On October 7th–8th Kengo Harimoto travelled to Paris to participate as an auditor and discussant in the workshop of the ANR/DFG-sponsored project 'Texts Surrounding Texts". The project aims at cataloguing the imposing collections of South Asian manuscripts held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)—where we discovered three more manuscripts of…
Spring 2021 has been a particularly busy time for the Śivadharma Project team members and friends: besides the usual reading sessions happening three times per week, we have organized a series of online seminars around our research topics, open to all team members and invited guests. This series of fourteen…
The Śivadharma Project aims at studying an immense wealth of resources related to the Śivadharma tradition, which contributed to the spread of Śaivism in South Asia from the early Middle Ages up to modern times. Our main resources are Sanskrit and Tamil manuscripts and inscriptions transmitting the precepts that Śiva…
Post by Nirajan Kafle, team member of the Śivadharma Project since June 2019My work primarily focuses on the study of the Umāmāheśvarasaṃvāda in its historical context. The Umāmāheśvarasaṃvāda, ‘the dialogue between Umā and Maheśvara’, is part of a textual cluster of Śaiva texts written in Sanskrit under anonymous authorship. The Śivadharma texts…
Maṟaiñāṉa-campantar was a Tamil poet and a prominent śaiva-siddhānta scholar, who lived in Chidambaram in the sixteenth century. His magnum opus is the Civatarumottaram, a translation into Tamil of the Śivadharmottara, which makes him a central figure in the South Indian branching of the Śivadharma tradition. Yet, in addition, Maṟaiñāṉa also composed two large-scale temple mythologies (tāla-purāṇam), dedicated to the…
Temple 2, Nālandā During the Śivadharma Seminar on the 23rd of March, I will talk about my current research on the presence of Śiva at Nālandā. Even though this large monastic site in Bihar is primarily associated with Buddhism, a significant amount of Śaiva images have also been found.The reliefs…
To coincide with the Mahaśivarātrī, a great Hindu festival, ApEx brings to you a noted European scholar on Sanskrit and Śaivism—the study and practice related to Śiva. Florinda De Simini is an associate professor in Ancient and Medieval History of India at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. A PhD in…
On March 11th I had the pleasure to inaugurate the new series of our Śivadharma Project seminar, with an online talk attended by the members of the project and a few guests. This has been the first occasion to introduce to the two new members of the project the research…
Interview to Florinda De Simini, PI of the Śivadharma Project, by Luca Fortis, free-lance journalist, for the Italian news log "Succede Oggi" Q.: Hai vinto il prestigioso Starting Grant assegnato dal Consiglio Europeo della Ricerca. Me ne parli? A: Si tratta di un finanziamento di un milione e mezzo di euro…
