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> There’s yet another problem: the sheer volume of texts. When it comes to Indian and Buddhist traditions, for example, the number of ancient manuscripts that h

> There’s yet another problem: the sheer volume of texts. When it comes to Indian and Buddhist traditions, for example, the number of ancient manuscripts that have survived but are yet to be studied has been estimated at around 10m, though Friedrich says he has seen estimates as high as 30m. There simply aren’t enough scholars with the right expertise, including the necessary language skills, to do the work. I was worried a lot about this during my PhD. Well-cited papers were just the "tip of the iceberg". I did some fairly thorough searches and came across quite a few papers in my field that were important in my view and unfortunately overlooked. The problem doesn't seem intractable to me. More researchers should spend some time searching the literature where they think no one else did. If a certain percentage of people did this, then I think it would benefit everyone including those who don't do particularly deep searches.

kossTKR 4y ago
First off i don't understand how this 10-30k number is physically or culturally possible. ( i admit my tired brain thought million first - confusing british/roman systems! ) Also having read sporadically through various dzogchen texts on "dream yoga" which is an older mapping and superset of what we today call lucid dreaming i'm positive that there could be an incredible amount of "useful knowledge" of various "weirder" aspects and concepts of consciousness and dreams waiting for us in some of those texts. Exciting!
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  Are you sure it's thousand? "m" is the common British abbreviation for million, while "M" would be the Roman abbreviation for a thousand. Plus, frankly only 10,000 Indian manuscripts seems way too low. India is huge, and has been literate for thousands of years.
- svat 4y ago
  The number is indeed millions, not thousands! Note that it's the number of manuscripts, not the number of distinct works. Many of the manuscripts would be copies of the same popular works (people preserve whatever's most useful), but there is a long tail of works each preserved in very few manuscripts. The 30-million estimate has been arrived at independently by several people AFAIK, but one of them is David Pingree, and look at e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=pingree+estimate+million+manuscripts https://www.google.com/search?q=pingree+estimate+million+man... for several sources. In particular, this paper by M. D. Srinivas [1] gives several independent estimates of the number of manuscripts, all in millions. There have been 4.2 million manuscripts actually documented already (as of 2019 when the paper was written), and this paper's estimate is that "10 million is indeed a reasonable estimate for the number of Indian manuscripts that are extant […] the number of manuscripts in Sanskrit can be expected to be of the order of 8 million." And although this post is about literature, that paper is about Indian astronomy&mathematics, which is perhaps representative: > We find that of the estimated 9,000 source-works of Indian Astronomy and Mathematics (which are preserved in around 30,000 manuscripts), only about 150 texts were edited, and just 30 texts translated during 1800-1947. During 1948-2019, there has been significant progress and another about 300 texts have been edited and 66 texts translated, many of them with detailed explanatory notes. Thus, only about 450 (or 5% of the estimated 9000 source-texts available) have been edited and published so far; even among the published works, only 96 texts have been seriously studied via translations and explanations with a view to bring out their technical (mathematical-astronomical) content. [1]: https://insa.nic.in/writereaddata/UpLoadedFiles/IJHS/Vol54_3_2019__Art01.pdf https://insa.nic.in/writereaddata/UpLoadedFiles/IJHS/Vol54_3... and https://www.esamskriti.com/essays/pdf/19%20The%20Untapped%20Wealth%20of%20Manuscripts%20on%20Indian%20Astronomy%20and%20Mathematics.pdf https://www.esamskriti.com/essays/pdf/19%20The%20Untapped%20... = ttps://archive.org/details/srinivas2019/page/n1/mode/2up
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Do you have any sense of how long these works are? It would be challenging for a single human to read 10,000 books in a lifetime, say, of 85 years, beginning at age 5. That would be 125 books per year, or nearly 2.5 per week. Every week, every year, for life. If these were shorter works --- the equivalent of pamphlets or essays (or more likely: epic poems), of a few pages each, that might be more viable. That said, 10 million works might represent a cultural accumulation, but would be difficult to describe as a cultural tradition, simply on the basis that at any one time, any person could know at best a small fraction of the works.
    - boomboomsubban 4y ago
      >Do you have any sense of how long these works are? While I have no clue on these specific works, I tend to use things like books of the Bible as a benchmark. Other works have similar length "books," like Caesar's "Gallic War" is split into 8 books of 5000 to 15000 words each or Aristotle wrote 400 books of about a thousand lines each. Maybe some are significantly longer, but I'd assume the majority are that length. Keeping longer works in one piece for centuries is incredibly challenging.
    - svat 4y ago
      The linked paper quotes "2.96 lakhs manuscripts (2.61 Crore Pages)" which works out to an average of about 88 pages per manuscript. I imagine one "page" (folio) of a (usually) palm-leaf manuscript is probably about half a printed page's worth of material, so maybe each manuscript on average is the equivalent of a 50-page printed book. (Again, note that 10 or 30 million manuscripts is probably fewer works: the quoted 30000 manuscripts <-> 9000 works relationship for astronomy/mathematics may not hold across the entire manuscript corpus. Also, for comparison, both the Library of Congress and the British Library seem to have on the order of tens of millions of books, and Harvard's massive Widener Library has 3.5 million books.) I'm not sure I understand the remark about "a cultural tradition": surely it's just as much the case for "Western culture", or even say "French culture", that a given person could have read only a small fraction of the works. It does not mean there isn't a French tradition or whatever. The intended meaning is just that from the (pre-modern) Indian "world" or "sphere" or whatever, there are those many manuscripts, many of them uncatalogued, let alone studied/digitized/edited/published/translated.
klodolph 4y ago
There's a lot that I would say is troubling about this number. Psychotherapists have been prescribing mindfulness-based interventions at increasing rates in the past few decades. You can't escape mindfulness, you'll hear about it everywhere you go. Yet, most of the literature about mindfulness or meditation and its impact on health is written in Sanskrit. Some of it is translated, and some of the translations make their way into English-language papers in psychotherapy or psychology journals, but it's such a small amount. Rather that dig through Buddhist texts, we have created our own, new set of practices called "mindfulness meditation", prescribing it left and right, going on vipassana retreats, reading books on transcendental meditation, etc. Mindfulness meditation is a western invention assembled out of pieces, taken out of context, of Buddhist and other traditions. Transcendental meditation was invented by a yogi in the 1950s. To be clear, I'm not talking about how recent these are in order to imply that older traditions are better--but older practices are better studied and we don't read about the older practices. You can find a ton of studies in western medical journals about the benefits of various MBIs, but these studies, taken as a whole, are somewhat troubling. One troubling aspect is that many of the benefits are based on data which is self-reported, and the nature of questions in a self-reported study is limited. This is normal and expected in these kinds of studies, but it gives us a very narrow selection of observations about the effects of MBIs, and these questions / observations are often selected in order to prove positive effects--researchers, of course, want to prove positive effects of MBIs. Meanwhile, there's two millenia of scholarly work, including descriptions of negative outcomes from meditation--what those negative outcomes were and how to structure the practice of meditation to prevent those negative outcomes--but these scholarly works are, again, not written in English and you hardly ever see literature reviews of these works in western medical journals. Anyway. As a metaphor, it seems like we're exploring a continent, and there are people already living here, but we're ignoring them because they speak Sanskrit, and some of us are getting hurt. It's not even really the ancient texts, but modern texts, even modern texts with English translations.
- CiceroCiceronis 4y ago
  This sounds like a fascinating unexplored area. Are there any English texts (books/journals/theses) exploring this? I’d love to look into what limited analysis of this large reserve of literature does exist in English.

kossTKR 4y ago

First off i don't understand how this 10-30k number is physically or culturally possible. ( i admit my tired brain thought million first - confusing british/roman systems! ) Also having read sporadically through various dzogchen texts on "dream yoga" which is an older mapping and superset of what we today call lucid dreaming i'm positive that there could be an incredible amount of "useful knowledge" of various "weirder" aspects and concepts of consciousness and dreams waiting for us in some of those texts. Exciting!

boomboomsubban 4y ago
Are you sure it's thousand? "m" is the common British abbreviation for million, while "M" would be the Roman abbreviation for a thousand. Plus, frankly only 10,000 Indian manuscripts seems way too low. India is huge, and has been literate for thousands of years.
svat 4y ago
The number is indeed millions, not thousands! Note that it's the number of manuscripts, not the number of distinct works. Many of the manuscripts would be copies of the same popular works (people preserve whatever's most useful), but there is a long tail of works each preserved in very few manuscripts. The 30-million estimate has been arrived at independently by several people AFAIK, but one of them is David Pingree, and look at e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=pingree+estimate+million+manuscripts https://www.google.com/search?q=pingree+estimate+million+man... for several sources. In particular, this paper by M. D. Srinivas [1] gives several independent estimates of the number of manuscripts, all in millions. There have been 4.2 million manuscripts actually documented already (as of 2019 when the paper was written), and this paper's estimate is that "10 million is indeed a reasonable estimate for the number of Indian manuscripts that are extant […] the number of manuscripts in Sanskrit can be expected to be of the order of 8 million." And although this post is about literature, that paper is about Indian astronomy&mathematics, which is perhaps representative: > We find that of the estimated 9,000 source-works of Indian Astronomy and Mathematics (which are preserved in around 30,000 manuscripts), only about 150 texts were edited, and just 30 texts translated during 1800-1947. During 1948-2019, there has been significant progress and another about 300 texts have been edited and 66 texts translated, many of them with detailed explanatory notes. Thus, only about 450 (or 5% of the estimated 9000 source-texts available) have been edited and published so far; even among the published works, only 96 texts have been seriously studied via translations and explanations with a view to bring out their technical (mathematical-astronomical) content. [1]: https://insa.nic.in/writereaddata/UpLoadedFiles/IJHS/Vol54_3_2019__Art01.pdf https://insa.nic.in/writereaddata/UpLoadedFiles/IJHS/Vol54_3... and https://www.esamskriti.com/essays/pdf/19%20The%20Untapped%20Wealth%20of%20Manuscripts%20on%20Indian%20Astronomy%20and%20Mathematics.pdf https://www.esamskriti.com/essays/pdf/19%20The%20Untapped%20... = ttps://archive.org/details/srinivas2019/page/n1/mode/2up
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Do you have any sense of how long these works are? It would be challenging for a single human to read 10,000 books in a lifetime, say, of 85 years, beginning at age 5. That would be 125 books per year, or nearly 2.5 per week. Every week, every year, for life. If these were shorter works --- the equivalent of pamphlets or essays (or more likely: epic poems), of a few pages each, that might be more viable. That said, 10 million works might represent a cultural accumulation, but would be difficult to describe as a cultural tradition, simply on the basis that at any one time, any person could know at best a small fraction of the works.
  - boomboomsubban 4y ago
    >Do you have any sense of how long these works are? While I have no clue on these specific works, I tend to use things like books of the Bible as a benchmark. Other works have similar length "books," like Caesar's "Gallic War" is split into 8 books of 5000 to 15000 words each or Aristotle wrote 400 books of about a thousand lines each. Maybe some are significantly longer, but I'd assume the majority are that length. Keeping longer works in one piece for centuries is incredibly challenging.
  - svat 4y ago
    The linked paper quotes "2.96 lakhs manuscripts (2.61 Crore Pages)" which works out to an average of about 88 pages per manuscript. I imagine one "page" (folio) of a (usually) palm-leaf manuscript is probably about half a printed page's worth of material, so maybe each manuscript on average is the equivalent of a 50-page printed book. (Again, note that 10 or 30 million manuscripts is probably fewer works: the quoted 30000 manuscripts <-> 9000 works relationship for astronomy/mathematics may not hold across the entire manuscript corpus. Also, for comparison, both the Library of Congress and the British Library seem to have on the order of tens of millions of books, and Harvard's massive Widener Library has 3.5 million books.) I'm not sure I understand the remark about "a cultural tradition": surely it's just as much the case for "Western culture", or even say "French culture", that a given person could have read only a small fraction of the works. It does not mean there isn't a French tradition or whatever. The intended meaning is just that from the (pre-modern) Indian "world" or "sphere" or whatever, there are those many manuscripts, many of them uncatalogued, let alone studied/digitized/edited/published/translated.

klodolph 4y ago

There's a lot that I would say is troubling about this number. Psychotherapists have been prescribing mindfulness-based interventions at increasing rates in the past few decades. You can't escape mindfulness, you'll hear about it everywhere you go. Yet, most of the literature about mindfulness or meditation and its impact on health is written in Sanskrit. Some of it is translated, and some of the translations make their way into English-language papers in psychotherapy or psychology journals, but it's such a small amount. Rather that dig through Buddhist texts, we have created our own, new set of practices called "mindfulness meditation", prescribing it left and right, going on vipassana retreats, reading books on transcendental meditation, etc. Mindfulness meditation is a western invention assembled out of pieces, taken out of context, of Buddhist and other traditions. Transcendental meditation was invented by a yogi in the 1950s. To be clear, I'm not talking about how recent these are in order to imply that older traditions are better--but older practices are better studied and we don't read about the older practices. You can find a ton of studies in western medical journals about the benefits of various MBIs, but these studies, taken as a whole, are somewhat troubling. One troubling aspect is that many of the benefits are based on data which is self-reported, and the nature of questions in a self-reported study is limited. This is normal and expected in these kinds of studies, but it gives us a very narrow selection of observations about the effects of MBIs, and these questions / observations are often selected in order to prove positive effects--researchers, of course, want to prove positive effects of MBIs. Meanwhile, there's two millenia of scholarly work, including descriptions of negative outcomes from meditation--what those negative outcomes were and how to structure the practice of meditation to prevent those negative outcomes--but these scholarly works are, again, not written in English and you hardly ever see literature reviews of these works in western medical journals. Anyway. As a metaphor, it seems like we're exploring a continent, and there are people already living here, but we're ignoring them because they speak Sanskrit, and some of us are getting hurt. It's not even really the ancient texts, but modern texts, even modern texts with English translations.

CiceroCiceronis 4y ago
This sounds like a fascinating unexplored area. Are there any English texts (books/journals/theses) exploring this? I’d love to look into what limited analysis of this large reserve of literature does exist in English.