Vol 19, No 3 (2022)

The article presents another part of our Russian translation (with an introduction and commentaries) of the valuable treatise, Dalil al-mutahayyirin (“A Guide for the Perplexed”), by Sayyid Kazim Rashti, one of the founders of the Shaykhi school. The work is dated 1842. The translation is made from the Arabic original, with its two Persian versions taken into account.

The concept of motion in Madhyamaka is treated as empty, i.e. having no referent in reality, for any change including the change of position of an object in space is generated by unenlightened saṃsāric consciousness. The Mādhyamikas’ teaching on motion was compared by some scholars with the views of the ancient Greek philosophical school of Eleatics, who also treated motion as unthinkable. But, while the Eleatic school considered true being to be absolute rest, the Mādhyamikas considered the concept of rest to be as empty as that of motion, for it is correlated with the concept of motion and has no sense without it. According to Nāgārjuna’s argumentation and to his commentator Candrakīrti, motion exists nor in that part of space which has already been traversed neither in that part which has not yet been traversed, and the moving object itself is treated as a point having no spatial dimension and therefore devoid of internal motion. Besides, the Mādhyamikas oppose the moving subject, space and motion itself to one another, considering them to be independent of each other on the level of superficial truth. This leads to logical contradictions and thereby shows that all these concepts are empty. The real essence of motion could be described by words only if we knew it already, and we can understand it only using words and concepts. This forms a vicious logical circle, and the way out of it can be enlightenment and knowledge of the true reality.

The article is devoted to the analysis of written sources covering the bureaucratic procedures of the Safavid era and containing practical instructions on the preparation of official documents. These are, first of all, two well-known manuals on the structure of the state apparatus and its management, Tazkirat al-muluk and Dastur al-muluk, as well as less studied, although extremely informative texts—a hand-written munsha’at manual housed in the Library and Museum of Malek, and a notebook (bayaz) of records about various features of the external design of decrees and letters sent to various persons, including the rulers of India, the Ottoman Empire, the states of Central Asia, the Pope and the monarchs of European states. With the help of these sources, the main types of documents issued by the Safavid divan and the characteristic features of the external design corresponding to each type are identified. They include elements such as the ‘unwan, the tugra and the seal. The types of documents identified on the basis of these sources correspond to the official records of Safavid diplomatics that have survived to this day. The information obtained is used for the analysis of recently identified and published original Persian documents from the RSAAA collections.

The article presents the results of a study of the history of early acquisitions of Japanese manuscripts and woodblock-printed books to the Imperial St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences and by the Asiatic Museum from 1791 to 1864, previously known under the collective name of the “Brosset collection”. The main sources for the study were the catalogs of Chinese and Japanese books by I. Busse (1798), P. Kamensky and S. Lipovtsev (1818), M.F. Brosset (1840, additions until 1864), as well as lists of some acquisitions by the Asiatic Museum and by the Academy of Sciences housed at the Archive of Orientalists of the IOM, RAS, and at the St. Petersburg branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The method of work involved comparing the titles of books mentioned in each of the catalogs or lists with the Japanese manuscripts and woodblock-printed books stored today at the IOM, RAS. As a result, it was found that the “Brosset Collection” was made up of acquisitions from at least nine donors, including valuable collections by Daikokuya Kodayu, J.A. Stutzer, the Russian-American Company, P.L. Schilling and K.I. Maksimovich.