November 1, 2022 (modified December 15, 2024)
I prepared an index of the Tāntrikābhidhānakośa—subtitled A Dictionary of Technical Terms from Hindu Tantric Literature—in order to add it to my dictionary search tool.
As of now, three volumes of the lexicon have been published, which can be downloaded from various online sources. I indexed them all. To do so, I used the list of terms defined—or scheduled to be defined—in the various volumes. It has disappeared from the website of the Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, but is still available online thanks to archive.org.
While editing this list of terms, I moved terms around in such a way that their order of apparition is the same as in the books. Whenever an entry heading enumerates several terms, I added one index entry for each of them. For instance, the heading kāmya-[mahā-]utsava (vol. 2, p. 89) results in two entries, kāmyotsava and kāmyamahotsava.
The same term can appear in several index entries, because of cross-references and because the second volume includes a corrigenda. Furthermore, the same entry term can also appear several times on the same page, such that the tuple (term, page) cannot be used as a primary key in some relational database without removing duplicates first.
The index is available as a CSV file, encoded in UTF-8 and normalized to NFC. You can download it here. The CSV file contains the following columns:
| # | Name | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | id | Entry id. A monotonically increasing integer, starting at 1. Currently unused. |
| 1 | term | Entry term, in IAST notation. Some terms include capital letters. Does not contain non-alphabetic characters except spaces (U+0020) and hyphens (U+002D). Hyphens only appear at the end of terms, and mark verbs. |
| 2 | volume | Volume number (currently, one of 1, 2 and 3). |
| 3 | page | Page number. A positive integer. To be more accurate, this is the number of the page on which the term appears, if an entry spans several pages. |