- 2 The Shakespeare estimate is based on measuring the result of //text() on the XML (...)
1This article explores possibilities for encoding the reuse of text in the works of the logico-epistemological school of Buddhism in South Asia (the texts of the pramāṇavādins). This school starts in about the fifth century CE in South Asia with Dignāga (ca 480 – ca 540 CE) and continues to produce texts up to around the thirteenth century. This corpus of Sanskrit literature consists of roughly 150 works, which were written by at least, but not many more than, forty authors. In terms of volume, again roughly speaking, the relevant section of the Tibetan canon, which includes translations of a significant number of these Sanskrit texts, is around 25 MB in size (encoded in ASCII). For comparison, a simple “text-only” measurement of the Folger Shakespeare edition results in approximately 8 MB of such raw text.2 These texts of the logico-epistemological school of Buddhism range in extent from a few hundred words to multivolume works. Not all texts survive in their original language, Sanskrit. Some are accessible only in translations, usually Tibetan ones, and others are known only through fragments surviving in other texts. Many of those texts that do survive in their original have not been critically edited.
- 3 Freschi and Maas (2017b, 13–21) develop the notion of “adaptive reuse,” where a significant and ins (...)
2Recent years have witnessed increased efforts to understand the various literary and social conventions that are characteristic of premodern South Asian literature, which this group of works belongs to. Freschi (2015), introducing a two-volume collection of specialist papers on text reuse in South Asian literature, provides a succinct overview of the expectations, difficulties, and hermeneutic considerations attached to the editing of these texts. Freschi (2015, 86–87) distinguishes three reasons for studying the reuse of text: first, it aids textual criticism, allowing the reconstitution of texts and increasing the certainty of editorial decisions; second, it facilitates a clearer understanding of the relations between works (and their authors); third, it provides an opportunity for reflecting on “historically conditioned notions of text, author, originality, copyright and so on” (Freschi 2015, 87).3 Most of these questions are outside the focus of this article, however. It aims one level below them: how to provide scholars and editors with the basis for making such judgments or decisions.
- 4 See Steinkellner (2017, xii–xiii) for the various phenomena considered, as well a (...)
3The term text reuse, furthermore, is broad. Even in the literature that deals with the texts under consideration, it subsumes such varied notions as citation, quote, quasi-quotation, report, passages that have been silently used, or secondary usage.4 Quotation is too narrow a category to subsume even the most basic cases of intratextual relations that are encountered in these texts.
4To understand the phenomena that the term reuse is supposed to cover here, it is first necessary to delimit and characterize this group of texts. These texts fall mainly within two categories: some of them belong to the literary genre called bhāṣya (commentary). The others are independent treatises that are mostly dedicated to a particular topic, either refuting opposing views or establishing tenets of this Buddhist group as the author saw them. The works of both groups are composed in what is often referred to as a “nominal style” (Jacobi 1903), a style that avoids the complex verb forms that Sanskrit can boast of and favors formally simpler noun formations. This leads to a high degree of abstraction and compression.
- 5 An accessible overview to the bhāṣya style is given by Tubb and Boose (2007). Apart from the observ (...)
5More significantly for our purposes, however, these texts share a certain set of ways to make use of other texts.5 This method, or technique, consists of several acceptable conventions that can, at first glance, all be classified as quotes, either explicit or not, and that can show strongly diverging degrees of literal accuracy.
6A formal system of analysis for these occurrences was developed by Ernst Steinkellner for printed critical editions. This system is the most differentiated that has been advanced for the classification of intertextual relations in the field of Buddhist studies. Its purpose is as follows:
It is with a view to providing a fairly general system of categories for differentiating between the various materials available as witness for original Sanskrit texts in their degree of testimonial validity that I would like to present below a more detailed list of kinds of text.
(Steinkellner 1988, 112)
- 6 This reference system was formalized by Steinkellner (1988, 116–18), and revised (...)
7The system defines a set of sigla that are to be used for the characterization of reused text. The most important ones are these:6
-
T:
-
textus, the text being edited;
-
Ce:
-
citatum ex alio, a quotation from another text in T;
-
Ce':
-
Ce usus secundarii in T: like Ce, but not explicitly acknowledged as a quote;
-
e:
-
added to Ce or Ce': signifying modus edendi, that the reused text was modified by the person quoting it;
-
Ci:
-
citatum in alio, quotation of T in another text, again with the possible addition of an apostrophe (') or an e, yielding Ci', Cie, and Ci'e;
-
R:
-
citatum in alio modo referendi, a span of text in T that is referred to in a later work.
8Each combination of sigla is usually followed by either a bibliographic reference to an edition of the related text, or, if the text has not been edited, the name of the related text.
9The individual letters used in this system of characterization have separate and rather diverse functions. The initial capital, T, C, or R, qualifies a span of text either, in the case of T, as the aim of the editorial endeavor, or, in the other cases, as a passage that has been found to be reused.
- 7 The qualifier i is of somewhat limited use in the present investigation: if a pas (...)
- 8 This distinction becomes relevant when a passage is reused more than once by subs (...)
10The second character, i or e, indicates the direction of reuse, either in another text or from another text.7 In a recent explanation of the symbol e, Steinkellner (2017, xii, n. 4) has made it explicit that it should not be understood to imply direct quotation: if the reuse of text A in text B is marked by an editor of text B with the appropriate symbols (Ce, Ce', etc.), we should not conclude that the editor is asserting that the author of text B had direct access to text A.8
11This second character is, furthermore, defined from the perspective of the edited text. Any passage in text B that is marked as a case of reuse of text A (Ce etc.) commits the editor to acknowledging a corresponding Ci in the (perhaps hypothetical) edition of text A. This Ci in text A is also fully dependent on the Ce in text B: obviously, nothing about a passage marked as Ci indicates that it is reused in another text, and it is only by finding it reused in that other text that we can classify it in this way.
12The decision whether this span of text is to be characterized as secondary usage, signalled by adding an apostrophe as the third character, is usually derived from the context in which the passage appears, the para-text surrounding the reused span of text. Any certainty in this regard is usually due to the author explicitly saying that the current passage was said, thought, or held by someone. The addition of this apostrophe is a binary sign: either a passage is reused secondarily, or it is not. It allows no further differentiation.
- 9 Steinkellner (2017, xxv) has recently maintained: “When comparing two texts, it i (...)
13The presence of the final letter, e (for modus edendi), is supposed to reflect the editor’s estimate of the difference between the reused text as it appears in a source and as it appears in the context of its reuse, insofar as one might reasonably assume that differences are due to an intentional change by the author of the text that incorporates the passage from another. Several editors (including this writer) have found it hard to give good reasons for this kind of decision in their editions, and have avoided the use of this category altogether.9 In any case, this siglum never was intended to characterize differences that could be due to simple mistakes in copying manuscripts, but to mark intentional changes on the part of the author reusing the text. This siglum is again a binary operator, and as such allows only for a basic distinction without further characterization.
- 10 Steinkellner (2017, xxi–xxv) summarizes and responds to the main concerns that ha (...)
14Even though this system of characterizations has been criticized in recent years because of a basic impossibility of being certain about which copy of a text an author quoting another text might have had,10 it cannot be disputed that the distinctions in the conceptual space opened up by this analysis are significant and useful ones for any research concerned with these kinds of texts: C and R mark reused material as either literally accurate or only paraphrased or alluded to; e, together with a source description, makes it clear where the quote is from; the apostrophe (') reflects a basic observation about the passage’s context in the text being edited (whether it occurs as an explicit quote or not). And the final, optional e represents the editor’s estimate of the quoted material’s accuracy as a representation of the source.
15In the rest of this article, these categories will be applied to some sample passages using the conceptual framework of the TEI Guidelines. The purpose is to illustrate light-weight markup rules for some general cases of textual reuse in the works of this genre that allow for easy querying of the resulting structured information. Before doing that, however, it will be useful to briefly consider the current infrastructure that the version 4.1 of the Guidelines (TEI Consortium 2020) offers as to its general applicability to these phenomena.
- 11 The modern editions of these texts generally do use the categories of modern p (...)
- 12 See also table 1 for an overview together with the attributes most useful for (...)
16The part of the TEI P5 Guidelines version 4.1 most relevant to our inquiry is section 3.3.3: Quotation (TEI Consortium 2020). It occurs within a longer section that “… deals with a variety of textual features, all of which have in common that they are frequently realized in conventional printing practice by the use of such features as underlining, italic fonts, or quotation marks, collectively referred to here as highlighting” (TEI Consortium 2020, 3.3: https://tei-c.org/Vault/P5/4.1.0/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/CO.html#COHQHighlighting and Quotation). Many of the texts under discussion here show features that are particular to South Asian manuscript culture. So, the categories of “conventional printing practice” (primarily European and American practice, that is) cannot be naively applied to the encoding of these texts: the devices employed in the manuscripts, and also the texts, for emphasizing, distancing oneself from, or quoting words or longer phrases are often quite different from those encountered in printed editions.11 Before looking at some of these conventions, it will be useful to summarize the main points in section 3.3.3. of the TEI Guidelines. The elements presented there are as follows, grouped by their nearest model class (all quotes in the following list are from TEI Consortium 2020, 3.3.3):12
-
in the class of model.hiLike (and model.common)
-
<q>: the most generic marker for quotations;
-
in the class of model.attributable
-
<said>: for quotations of what someone says or thinks;
-
with the boolean attributes @direct and/or @aloud
-
in the sub-class model.quoteLike
-
<quote>: for any passage that is “attributed by the narrator or author to some agency external to the text”;
-
allows the attribute @source, which points at a source;
-
- 13 The element <cit> is used also in dictionaries, but this is not (...)
<cit>, “cited quotation,” a container for <quote> in which it is associated with an explicit (in the text) reference to a source;13
-
in the class of model.emphLike
-
- 14 The Chicago Manual of Style (University of Chicago Press 2010, 7.5 (...)
<mentioned>: “marks words or phrases mentioned, not used”14 in a given context;
-
<soCalled>: for “cases in which quotation marks are used to distance the quoted text from the narrator or speaker.”
- 15 Unless indicated otherwise, all XPath and XQuery expressions shown in this pap (...)
- 16 A more elegant solution would be to derive the elements’ names from the corres (...)
17That the TEI Guidelines define elements and attributes largely through their inclusion in such classes means that these classes are relevant not only for the correct (as intended) employment of the elements in marking up documents, but also for the development of reliable software that queries the documents. For even though section 3.3.3 discusses the varying use cases for all the above-mentioned elements as candidates for analyzing material surrounded by quotation marks, querying for them efficiently presupposes the correct expectations of their various properties. And these are mostly a function of the classes that the elements belong to. For example, an XPath15 that collects all elements likely to be used for quotation marks would be //(q|said|quote|cit|mentioned|soCalled) (with duplication).16
Example 1. XQuery for the local names of elements in model.attributable class (according to TEI Consortium 2020). The result is the list (<said>, <quote>, <cit>, <floatingText>).
declare default element namespace "http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0";
doc("https://www.tei-c.org/Vault/P5/4.1.0/xml/tei/odd/p5subset.xml")
//elementSpec[
classes/memberOf[
@key=(
"model.attributable",
//classSpec[
classes/memberOf[@key="model.attributable"]]
/@ident/string())]]
/@ident/string()
Table 1. TEI elements for marking material in quotation marks, with selected attributes for linking to a source or other occurrence of the material.
| Element |
Nearest Model |
Attributes linking to other occurrences |
| <q> |
model.hiLike |
@who; @source; @corresp |
| <said> |
model.attributable |
@who; @source; @corresp |
| <quote> |
model.quoteLike |
@source; @corresp |
| <cit> |
model.quoteLike |
@source; @corresp; source usually encoded in a child element |
| <mentioned> |
model.emphLike |
@source; @corresp |
| <soCalled> |
model.emphLike |
@source; @corresp |
18It is noteworthy that the elements suggested for marking quotation in section 3.3.3 of the TEI Guidelines do not share one class: some belong to model.attributable, others to model.emphLike, and the most general marker—<q>—belongs to model.hiLike. This is a result of the presentation in section 3.3.3, which focuses on the use of quotation marks. Since modern printing does not, on the analysis proposed there, employ them to mark only related features, there need not be any expectation of a common superclass for the elements discussed here.
- 17 At least if a well-construed system is used. A noteworthy example is the defin (...)
19The quotation elements as described in the TEI Guidelines all share the @source and @corresp attributes. These two properties are expressive enough to provide the required intertextual links—that is, a link to a work, either in the abstract or as found in a certain edition, and to a passage in that edition. 17 For this reason, they need not be discussed further here. What is not so easily solved, however, is how these various elements map onto the conceptual distinctions underlying Steinkellner’s model. Should one just use <q>, the most general form, and be done with it? Or can something be gained from differentiating among the elements for different cases? The next section will consider some examples to answer these questions.
20Example 2 shows a quotation in the fullest sense of the word.
Example 2. Simple quote with attribution (the target of tei:quote/@source is not shown).
<div>
<div xml:lang="sa">
<p>
<seg>etena yad uktam <persName>udyotakareṇa</persName>
<quote source="NBhV.xml#p312l21">avācakatve śabdānāṃ pratijñāhetvor
vyāghāta</quote> iti tad api pratyuktaṃ bhavati.</seg>
</p>
</div>
<div type="translation" xml:lang="en">
<p>
<seg>Through this also what <persName>Uddyotakara</persName> said,
<quote>If words do not denote anything, both the proposition and
the reason [in your inference] are inconsistent.</quote> has been
rejected.</seg>
</p>
</div>
</div>
21Example 2 is from the ca. eighth-century “Tattvasaṅgrahapañjikā” (see Krishnamacharya 1926), the commentary by Kamalaśīla on Śāntarakṣita’s panorama, in verse, of contemporary philosophy, the “Tattvasaṅgraha” (see Krishnamacharya 1926).
22There are three voices that must be distinguished in this passage:
-
The passage as a whole is spoken by Kamalaśīla, the commentator.
-
He is connecting a passage in the base text, the text he is commenting upon, to an objection by a non-Buddhist opponent. The base text is here not quoted but only pointed at, by saying Through this, that is, through what is said in the base text.
-
The opponent’s text is quoted verbatim, as a subphrase in a statement that rejects it. In this case, we can verify that it is a faithful quote, since the sentence is found in Uddyotakara’s work (“Nyāyabhāṣyavārttika” 312.21–22, in Thakur 1997).
23The commentary here performs various functions:
-
The construction “Through this … has been rejected.” (“etena … pratyuktaṃ bhavati”): connection of the text commented upon and the provided quote
-
What was said (yad uktam): introduction of the quote
-
Uddyotakara (udyotakareṇa): attribution of the quote (the spelling with a double d is preferable)
-
<quote>: repetition of what Uddyotakara said
24Since it is generally useful to capture the context of a quote, it is embedded in a <seg> element, which carries little semantic baggage. One could also consider the employment of a <cit> element instead of it in this case. But in the absence of a “bibliographic reference to [the] source” (TEI Consortium 2020, 3.3.3) of the quotation, this would not be an appropriate use case for <cit>.
25All of these functions can be tied to parts or segments of the sentences under consideration. Ideally, all these functions that the commentary performs should be easy to find by general queries run on the group of texts. A simple search for //quote will catch this type of quote, and its context can be discovered by checking the parent (//quote/parent::*). Possible refinements that could be made by employing @type and/or @ana attributes, and which are not reflected in the structure of the markup, will not be discussed here.
26In Steinkellner’s analysis, Uddyotakara’s words in this passage would be categorized as Ce, an explicit quotation that is exactly the same as in a source available to us today.
27Later in the same text, Kamalaśīla introduces verse 1061 of the text he is commenting on as shown in example 3.
Example 3. Quotes as references, markup following typography .
<div n="1061">
<div xml:lang="sa">
<div type="base-text">
<lg xml:id="ts__1061">
<l>agobhinnaṃ ca yad vastu tad akṣair vyavasīyate /</l>
<l>...</l>
</lg>
</div>
<div type="commentary">
<p>yac coktam <hi rend="bold">indriyair</hi> ityādi, tad asiddham iti
darśayann āha—<hi rend="bold">agobhinnaṃ ce</hi>tyādi.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div type="translation" xml:lang="en">
<div type="base-text">
<lg xml:id="ts__1061__trl">
<l>Also a real thing excluded from what is not a cow is ascertained
through the sense faculties.</l>
<l>...</l>
</lg>
</div>
<div type="commentary">
<p>Further, what was [previously] stated starting with [the word] <hi rend="bold" xml:lang="sa">indriyaiḥ</hi>, that is unestablished. In
order to show this, [Śāntarakṣita, the author of the base text,] spoke
[the verse] that begins with [the words] <hi rend="bold">Also [a real
thing] excluded from what is not a cow</hi>.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
28The passage in example 3 shows a type of quote significantly different from the one we saw before. The commentator’s introduction of the passage from the base text, the text the commentary is written on, contains at least two elements (here still marked graphically by <hi>) 18 that should be categorized as <quote> elements of some sort:
-
The first is indriyair ityādi. This refers to an earlier verse, Tattvasaṅgraha 939 (see Krishnamacharya 1926), which itself is a quote, in the base text, of a passage by an opponent.
-
The second is agobhinnaṃ ca ityādi, which points to the beginning of the verse in the base text, Tattvasaṅgraha 1061, in which the author of the base text answers the opponent’s claim that was reproduced in Tattvasaṅgraha 939.
- 19 Since these kinds of reuse are intended to point at the beginning of a passage, t (...)
- 20 See, for example, Steinkellner, Krasser, and Lasic (2005, 1:lvi): “Words from (...)
29Both of these phrases have as their main function the indication of the passage that the commentator is going to speak about, and they indicate it by repeating a few words from the beginning of the passage.19 It is characteristic about this type of quotation that its content is usually irrelevant: it is a reference to a particular string of characters, or sequence of sounds, much like a lemma in a note of a critical edition indicates the place to which the note applies. Steinkellner (1988, 117) remarks that these cases should be categorized as “quotations from another text” (Ce), though in his own editions he usually marked these kinds of quotes by graphical means (bold face), probably so as not to make the apparatus overflow.20
Example 4. Quotes as references, first attempt (translated in example 3; the element with the @xml:id of "ts__939" is not shown).
<div n="1061">
<div type="base-text">
<lg xml:id="ts__1061">
<l>agobhinnaṃ ca yad vastu tad akṣair vyavasīyate /</l>
<l>...</l>
</lg>
</div>
<div type="commentary">
<p>
<seg>yac coktam <quote type="lemma" source="#ts__939">indriyair</quote>
ityādi, tad asiddham iti darśayann āha—<quote type="lemma" source="#ts__1061">agobhinnaṃ ce</quote>tyādi.</seg>
</p>
</div>
</div>
- 21 One might consider encoding this information in a @corresp attribute. But this (...)
30A first solution, shown in example 4, is to use the <quote> tag for these repetitions, with @type set to "lemma" (in the sense used in textual criticism, not to be confused with the linguistic value as in the @lemma attribute). With this markup we can separate these <quote> elements from other types quite easily. The reference to the base text is encoded in a @source attribute. A possible drawback in this encoding is that the referring function of the passage in which the quotation appears does not become evident. Ultimately, one would have to establish (in the <encodingDesc>) that the value "lemma" in the @type of a <quote> element means that this element has some features of a reference.21
31The next suggested solution, in example 5, tries to make this feature explicit by using <ref> elements. However, this creates problems. Semantically, it is problematic because it is not the content of the quote that <ref> refers to: the commentary uses the phrase “that starting with xyz” to refer to the base text but only “xyz” is an actual quote. It also has the significant drawback that any query intended to catch all quote-like elements will now have to include certain <ref> elements. This would increase the complexity of queries significantly.
Example 5. Quotes as references, second attempt (translated in example 3; the element with the @xml:id of "ts__939" is not shown).
<div n="1061">
<div type="base-text">
<lg xml:id="ts__1061">
<l>agobhinnaṃ ca yad vastu tad akṣair vyavasīyate /</l>
<l>...</l>
</lg>
</div>
<div type="commentary">
<p>
<seg>yac coktam <ref target="#ts__939" type="lemma">indriyair</ref>
ityādi, tad asiddham iti darśayann āha—<ref target="#ts__1061" type="lemma">agobhinnaṃ ce</ref>tyādi.</seg>
</p>
</div>
</div>
Example 6. Quotes as references, proposed solution (translated in example 3; the element with the @xml:id of "ts__939" is not shown).
<div n="1061">
<div type="base-text">
<lg xml:id="ts__1061">
<l>agobhinnaṃ ca yad vastu tad akṣair vyavasīyate /</l>
<l>...</l>
</lg>
</div>
<div type="commentary">
<p>
<seg>yac coktam <ref target="#ts__939"><quote type="lemma">indriyair</quote> ityādi</ref>, tad asiddham iti darśayann
āha—<ref target="#ts__1061"><quote type="lemma">agobhinnaṃ
ce</quote>tyādi</ref>.</seg>
</p>
</div>
</div>
32It thus seems best to combine these solutions, and treat the quote together with its embedding phrase as a reference as shown in example 6. This expresses most of the features that we can see in these quotations: we can pick out these <quote> elements along with all the other types, and still easily differentiate them by examining whether they are embedded in a <ref> to the base text.
33In a second passage that follows later in the commentary on the same verse, Kamalaśīla takes up the Sanskrit word ca (usually and or furthermore), and explains how it is to be understood in the verse: its function there is the inclusion of objects that are not explicitly mentioned in the verse, rather than the simple conjunction of this sentence with the previous one. This is not the same kind of referring quotation that we considered above in examples 4–6, because its main purpose is to comment on the significance or meaning of the term, not to indicate a particular point in the base text. A proposal for its markup with <mentioned> and <gloss> is shown in example 7.
Example 7. Quotes for explanation.
<div n="1061">
<div xml:lang="sa">
<div type="base-text">
<lg xml:id="ts__1061">
<l><seg xml:id="ts__1061__a">agobhinnaṃ</seg> <seg xml:id="ts__1061__b">ca</seg> yad vastu tad akṣair vyavasīyate /</l>
<l>...</l>
</lg>
</div>
<div type="commentary">
<p>
<seg><mentioned source="#ts__1061__b">ca</mentioned>kāro <gloss target="#ts__1061__b">'nuktārthasamuccaye</gloss>.</seg>
</p>
</div>
</div>
<div type="translation" xml:lang="en">
<div type="base-text">
<lg xml:id="ts__1061__trl">
<l><seg xml:id="ts__1061__b__trl">Also</seg> a real thing <seg xml:id="ts__1061__a__trl">excluded from what is not a cow</seg>
is ascertained through the sense faculties.</l>
<l>...</l>
</lg>
</div>
<div type="commentary">
<p>
<seg>The particle <mentioned source="#ts__1061__b__trl">ca</mentioned>
[is used] <gloss target="#ts__1061__b__trl">in the sense of
indicating objects not mentioned [in the verse]</gloss>.</seg>
</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
34In terms of query complexity, this has similar problems to the simple <ref> solution just discussed: any query for quotes in general will have to take the variation introduced by <mentioned> into account, and will therefore become more complicated. However, section 3.3.3 of the TEI Guidelines does suggest <mentioned> as the element to use for the phenomenon described here. The element <mentioned> therefore must be considered in well-constructed queries for reused text.
35The primary function of repeating the word that is to be explained, ca, is not to refer to the text, but to say something about the meaning or content of that term. This explanation can be encoded as a <gloss> element. Both elements, <mentioned> and <gloss>, are loosely tied to the base text, and not to each other, because there are variant forms of this phenomenon where either there is no clearly identifiable <gloss>, or the term which could be <mentioned> is not repeated in the text. As before, the context useful to understanding this occurrence is wrapped in an anonymous <seg> element.
36Steinkellner marks text segments of this kind with T' (textus usus secundarii), though he notes that “[f]ormally this kind of text would correspond to the group of ‘Ce'-texts’… But in order to distinguish the group of quotation-texts in their hierarchical position more clearly I prefer the reference to the textus in the present definition” (1988, 116–17). This hierarchical position amounts to an expression of the value that an editor assigns to a text as a witness for some other text. In the present case, it declares the editor’s conviction that the direct commentary is a privileged witness that is second in reliability only to direct witnesses (usually manuscripts) for the text that is being commented upon. The markup solution proposed here (with <mentioned>) does not explicitly express this facet, since it captures only the typed structural correspondence between text passages. However, this facet can be defined by the editor in a systematic fashion through the annotation of the target of the @source attribute: the determination of the “hierarchical position” is something that the editor will usually make explicit in their organization and interpretation of the sources. The encoding proposed here thus has the benefit of keeping two unrelated things separate: the similarity (or, in some cases, identity) of sequences of characters in different texts, and the editor’s estimate of their value as witnesses for certain editorial decisions. For example, an explicit quote from the base text in a commentary (corresponding to Ce in Steinkellner’s schema) would receive the same markup as an explicit quote in any other text (<quote> with @source). If the editor decided that the commentary had greater reliability than the other text, this could be made explicit in any of the many ways that the TEI Guidelines provide for: for example, since a document encoded on the basis of witnesses will probably have a <listWit> element, one could at least add an @ana attribute to the <witness> elements contained therein, and derive the desired hierarchical position from a query of that attribute.
- 22 Silent reuse is very common across the genre of scholastic Sanskrit. See Gnoli (...)
37The last case of text reuse to be discussed is that of “silent reuse.” In this variant, phrases, sentences, or even longer passages are reused without explicitly marking them as being due to another agency. This phenomenon is characterized as usus secundarii by Steinkellner. These passages can, in this process, also change to varying degrees, and it is a difficult philological problem to judge the differences between the “reused” and “original” texts.22 The markup outlined for passages in this category also applies to cases where a passage is only paraphrased or alluded to.
- 23 Well-known examples are Ravigupta’s reworking of Prajñākaragupta’s “Pramāṇavārtti (...)
38In practice, all three possible modes of reuse are encountered: a text might reproduce a passage from another by embellishing or otherwise extending it, it might summarize or condense the original passage, or it might reproduce it very faithfully. Often, one will find all three modes mixed together in the same text.23 In many cases it is also not possible to determine through how many intermediary steps a passage has been received, especially when the work it is supposedly taken from has not survived as a whole.
Example 8. Encoding parallels, suggested solution with stand-off markup (<anchor> only). The three <div> elements could be in different documents. For the text content, see examples 11, 13, and 15. The internal markup of the text passages linked in this way is not relevant to this solution.
<div>
<!-- source text -->
<div type="text1">
<p>...<anchor xml:id="j-1-s"/>tatraikas tāvad bāhyo ... dṛṣṭāv iva
iti<anchor xml:id="j-1-e"/></p>
<p>... atrāpy uktam ... <anchor xml:id="j-2-e"/>...</p>
</div>
<!-- First reuse: Ratnakīrti’s Apohasiddhi -->
<div type="text2">
<p>...<anchor xml:id="r-1-s"/>tatra bāhyo ’rtho ... dṛṣṭāv iva iti<anchor xml:id="r-1-e"/></p>
<p>...atrāpy uktam ...<anchor xml:id="r-2-e"/>...</p>
</div>
<!-- Second reuse: Mokṣākaragupta’s Tarkabhāṣā -->
<div type="text3">
<p>...<anchor xml:id="m-1-s"/>bāhyārtho ... dṛṣṭāv iva iti<anchor xml:id="m-1-e"/></p>
</div>
<linkGrp type="silentreuse">
<link target="#j-1-s #j-2-e #r-1-s #r-2-e"/>
<link target="#j-1-s #j-1-e #r-1-s #r-1-e #m-1-s #m-1-e"/>
</linkGrp>
</div>
39The source text referred to in example 8 is from a work by Jñānaśrīmitra, a Buddhist monk and scholar active at the beginning of the eleventh century CE in Bengal. The section of text is from his “Apohaprakaraṇa” (see example 11 for the full text). This section was reused twice, with various degrees of abridgements.
40Its first reuse (encoded in example 13) is taken from the “Apohasiddhi” (see McAllister 2020) of Ratnakīrti, who lived in the first half of the eleventh century: he calls his texts “abridgements” or “summaries” (saṃkṣepa) of the much more extensive works of his teacher, Jñānaśrīmitra. The same passage is again reused a few centuries later by Mokṣākaragupta in his “Tarkabhāṣā” (see Iyengar 1952; encoded in example 15). This third manifestation of the passage is heavily abridged. This case illustrates how text passages were reused by several authors. It also contains a quote-within-a-quote, an explicit quotation of a partial verse from a foundational text for the logico-epistemological school of Buddhism, the “Pramāṇaviniścaya” (see Steinkellner 2007) (in the examples below, a modern partial edition of it is referred to by "#pvin1"; the @target "PVin.xml#v15" refers to a TEI XML edition containing the quote). One might hesitate about how to categorize this quote from the “Pramāṇaviniścaya”: it is, on the surface, an explicit quote, but it is unlikely that any of the two authors reusing the passage in which it occurs should be said to have quoted this contained item itself. It is more likely that the verse was transmitted by them in the form found in the passage surrounding it, which was being reused as a whole. This question has to be answered when one wishes to judge the value of the preserved version of the verse for an edition of the “Pramāṇaviniścaya.” The proposed markup should enable a researcher to easily collect information that allows them to answer that question.
41Two solutions will be proposed here. The first employs only lightweight stand-off markup and might be suitable for cases where the markup of the source documents cannot easily be changed. The second solution has the benefit of simpler querying, but at the cost of deeper interventions in the source documents.
42The first solution is to use encoding such as that shown in example 8. This proposal marks up parallel text passages in a way that is minimally invasive on the source documents. It adheres closely to the <linkGrp> solution proposed in section 16.5.2 of the TEI Guidelines, Alignment of Parallel Texts.24 This solution has at least two advantages: often, the interpretation of textual parallels is a rather subjective matter. The separation of this interpretative layer from the main text requires only <anchor> elements in the document, so that the impact on existing applications should be minimal. The <linkGrp> elements can be easily shared, stored in separate files, and one can have several of them, so that they can accommodate conflicting interpretations by different researchers. A second benefit is that they also work when the quoted material does not align nicely with block-level elements, as is the case in example 8, where the reused material crosses over a paragraph border in the first case of its reuse.
43A drawback of this solution is that the search for quotes will become more complicated. But I feel that in this situation this disadvantage is justified to a certain extent: all members of model.attributable are defined, after all, as having been explicitly marked as quotes in the source text. These “silent quotes” are not marked in such a way.
Example 9. Encoding parallels, solution with linked elements (the documents presupposed are shown in examples 11, 13, and 15).
<div>
<linkGrp type="silentreuse">
<link target="#j1 #r1 #m1"/>
<link target="#j2 #r2"/>
</linkGrp>
</div>
44The second proposed solution is as shown in example 9. This solution is superficially similar to the one shown in example 8, but it links whole elements to each other, not the start and end points of spans of text. It thus requires the identification of spans of texts (at least as <seg>) that are to be linked, even in the case of the original text that is being reused. It might be preferable, however, since it facilitates easier querying of the document. It employs the mechanisms provided in <att.global.linking> , that is, the @next and @prev attributes as described in section 16.7 of the TEI Guidelines, Aggregation.25 This allows elements to be constructed around the hierarchical constraints of the XML tree. In this variant, the employment of <seg> (for a quote’s context) and <quote> (for the quoted material) would cohere closely to the suggestions offered above for the cases of explicit quotations. But to the extent that the employment of model.attributable elements is questionable, this solution might be inadequate. The main practical benefit is certainly that a simple “search for all quotes,” for example, //quote, would return these results as well as any quotes explicitly marked as such in the sources. In examples 13 and 15, I have differentiated the <quote> elements by setting @type to "silent".
45Both solutions could be simplified by using CTS URNs as suggested and discussed by Berti, Almas, et al. (2015) and Berti, Blackwell, et al. (2016). Such references would replace the simple internal references (like "#j1" in the examples). For the first solution, we would then not even have to introduce <anchor> elements, since we could link directly into the text. For the second solution, it would at least save us the necessary markup in the document containing the reused text.
46All cases of text reuse analyzed so far can be quite clearly expressed within the framework of the TEI Guidelines. So in this sense, no particular changes are necessary to accommodate this facet of Sanskrit literature. The markup proposed here is expressive enough to allow for all of the distinctions that were developed expressly for the study and edition of these texts (Steinkellner 1988). However, it also allows for a cleaner separation of the raw textual evidence and the editor’s judgement, by encoding only the textual correspondences. The TEI Guidelines provide a rich set of mechanisms for attaching interpretations to the basic set of structural elements discussed here. A simple way would be the addition of @ana and/or @type attributes to the appropriate <seg> or <quote> elements. An alignment of a source text and a derived text, even through multiple derivations, is possible and could be opened for further automatic processing after adequate normalization of the <linkGrp> elements.
Example 10. List of passages connected through <link> elements (for documents as in example 8).
<div xml:id="cases-of-silent-reuse">
<p>...<anchor xml:id="j-1-s"/>tatraikas tāvad bāhyo ... dṛṣṭāv iva iti<anchor xml:id="j-1-e"/>
</p>
<p>... atrāpy uktam ... <anchor xml:id="j-2-e"/>...</p>
<p>...<anchor xml:id="r-1-s"/>tatra bāhyo ’rtho ... dṛṣṭāv iva iti<anchor xml:id="r-1-e"/>
</p>
<p>...atrāpy uktam ...<anchor xml:id="r-2-e"/>...</p>
<p>...<anchor xml:id="m-1-s"/>bāhyārtho ... dṛṣṭāv iva iti<anchor xml:id="m-1-e"/>
</p>
</div>
47To summarize, the following (simplified) XPath expressions might be used to select and find the different categories of reuse discussed in the introduction:
-
Ce citatum ex alio, the quotation from another text in the text being encoded (T):
-
A simple //quote is sufficient (see also example 1)
-
Ce' citatum ex alio usus secundarii, a silent quote in T:
-
On the first solution (see example 8), an XPath is not as straightforward as in the cases of explicit quotes. Given the <link> elements used in example 8, one could list the corresponding passages as follows:
<div xml:id="cases-of-silent-reuse">{
//anchor[contains(string-join(//link/@target, " "), concat("#",
@xml:id))]/parent::* }</div>
The result is shown in example 10. This XQuery expression is not a general solution because the analysis of the links is very naive (matching on a partial string) and there is no loop over the elements of the <linkGrp> or grouping of results.
-
On the second solution proposed above (see example 9), the results of //quote would include these cases; one could filter on attribute values (not discussed here).
-
e added to Ce or Ce', signifying that the editor believes that the text was changed by the author of T (modus edendi)
-
This is judged from the comparison of two passages; the editor’s decision can be recorded in an @ana attribute to all of the proposed elements, but should not be expressed in the structure of the markup.
-
Ci(') citatum in alio (usus secundarii), (silent) quotation of T in another text
-
This is a simple reversion of previous relations (i.e., a //quote or similar search on the target text).
-
R citatum in alio modo referendi, a text of T referred to or paraphrased
-
This case belongs to the ones discussed in section 5. An editor might express peculiarities of the reference or paraphrase with an @ana attribute that can be added to any of the given relations. In most cases, the “quotation” expressed through a <link> element will be the obvious place for such a specifier. In the solution that encodes silent quotes as <quote>, an example was given that would match //quote[@type="silent"].
SVN keywords: $Id: jtei-cc-ra-mcallister-185-source.xml 1015 2021-03-15 12:59:12Z tiago.sousa-garcia $
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