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Stylometry Then and Now: Authorship Verification of Vivekacūḍāmaṇi and Vedāntic Stotras

This paper deals with the authorship of the Vivekacūḍāmaṇi and the seventeen Vedānta Stotras traditionally attributed to Śaṅkara, the author of Brahma- Sūtra-Bhāṣya. Robert Gussner subjected the same works to a statistical stylometric test in the 1970s and concluded that they could not be authored by Śaṅkara. The problem of authorship in this paper is approached from two angles ; the first is a traditional philological approach in accordance with the criteria for determining Śaṅkara’s authorship set by Paul Hacker. Although such an analysis does not yield unequivocal results, the use of some terms and concepts such as saccidānanda and māyā indicate that the works do not belong to Śaṅkara, but were composed at a later period. Another methodology being tested in the paper is a state-of-art stylometric methodology called the General Imposters framework. The paper first describes the methodology itself, then extensively discusses the preparation of the texts, especially the problem of separating the Sanskrit text and resolving the sandhi. The paper then reports on the reliability of the method when applied to the texts of known authors. Finally, the method is tested on Vivekacūḍāmaṇi and the 12 Vedānta Stotras by applying several different parameters which mostly indicate that the works in question cannot be attributed to Śaṅkara. In this way, the General Imposters framework confirms the results that Robert Gussner obtained in the 1970s.

stylometry ; authorship ; Śaṅkara ; Advaita Vedānta ; authorship verification ; imposters method

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