Synopsis
Consisting of about 25,000 verses in Vālmīki's Rāmāyaṇa, the story of Rāma was summarized in 704 verses in eighteen chapters in the Rāmopākhyāna, which comprises chapters 258-275 of the Āraṇyaka Parvan of the great epic Mahābhārata. The story is introduced in chapter 257 and given an afterword in chapter 276 which bring the number of verses in this book to 728. The book includes a thorough introduction to the various dimensions of the story, a descriptive glossary of proper names with references to where they are used in the text, and genealogical trees of Rāma and Rāvaṇa. The present English translation of the Rāmopākhyāna is suitable for secondary school and university students, and adults.
About the Author
Peter Scharf earned his B.A. in philosophy at Wesleyan University and his doctorate in Sanskrit at the University of Pennsylvania, after which he taught Sanskrit at Brown University for 19 years and conducted research on the linguistic and philosophical traditions of India. Since 2011, he has held several visiting professorships and fellowships: Visiting Professor at the Maharishi International University Research Institute, International Blaise Pascal Research Chair at the University of Paris Diderot, Visiting Professor in the Department of Sanskrit Studies at the University of Hyderabad, Visiting Professor of Sanskrit in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Visiting Professor in the Language Technologies Research Center at the International Institute of Information Technology in Hyderabad, Fellow at the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla. He is currently the director of the Sanskrit Library (sanskritlibrary.org), an international digital Sanskrit library which he founded in 2002, and Adjunct Professor at the International Institute of Information Technology in Hyderabad. While his research focuses on the linguistic traditions of India, Vedic Sanskrit, and Indian philosophy, he has devoted considerable attention over the past several years to Sanskrit computational linguistics and building a digital Sanskrit library. He is now developing computational implementations of Pāṇinian grammar and Pāṇinian models of verbal cognition. Scharf is the author or editor of several books and over a hundred articles. His authored books include the first-year Sanskrit textbook Śabdabrahman: a linguistic introduction to Sanskrit; Rāmopākhyāna - the story of Rāma in the Mahābhārata: an independent-study reader in Sanskrit; सङ्क्षिप्तमहाभारतम्-The Mahābhārata in a nutshell: a one-chapter narration in forty-three verses presented as an independent-study reader in Sanskrit; and The denotation of generic terms in ancient Indian philosophy: grammar, Nyāya, and Mīmāṁsā. He recently edited a collection of research papers on Sanskrit linguistics, Vedic and related subjects in two volumes entitled Śabdānugamaḥ Indian linguistic studies in honor of George Cardona. For more information about the author and his publications, see https: //sanskritlibrary.org/cv/profile.html.
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