramer

This project aims to promote ongoing collaboration between young Korean and German Buddhism researchers by organizing a joint workshop where the current research topics of young scholars will be shared. Two established scholars from Germany, Prof. Dr. Dorji Wangchuk and PD Dr. Philipp Maas, will also participate, leading readings of Sanskrit and Tibetan texts. The workshop consists of two parts:

(1) Presentation of Research Papers: Doctoral candidates and postdoctoral researchers from both countries will present and discuss their current research findings. These presentations aim to help young scholars share the latest research trends and strengthen their network for collaborative research.

(2) Intensive Reading Program: Participants will read classical Sanskrit works and Tibetan texts under the guidance of two established and renowned teachers. This program is expected to lay the groundwork for interdisciplinary research.

Future Collaborations in Planning

The project intends to provide a forum for German and Korean researchers to understand and discuss each other's research areas and academic strengths. Through this exchange experience, both research teams can plan future collaborations in various forms.

Divergent Discourses: Processes of Narrative Construction in Tibet, 1955-62

International project cooperation
German part: funded by German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG))
Duration: 3 years
Start: 2023/4/1
Project leader: Dr. Franz Xaver Erhard

The international project cooperation "Divergent Discourses" is funded by the DFG and the AHRC and carried out by a project team at SOAS, London, and at the University of Leipzig. "Divergent Discourses" explores a conflict that began in the 1950s in the high Himalayas and led to almost two decades of armed conflict. This conflict continues to this day in the form of disputes over ideas and narratives between the Chinese government and the Tibetan community in exile.

Not long after Chairman Mao sent Chinese troops to annex Tibet in 1950, the Dalai Lama, Tibet's traditional ruler, fled to India with some 80,000 Tibetans. Chinese officials then produced millions of words in newspapers, historical tracts, propaganda leaflets and books to justify their claim to Tibet and condemn the old regime. From India, Tibetan exiles produced refugee accounts, testimonies, memoirs and histories of Tibet to refute China's claims.

Materials of this kind, which are primarily polemical, are often not considered important sources by historians. However, with the development of digital humanities and computer-assisted research techniques, they can now be analysed in a variety of ways to extract details about events, people and ideas that would otherwise receive little attention in the texts in which they are buried. With these new research tools, a great deal of data and information from different sources can be brought together, providing new information and insights into the history of the time.

These innovative tools allow for an in-depth study of the two competing discourses that emerged in the 1950s, each with its own account of Tibetan history, identity and traditions. The divergence between these representations has since shaped China's policy in Tibet, its strained relations with India, its tense relations with the US and the West, its response to repeated protests by Tibetans inside Tibet, and the six-decade failure of the exiled and Chinese leadership to reach an agreement.
The project will develop computer-based tools and adapt existing software to enable modern Tibetan texts to be compiled for the first time into a historical digital corpus, where they can be annotated and cross-referenced to enable sophisticated searching and study.

The three-year project will result in publications that provide new insights into the events that led to the split between the Chinese and Tibetan governments in the 1950s, the arguments and narratives that produced them, and the ways in which this split changed subsequent events. The project will also establish a website with examples of typical documents from the period with English translations, a database of events and names from the documents, and online access to the texts and data collected as part of the project.

For more information, please visit the project website.

Digital critical edition of the Nyāyabhāṣya

• Funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG))
  Duration: (9) 3 years
  3rd project phase
  Start: 2023/01/01
  Project leader: Prof. Dr. Eli Franco

The Nyaya (“logic”) is one of the most important traditions of classical Indian philosophy. Its foundational treatise, the Nyayasutra, consists of five chapters and is ascribed to sage Aksapada. It was basically finalized by anonymous redactors in the second half of the fourth century and was commented upon shortly afterwards by Paksilasvamin Vatsyayana. His commentary, the Nyayabhasya, is of crucial importance not only for our understanding of the early phase of Nyaya philosophy and for reconstructing the earliest form of the Nyayasutra, but also for expanding our knowledge of the teachings of other philosophical traditions of the classical period, of whose literature only a fraction has survived. In spite of this undisputed significance for the study of the history of Indian philosophy, the Nyayabhasya has not yet been critically edited. The need for a methodologically refined critical edition of this commentary has been amply demonstrated by earlier DFG and FWF-funded projects focused on chapters 1 to 2 and 5. The nine-year DFG long-term project aims to establish a critical text of chapters 3 and 4 which deal in dialectical form with central issues relating to metaphysics, epistemology, theology and soteriology. Out of 41 manuscripts available for chapter three, 15 core manuscripts selected on stemmatic grounds have been used to establish its critical text in the first two project phases. In the final phase, the critical edition of chapter four will be achieved on the basis of the already documented text of 21 among a total of 39 available manuscripts. The text-critical and text-historical work on the two chapters is enriched by phylogenetic analyses of the texts of the primary witnesses, and the consideration of the evidence provided by secondary witnesses and selected printed editions. In addition to the printed critical edition of the two chapters, a major aim of the project is the state-of-the-art digital publication, and thereby wide dissemination, of a novel critical edition of their text, accompanied by a documentation of the text versions of all primary and secondary witnesses and the selected printed editions, as well as detailed manuscript descriptions. It will be published on the innovative web platform Brucheion which is being developed for the project and will, after its completion in the project’s final phase, allow free access to the texts and the possibility of investigating the variance of the many extant versions of the two chapters. Brucheion will also function as an open-access multi-user web-based Virtual Research Environment for critical work based on a large number of manuscripts. The critically established text will form a well-founded exhaustive source for future studies on classical Nyaya philosophy and the basis of a new philologically informed translation of the Nyayabhasya. Moreover, the project will make a substantial contribution to the introduction of Digital Humanities and Digital Philology into the discipline.

DFG Programme Research Grants

International Connection Austria, India

Cooperation Partners: Dr. Martin Gluckman; Dr. Andrey Klebanov; Professorin Dr. Karin Preisendanz

Continuing study of the two newly discovered Buddhist Sanskrit manuscripts of a comprehensive philosophical work attributed to Jitāri: Completing the outstanding editorial work and conducting further historical-philosophical studies of selected chapters

Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)
Duration 3 years
Start: June 1, 2021
Project leader: Dr. Junjie Chu

It has long been known that a large number of rare Sanskrit manuscripts have been preserved in Lhasa. Those containing the most important Buddhist philosophical works were photographed in 1987. These photocopies are currently held at the China Tibetology Research Center, Beijing. However, access to these documents remains severely restricted. The applicant is fortunate to have obtained access to two manuscripts (112+55 leaves) containing a very important work by the philosopher Jitāri (c. 940 – 980 CE) entitled "[A Collection of] Topics of Debate" (vādasthānāni). This work consists of 22 systematic expositions, most of which are completely unknown to date. The proposed project will be based on these two manuscripts.

Jitāri is a well-known Buddhist philosopher who exerted a strong influence on the later period of the history of Indian Buddhist philosophy. In the diverse chapters of his Vādasthānāni, a wide variety of topics are discussed, such as the negation of the existence of the universal, the negation of the existence of God, the proof of impermanence, the proof of the non-existence of the self, the proof of the Buddha's omniscience, etc. All these topics are the subject of long-lasting debates between Buddhist, Brahmin and Jaina philosophers. Until recently, however, our knowledge of Jitāri was very scanty. Therefore, the value of these newly available materials can hardly be overstated; they will not only broaden our insight into Jitāri's thought, but will also greatly enrich our knowledge of his historical and philosophical relations with other authors, thus providing a better understanding of the later period of Indian Buddhist philosophy in South Asia.

In the previous phase of the project carried out by Prof. Eli Franco (June 1, 2011 – May 31, 2013, DFG number: FR 2531), a draft diplomatic edition of the entire text and a critical edition of two chapters were prepared by the present applicant. The aim of the requested continuation of the project is to complete the outstanding editorial work, i.e., to revise and finalize the draft of the diplomatic edition, and to critically edit the additional chapters in order to complete the critical edition of the entire text. Based on the critical edition, a historical-philosophical study of some selected chapters will be carried out. The result is expected to be published in the series "Sanskrit Texts from the Tibet Autonomous Region" of the China Tibetology Research Center and the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Beijing-Vienna.

Digital critical edition of the Nyāyabhāṣya

• Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)
  Duration: (9) 3 years
  2nd project phase
  Start: July 1, 2019
  Project leader: Prof. Dr. Eli Franco
  In the project, final work will be carried out by means of a contract for work.

The Nyaya ("Logic") is one of the most important traditions of classical Indian philosophy. Its basic scripture, the Nyayasutra, consists of five chapters and is attributed to the sage Aksapada. In the second half of the 4th century, the text was largely fixed by anonymous editors and shortly thereafter commented upon by Paksilasvamin Vatsyayana. Vatsyayana's commentary, the Nyayabhasya, is extremely important for our understanding of the early phase of Nyaya philosophy and the reconstruction of the earliest form of the Nyayasutra. Furthermore, it expands our knowledge of the other philosophical traditions of the classical period, whose literature is only partially extant.

Despite this great importance for the study of the history of Indian philosophy, the Nyayabhasya has not yet been critically edited. The need for a critical edition has been adequately documented by a DFG-funded pilot project on the 5th chapter and three FWF-funded projects on chapters 1-2 at the University of Vienna. The DFG long-term project aims at the critical edition of chapters 3-4, which deal with central metaphysical, epistemological, theological, and soteriological questions in a dialectical form. To produce the critical text, 15 manuscripts will be used, selected from 41 available from a stemmatic point of view. They will be supplemented by a number of other manuscripts, after philological evaluation of their readings and the performance of various phylogenetic analyses of their texts. Surrogates of the relevant manuscripts, mainly from India, are already available. In addition to the printed critical edition of the two chapters, a major goal of the project is the digital publication, in accordance with the latest standards, and thus wide dissemination of a novel critical edition of their text, accompanied by documentation of the textual versions of all primary and secondary witnesses and selected printed editions, and with the addition of detailed manuscript descriptions. It will be published on the innovative web platform Brucheion, which was developed for the project and will provide free access to the texts as well as the possibility to study the diversity of the textual tradition. The critical text will be a reliable, well-argued comprehensive source for future studies of classical Nyaya philosophy and will provide the basis for a new philologically informed translation of the text. The project will make a substantial contribution to the introduction of digital humanities and digital philology into the discipline, with the establishment of new approaches and methods in stemmatics and representation of data that can be applied to any other humanities subject, such as classical philology, in which critical editions are undertaken on the basis of a large number of manuscripts.

Scientific treatment of Buddhist cave paintings in the Kuča region of the Northern Silk Road

In the Buddhist cave complexes of the Kuča region (Uyghur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang, PR China), which is located on the Northern Silk Road, there are impressive wall paintings dating from about the 5th to the 10th century. These are now being completely catalogued, documented and scientifically evaluated for the first time. Members of the research project of the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig are recording all the paintings of this region with scientific commentary in a database-supported information system. Fragments preserved in museums and collections around the world, as well as paintings that are only preserved in photographs, drawings, or descriptions, are also being consulted. The aim is to document the pictorial programs as well as the representational content of the paintings, their literary basis and, if applicable, their affiliation with Buddhist schools, and to evaluate them in terms of cultural history. The influences of pictorial traditions from India, Iran, classical antiquity and China will also be investigated.

With this project, the world's largest center for the study of Kuča paintings is being established at the Academy in Leipzig - in cooperation with scholars in various European countries, China, Japan, and the USA. For the first time, Buddhist cave paintings can be made accessible in their entirety for the religious, artistic and cultural studies of Buddhism and its spread to East Asia.

This research project is part of the Akademienprogramm, which is currently the largest long-term research program in the humanities and cultural sciences in the Federal Republic of Germany and is funded by the federal and state governments. This measure is co-financed by tax funds on the basis of the budget passed by the Saxon state parliament.

Further information can be found on the Project-Website  of the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig.

Mañjughoṣa Translation Project

Under the title "Mañjughoṣa Translation Project Leipzig," staff members of the Institute have succeeded in attracting a first translation grant from the 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha initiative to the Āryākṣayamatiparipṛcchānāmamahāyānasūtra ('Phags pa Blo gros mi zad pas zhus pa zhes bya ba theg pa chen po'i mdo, Tôh. no. 89). 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha is an international non-profit organization with the goal of translating the Tibetan Buddhist canon in its entirety into Western languages. Collaborators involved in the project include Dr. Rolf Scheuermann , Prof. Dr. Per Kjeld Sørensen (Prof. em. Leipzig University), and Stefan Schley, M. A. Other persons involved: Prof. Dr. Lewis Doney  and Tashi Bhutia (Karmapa International Buddhist Institute, New Delhi).