Sponsor

The Brahmasiddhi of Maṇḍana Miśra

edited by Professor Diwakar Acharya

The Brahmasiddhi of Maṇḍana Miśra, edited by Professor Diwakar Acharya, Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford, is a major contribution to the study of Advaita Vedānta and classical Indian philosophy.

This monumental volume brings together, for the first time in a single work, all available commentaries on this important text, offering scholars a comprehensive critical resource for the study of its reception and interpretation. Of particular significance is the inclusion, in revised and further edited form, of the long-lost commentary of Vācaspati Miśra, which Professor Acharya had discovered and published earlier. By assembling these historically and philosophically crucial layers of commentary, the volume will greatly enrich future research in Vedānta and provide an indispensable foundation for continued scholarly work on The Brahmasiddhi.

Journal of Sanskrit Studies

Oxford Sanskrit Text Society

The Journal of Sanskrit Studies is an international, peer-reviewed, quarterly academic journal dedicated to the rigorous study of Sanskrit texts, traditions, and intellectual cultures across historical periods and disciplinary boundaries. Published by the Sanskrit Text Society, the journal provides a scholarly forum for critical engagement with the vast and diverse corpus of Sanskrit literature, encompassing the Vedic, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions. It seeks to advance research grounded in philological precision, textual criticism, and manuscript studies, while also encouraging historically informed, philosophical, and interdisciplinary approaches to Sanskrit sources. The journal is committed to fostering excellence in scholarship through a robust double-blind peer-review process and adherence to the highest standards of academic integrity. As an open-access online publication, the Journal of Sanskrit Studies aims to make high-quality research freely available to a worldwide scholarly community.

Sūryaprajñapti–Candraprajñapti

Anupam Kumar Suman

A landmark of early Jain science, the Sūryaprajñapti–Candraprajñapti preserves an ancient Indian tradition of astronomy, celestial motion, time-reckoning, and cosmology—presented here with critical notes and its first annotated English translation.

The Sūryaprajñapti and Candraprajñapti occupy a distinctive place in the history of Indian science. Preserved within the Śvetāmbara Jain canonical tradition, they represent one of the earliest systematic bodies of Jain astronomical thought and belong to the formative, pre-siddhāntic phase of Indian astronomy. Their discussions of the Sun and Moon, celestial motions, time-reckoning, nakṣatras, and the structure of the cosmos preserve an astronomical system markedly different from the mathematical astronomy that became dominant in India from the early centuries CE. Earlier scholarship has consequently recognised the Sūryaprajñapti as particularly important evidence for an indigenous stratum of Indian astronomy prior to the ascendancy of the classical siddhāntic tradition. The complex textual relationship between the Sūryaprajñapti, Candraprajñapti, and other Jain cosmographical texts also makes them important witnesses to the formation and transmission of scientific knowledge in ancient India.

This volume of the Universal Sanskrit Library seeks to make this difficult and comparatively neglected scientific tradition accessible to a wider scholarly readership through critical notes and the first annotated English translation of the texts. Rather than treating their cosmological and astronomical statements merely as curiosities, the study attempts to recover the conceptual framework within which their observations, measurements, terminology, and models of celestial motion were formulated. By reading the texts philologically alongside the history of Indian astronomy, the volume aims to illuminate an important stage between early Indian astral traditions and the emergence of classical mathematical astronomy, while providing a foundation for renewed study of Jain contributions to the history of the exact sciences.

Anupam Kumar Suman is a doctoral researcher in Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford, specialising in the history of Indian astronomy and astrology and the critical study of Sanskrit scientific texts. He holds an MPhil in Classical Indian Religion from Oxford, an MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology from the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, an MSc in Social Policy and Development from the London School of Economics, and a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Patna University. Before turning to full-time academic research, he served for nearly fifteen years in the Indian Civil Service. His research brings together Sanskrit and Prakrit textual scholarship, the history of astronomy, mathematics, and astral sciences, with particular emphasis on recovering and critically interpreting unpublished and understudied sources for the history of premodern Indian science.