[Buddha-l] The state of buddha-l: a brief report

[Richard Hayes]

On Aug 15, 2009, at 8:44 PM, Joanna Kirkpatrick wrote:

> Just for the record, before Richard's comment you quote from,
> yesterday I had already cross-posted Dominik's message that you
> refer to on Buddha-L, followed by my expression of looking
> forward to his English translation of a 17th c ayurvedic text.

Yes, you did. You also mentioned, if memory serves me well, that he is  
currently doing research at the IIAS in Leiden. Alas, I think his  
stint there has come to an end. It was a big disappointment to me to  
find out that Dominik was planning to leave Leiden at the end of July,  
because I was hoping to spend time with him when I get there. I have  
never met him, but we have corresponded since 1989. We have in common  
that we were both trained by B.K. Matilal and we both have a love of  
traditional Sanskrit grammatical treatises. Where the similarity ends,  
of course, is that he really knows what he's talking about, and I just  
dabble in it.

Dominik is not only a first-rate Indologist and founder of the  
Indology list and website, but he is also an excellent computer  
programmer. He helped develop the amazingly useful TeX macros for  
making critical editions, which I have used for years in preparing  
Sanskrit texts for my students to read. It was Dominik who got me  
started in 1990 using TeX and LaTeX for typesetting Sanskrit, and he  
was enormously generous with his time in helping me get started. If  
you're planning to make a critical edition of some text, consider  
using LEDMACS, a set of LaTeX macros that evolved out of the EDMAC  
(editing macros) package that Dominik helped develop for plain TeX.

Time for a digression. (I try to put several in each message.) English  
needs a new set of verbs to cover the phenomenon of "knowing" someone  
whom one has never met in person. I reckon this could be the subject  
matter of a disciple called e-pistemology (the study of those to whom  
we send e-pistles).

Richard