4 ms·

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/rom

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.

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.