The Bhāṭṭa School of Benares

Author(s):  
Christopher T. Fleming

This chapter examines the reception of Dāyabhāga-centred, Gauḍa jurisprudence and Navya-Nyāya theories of ownership in the Dharmaśāstra and Mīmāṃsā writings of the Bhaṭṭa family of Mahārāṣṭrian Deśastha brāhmaṇas who led the southern (Dākṣinātya) community of paṇḍitas in Vārāṇasī between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Bhaṭṭas’ polemic against the Navadvīpan, Navya-Nyāya-inflected school of jurisprudence marks a watershed moment when the Mitākṣarā and its Mīmāṃsā-derived theory of ownership were incorporated into a broader, distinctively southern scale of Dharmaśāstra texts that framed the Mitākṣarā/Dāyabhāga divide as a debate between Mīmāṃsā and Navya-Nyāya theories of property. By the close of the seventeenth century, one could speak of two complex, comprehensive schools of Dharmaśāstric thought, inflected by Mīmāṃsā and Navya-Nyāya philosophy, centred around pedagogical networks in Vārāṇasī and Navadvīpa, taking paradigmatically divergent approaches to the problem of inheritance, and emanating from commentarial literature on the Mitākṣarā and Dāyabhāga respectively.

1963 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jozef Cohen
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-253
Author(s):  
Wu Huiyi ◽  
Zheng Cheng

The Beitang Collection, heritage of a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit library in Beijing now housed in the National Library of China, contains an incomplete copy of Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s commentary on an Italian edition of Pedanius Dioscorides's De materia medica (1568) bearing extensive annotations in Chinese. Two hundred odd plant and animal names in a northern Chinese patois were recorded alongside illustrations, creating a rare record of seventeenth-century Chinese folk knowledge and of Sino-Western interaction in the field of natural history. Based on close analysis of the annotations and other contemporary sources, we argue that the annotations were probably made in Beijing by one or more Chinese low-level literati and Jesuit missionaries during the first two decades of the seventeenth century. We also conclude that the annotations were most likely directed at a Chinese audience, to whom the Jesuits intended to illustrate European craftsmanship using Mattioli’s images. This document probably constitutes the earliest known evidence of Jesuits' attempts at transmitting the art of European natural history drawings to China.


2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 208-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Edgington

By an analysis of extensive and detailed annotations in copies of Thomas Johnson's Mercurius botanicus (1634) and Mercurii botanici, pars altera (1641) held in the library of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the probable author is identified as William Bincks, an apprentice apothecary of Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey. Through Elias Ashmole, a friend of Bincks' master Thomas Agar, a link is established with the probable original owner, John Watlington of Reading, botanist and apothecary, and colleague of Thomas Johnson. The route by which the book ended up in the hands of Thomas Wilson, a journeyman copyist of Leeds, is suggested. Plants growing near Kingston-upon-Thames in the late seventeenth century, recorded in manuscript, are noted, many being first records for the county of Surrey.


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