| The programme aims, in addition to continuing the critical edition, at examining the historical, political and religious conditions within which the Skandapurana was composed, revised, and disseminated. The programme will be divided into a Core Project and three Sub-projects. The Core Project may be best described by the main title of the programme: A Historical Enquiry Concerning the Composition and Spread of the Skandapurana. It will focus on the political, cultural and religious world which is reflected in the Skandapurana, that is North India in the early medieval period (AD 500--800). Sub-project 1 is a cooperation of Purana experts in the universities of Groningen, Hamburg, Kyoto, and Edinburgh. It aims at bringing out two further volumes of the critical edition of the Skandapurana, IIB and III. Processes of transculturation are the subject of the sub-projects 2 and 3. Sub-project 2 is envisaged as a PhD study in which the history of early Shaivism in Nepal and the reception history of the Skandapurana is investigated. Sub-project 3, also a PhD study, is devised to examine the history of early Shaivism in Daksina Kosala (the present union state Chhattisgarh) to which the Pasupata movement migrated in the 6th century and where we find the earliest epigraphical attestations of the secterian history as told in the Skandapurana. |
