Christèle Barois is a doctoral student at the Ecole pratique des hautes études. Having completed work on her thesis, "The Vāyavīyasaṃhitā. Śaiva doctrine and rituals in Purāṇic context", prepared under the guidance of Mrs. Lyne Bansat-Boudon, she is visiting the EFEO Centre in Pondicherry from November to December 2012 on a scholarship from the EFEO to further her study of the transmission and ritual installation of the manuscript in the Śaivasiddhānta tradition. This research, started in 2004, is based on a corpus of medieval texts that describe rites in which the manuscript is worshipped in the same way as a representation of the deity. These texts contain valuable information that belongs to the domain of manuscriptology (physical descriptions of manuscripts, technics of writing, etc.) in a sectarian context, strictly related to the transmission from master to disciple.

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