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IN PURSUIT OF THE ORIGINAL: THE METHOD OF TEXTUAL SCHOLARSHIP AND THE PROBLEM OF ITS APPLICATION TO CANONICAL STUDIES. A CASE STUDY OF THE MONGOLIAN TRANSLATION OF THE PRATIMOKSASUTRA Ekaterina Sobkovyak Bern University, Institute for the Science of Religion and Central Asian Studies, Bern Introduction The academic research on the Mongolian Kanjur, which is a vast collection of Buddhist sacred texts translated predominantly from Tibetan, has been conducted by European scholars within the framework of canonical studies. The European scholarly tradition of canonical studies originated from Biblical studies, and evolved into a fully-fledged and highly productive discipline that, for a certain time, set the tone for the development of the related branches of the humanities. The terminological, as well as the theoretical-methodological, apparatus of Biblical studies has been readily adopted by scholars contributing to canonical studies, which resulted in the following: (1) the term ‘canon’, which in Christian culture and within the European scientific paradigm was initially used as a definition of Christian scripture, i.e., the Holy Bible, started to be applied to sacred religious texts belonging to different cultural traditions;' (2) the traditional methods of Biblical studies, such as classical and comparative philology, together with historical textual criticism, were used extensively in the investigation of the abovementioned texts, which appeared to belong to the same generic category as the Bible and, thus, were considered to be characterized by the same typological features. ! The publication of the 50-volume “Sacred Books of the East” series, edited by Max Müller, might be one of the most influential scholarly enterprises that determined for decades the understanding of the concept ofcanon within the Western academic community. Müller set the theoretical basis for the project in a series of lectures delivered in 1870 atthe Royal Society in London and in 1888 at the University of Glasgow. He applied the concept of canon not as a specialized term reserved exclusively to designate the Bible, but as a generic category. He simultaneously put the term into a synonymic relationship with expressions such as ‘religious books’, ‘canonical books’, ‘sacred books’, ‘sacred writings’, or ‘scripture’, taking, unfortunately, no pains either to explain the exact meaning of these expressions or to distinguish between them. Although, in his works, Miiller tackled the problem of distinguishing between texts that can be recognized as canonical and those that cannot, he never actually questioned the existence of the phenomenon itself, as well as its generic nature; see Miiller, Max: /ntroduction to the science of religion. Longmans, Green and CO, Oxford 1882; Miiller, Max: Natural religion. Longmans, Green and CO, London [etc.] 1907. This taking for granted the canon as a generic category was common in scholarly discourse up until the second part of the twentieth century. 193
