The 'Indian Books' in ʿAlī ibn Sahl Rabban al-Ṭabarī's Paradise of Wisdom.A new Arabic edition, first-time English translation, lore-historical introduction and multilingual glossaries

Ê¿Alą ibn Sahl Rabban al-áabarą 的《智慧天堂》中的“印度书籍”。新的阿拉伯语版本、首次英文翻译、传说历史介绍和多语言术语表

• 批准号: 457223417
• 负责人: Professor Dr. Stefan Weninger
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Centrum für Nah- und Mittelost-Studien (CNMS)
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 资助国家: 德国
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/457223417?language=en
• 关键词: Indian; Books; Al; ibn; Sahl

This project centres around a unique Arabic treatise that was appended by the Persian scholar ʿAlī ibn Sahl Rabban al-Ṭabarī to his medico-philosophical chef-d'œuvre, completed in the year 850 AD. The main work bears the title Paradise of Wisdom, the appendix is headed by "Extracts from the Books of the Indians". In this appended treatise, the author explains to a largely Muslim audience the basic tenets of Ayurvedic medicine, and presents its salient features summarily and systematically. His expositions are based on a number of relevant Sanskrit writings that had been translated into Arabic about two generations earlier. Ṭabarī does not advocate the teachings of the Indians, but rather confines himself to a faithful rendition of their ideas, thereby displaying a kind of neutral distance which we today would call 'objective' and which in a medieval context might rightly be regarded as exceptional. Ṭabarī's treatise, conceived during a formative period in Arabo-Islamic scientific history, is in all respects a highly important document which, moreover, had no literary precursors nor indeed did it engender similar investigations in its wake. For our understanding of Arabic scientific history, Ṭabarī's treatise represents a veritable treasure chest of otherwise unattainable information, a source both central and neglected. For the field of Indology, too, we can expect to gain new and significant insights: the Arabic translations used by Ṭabarī when writing his treatise proceeded on their part from Sanskrit versions that predate all currently available Ayurvedic manuscripts by nearly a thousand years. The so-called "Indian Books" of Ṭabarī — famous but hardly studied among Arabists, almost unknown among Indologists — were edited in 1928, together with the bulk of the work, and partially translated into German in the 1950s. The edition of the Arabic text, however, is philologically unusable, and the partial German translation, which is based exclusively on this deficient edition, is equally unreliable. We are therefore proposing to prepare a new, critical edition of the Arabic text, drawing on all manuscript witnesses that are now known; on the basis of a newly established text, we will then provide an annotated English translation; the material suchwise acquired will be evaluated and interpreted in an introductory study, focusing first and foremost on questions related to the intricacies of textual transmission; finally, we envisage to compile multilingual glossaries (Arabic‒Sanskrit‒English), and thereby to give access to all philologically relevant terms. The results of this research project will be published in the form of a monograph.

该项目围绕着一部独特的阿拉伯语论文展开，该论文由波斯学者Al-Ibn Sahl Rabban al-Al-Abarabaraban添加到他于公元850年完成的医学哲学杰作中。主要工作承担的标题天堂的智慧，附录是为首的“摘录从图书的印第安人”。在这篇附加的论文中，作者向主要是穆斯林的观众解释了阿育吠陀医学的基本原理，并简要和系统地介绍了其突出特点。他的论述是基于一些相关的梵文著作，这些著作在大约两代人之前被翻译成阿拉伯语。他并不提倡印第安人的教义，而是把自己局限于忠实地再现他们的思想，从而表现出一种中立的距离，我们今天称之为“客观”，在中世纪的背景下，这可能被正确地视为例外。在阿拉伯-伊斯兰科学史的形成时期构思出的萨巴赫的论文，在各方面都是一份非常重要的文件，而且，它既没有文学上的先驱，也没有引起类似的调查。对于我们理解阿拉伯科学史来说，萨巴赫的论文代表了一个真正的宝库，里面有其他方式无法获得的信息，一个既重要又被忽视的来源。对于印度学领域，我们也可以期待获得新的和重要的见解：阿卡巴在撰写论文时使用的阿拉伯语翻译是从梵语版本开始的，这些梵语版本比目前所有可用的阿育吠陀手稿早了近一千年。1928年，《印度书》（Indian Books）和大部分作品被编辑，并在20世纪50年代被部分翻译成德语。然而，阿拉伯文本的版本在语言学上无法使用，而完全基于这个有缺陷的版本的部分德语翻译也同样不可靠。因此，我们建议利用目前已知的所有手稿证人，编写一份新的阿拉伯文本的重要版本;然后，我们将在新确定的文本基础上，提供一份附有注释的英文译本;将在一份介绍性研究报告中对这样获得的材料进行评估和解释，首先侧重于与文本传播的复杂性有关的问题;最后，我们设想编纂多语种词汇（阿拉伯语、梵语、英语），从而提供所有与语言学有关的术语。这一研究项目的成果将以专著的形式出版。