Peter Pasedach is a research associate at the department for Indology and Tibetology of Hamburg University. He is a Sanskritist specialising in court poetry, on which he leads a DFG-funded project, and yoga-related texts. He has taught Sanskrit and related topics in Hamburg, Göttingen and Leiden. He is actively involved in the building up of the focus Yoga Studies at Hamburg University.
Peter Pasedach completed his PhD in 2018 with a dissertation on the sixth canto of the Haravijaya, the major part of which is a philosophical ode to Śiva, sung to him by personified Spring, praising him as the real nature of the highest reality of a wide diversity of philosophical and theological systems of the time. He critically edited this canto, together with its available commentaries, basing himself on manuscript material dating back up to the 12th century which he collected on a number of research trips to India. Currently the primary focus of his work is on the Kapphiṇābhyudaya, a mahākāvya based on a Buddhist plot, but with śaivaite elements. Having recently got access to copies kept in Beijing of the single known manuscript of any commentary on it, which has survived in Tibet, he is now working on a DFG-funded project on these two epic poems.
In Yoga, he is working on a new digital critical edition of the Śivasaṃhitā, and preparing a project on Vācaspatimiśra’s Tattvavaiśāradī on the Pātañjalayogaśāstra. In his Sanskrit literature courses he regularly reads yoga-related texts.