PrefaceSphujidhvaja first attracted my attention more than twenty years ago, when I read the brief account of the Yavanajataka given by
Mahamahopadhyaya Haraprasad Sastri in his Catalogue of Palm-leaf and Selected Paper MSS. Belonging to the Durbar Library, Nepal. I spent the academic year 1957-1958 in India, mainly in Poona working on the great collection of Sanskrit jyotisa manuscripts housed in the
Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute and preparing the first transcript of Minaraja's Vrddhayavanajataka; my critical edition of this text, which has been most helpful in understanding Sphujidhvaja's, has also appeared this year, in the Gaekwad Oriental Series. In December of 1957 I traveled to Nepal to attempt to see the manuscript of the Yavanajataka, but this privilege was not granted me. Fortunately,
in the spring of 1958, Mahamahopadhyaya Pandurang Vaman Kane, with the utmost kindness and generosity, allowed me to copy a transcript that he had acquired of ff. 2- 10 and 98-103. On the basis of this fragment I recognized both the Greek origin of the treatise, which had been previously surmised from its title, and the Babylonian character of its planetary theory.
It was not, however, until 1961 that a microfilm of the complete manuscript (lacking, however, f. 102) was obtained through the good offices of my guru, Professor Daniel Ingalls of Harvard University, and the then Ambassador to India and Nepal from the United States, Professor John Kenneth Galbraith. In the summer of 1965, a visit to Leipzig sponsored by Dr. Emilie Boer of the Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften revealed the existence of the Sarada manuscript of chapters 44-50, and Dr. V. Raghavan of Madras University informed me of the transcript of much of the Kathmandu manuscript in the Sylvain Levi collection in the Sorbonne. During the years 1961-1967, at Harvard and at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, I transcribed the Kathmandu manuscript, established a text, translated it, and wrote the commentary; the work, then, was essentially completed a decade ago. In the interim I have tried to keep the commentary up to date, though I am sure that I have not been totally successful in this effort. But whatever falsehoods or misrepresentations may persist,
I am confident that the main conclusions are unassailable: the greater part of the Yavanajataka was directly transmitted (with some necessary adjustments) from Roman Egypt to Western India, and this text is one of the principle sources for the long tradition of horoscopic astrology in India.As one further evidence of its influence on Indian science I quote from a letter written to me by Professor Kripa Shanker Shukla, dated Lucknow 26 January 1977. He informs me that, in his Aryabhatiyabhasya written in A.D. 629 (of which important work Professor Shukla is publishing a long-awaited critical edition this year),
Bhaskara cites from "Sphujidhvajayavanesvara" verses 55-57 of chapter 79, and from "Yavanesvara" padas a-b of verse 89 of chapter 1.To all the scholars mentioned above, and to
the Ford Foundation, the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, I am greatly indebted for their assistance and support. But
I must especially thank Professor Ingalls for his sustained interest in and many efforts on behalf of this edition; he acquired the microfilm of the manuscript, he corrected many corrupt passages in the text and greatly improved my translation, and he accepted the work for publication in the Harvard Oriental Series. Without his aid this book could not have been written.
Posted: Sun Jun 16, 2024 3:13 am