Power and Authority-Aspects of Kingship and Religious Traditions in Ancient India

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The purpose of this project is to investigate problems regarding the kingship in ancient India with cooperation of reseatchers of various fields in Indology. Looking into the history of research on this subject, we have especially focused our attention upon the Epic text "Mahabharata", . since this gigantic text offers most important information on the kingship and concerned topics during the period between fourth century B.C.and fourth century A.D.when the classical type of kingship was going to be established. Our study consisted of two type of research activities : a joint research workshop of the researchers participated in this project and the build-up of data files on the ancient Indian kingship from the available Sanskrit literatures.The head of the project organized a joint seminar of reading Sanskrit text of the Epic, in which all the investigators of this project participated. The joint seminar was regularly held during the three-year's project and the total number of seminar … More s came up to fifty. The main text taken up in the joint seminar was the Rajadharma Parvan (The Section of King's Duty) in the twelfth volume of the Mahabharata, where the best arranged information on kingship is to be obatained. This text portion had so far not been closely studied from the philological point of view. Our first intention was to establish the text itself and to offer a reliable translation. With the advance of our seminar, we had piled up report materials through good discusiions and we could finally edited a translation with detailed notes of a thousand pages in total volume. While the research result is available in printed-out form, we decided to distribute our result also through internet, that is , through the computer network to the wider cicle of scholars of Indology and Indian studies. Our fruit of research will be shortly distributed to the researchers in HTML format.The second part of our join work has been to compile a gigantic Sanskrit data file of kingship in ancient India. For this purpose, passages on the concerned topics of kingship was extracted from various kind of Sanskrit literatures, ranging from late Vedic literatures, Epics and Puranas to the texts of politics. This first attempt to compile the enormous data file of Indian kingship in the form of electronic text has been announced to the international scholars of Indology and enthuastically welcomed by them. The file provisionally called "A Sanskrit File of Ancient Indian Kingship" will be made public through internet shortly and we strongly believe that it will be heavily utilized by the international scholars working not only on Indian politics and administration, but those on cultural history and religious history. Less