Thursday, March 27, 2025 – 5pm, Foster 103
David Brick, Associate Professor, Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Michigan
This talk will introduce a rare new addition to the corpus of Dharmaśāstra literature: an early unpublished commentary on the Yājñavalkya Dharmaśāstra, a major foundational work of the Hindu legal tradition. Although incomplete (covering just the first 195 verses of Yājñavalkya), this commentary is quite long, occupying 173 palm-leaf folios in the only known manuscript of it. Therefore, it is significant for providing both additional evidence about the history of Hindu law and Indian society more generally and an especially early and erudite example of a Dharmaśāstra commentary, being perhaps the third oldest such commentary to have been discovered. This talk will provide a general introduction to the text; note some of its interesting features; and discuss the ongoing effort to edit and translate it.