The Purāṇasby Ludo Rocher

The Purāṇas by Ludo RocherReview by: Walter Harding MaurerJournal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 108, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1988), pp. 633-636Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/603152 .

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REVIEWS OF BOOKS

The Purlnas. By LUDO ROCHER. A History of Indian Litera- ture, ed. Jan Gonda, vol. II, fasc. 3. Wiesbaden: OTTO

HARRASSOWITZ, 1986. Pp. vi, 282. DM 120.

It is a mistake to assert, as some Indologists still occasionally do, that the Puranas are a neglected department of Sanskrit literature. The problem is not that they are neglected or that they are but little studied: it is rather that their number and volume are so dauntingly great as to cause even a hardy investigator to recoil from attempting a close and scientific scrutiny of them. In spite of the challenge the Puranas pose, however, the greater mass of them was studied in detail by Vans Kennedy and Horace Hayman Wilson some 150 years ago and, more or less simultaneously, the popular Bhdgavatapurdna, by Eugene Burnouf. Then, probably in part because among many European scholars the Puranas were felt to be fairly late works, relatively unorigi- nal and hence less deserving of attention, they were accorded but sporadic attention until about 70 years ago. By the time that the first volume of the English translation of Moriz Winternitz' Geschichte der indischen Literatur appeared in 1927, so states Professor Rocher, several Puranas had been edited and some translated. Moreover, the number of scholars devoted to puranic research had considerably grown. With the establishment of the Purana Department of the All- India Kashiraj Trust in the 1950s and the publishing of a journal exclusively concerned with puranic research, the Puranas are no longer a neglected area of Sanskrit literature. In the past two decades, under the impulse of the critical editions of the Mahabhdrata and Rdmdyana, critical editions of several of the Mahapuranas have appeared, e.g., of the Vdmana, Karma and Vardha, intended to supplant the very defective pre-existing editions.

Although negative views concerning the importance of the Puranas have not infrequently been expressed by both West- ern and Indian scholars, in general their value as encyclopedic repositories of every aspect of Hindu culture has more often been stressed, especially by Indians. The great Muslim polymath al-Birifin, it should be remembered, made abundant use of the Puranas in his comprehensive treatise on India, obviously convinced of their value.

The relation of the Puranas to the Veda is presented as a subject of divergent opinion among scholars, some, perhaps the minority, feeling that there is no connection at all, others that the Puranas are a sort of companion to the Veda, scriptures of popular Hinduism. Accordingly, they are often called a Fifth Veda, a rank that may derive support from the term Puranaveda ('Ancient Veda'?), believed by many to

refer originally to a specific book, now lost, which contained Vedic material.

For many years the view was held that the Puranas, as they have come down to us, are sectarian treatises, devoted exclusively to the worship of Visnu or giva, and further that they are relatively modern recasts of earlier non-sectarian works. But they are often found to have mixed affiliation, in spite of their sectarian classification, as exemplified by the Vdmanapurdna, classed as a Vaisnava work as suggested by the title, but in reality a synthesis of Pa5upata Saivism and Bhagavata Vaisnavism. An argument' that is often used to support the theory that the current Puranas are not original is that their contents mostly do not conform to the old definition of a Purana, found in Amarasimha's Ndmalihgd- nusdsana (1.6.5), which states that "a Purana possesses five characteristics" (purdnam paicalaksanam). Apart from the fact that these characteristics are not specified by Amara, but only by his commentators,2 several of the Puranas mention ten characteristics or topics, and the Matsyapura-na goes so far as to include among these topics "anything else that exists on earth" (yac ednyad vidyate bhuvi). Vans Kennedy, while not denying that the five topics are dealt with in most of the Puranas, emphasizes that their principal characteristic is religious instruction.

Another argument that has been presented on behalf of the non-originality of the extant Puranas is the ubiquitous assertion in them that their number is eighteen, as though all of them had existed when any one of them was being composed-although there are sporadic discrepancies in the listings. Practically nothing is known, however, about the origin of these lists, and Professor Rocher concludes, probably rightly, that the prevalence of the number eighteen in the numeration of the Mahapuranas and Upapuranas may scarcely be more than a reflection of the omnipresence of eighteen throughout Indian culture.3

E.g., by M. A. Mehendale, The Purdnas (in History and Culture of the Indian People, vol. 3: The Classical Age), p. 297: "That the present texts hardly represent the original Puranas can be inferred from the disparity between the old definition of the Puranas and their present contents."

2 The five topics mentioned by the commentators are contained in the following 9loka: sargas ca pratisargag ca vatizo manvantardni ca / vadi?(y)anucaritarh caiva puranam paicalaksanam / /

He mentions that there are eighteen parvans in the Mahabhdrata, that the battle of the Kauravas and Pandavas

633



634 Journal of the American Oriental Society 108.4 (1988)

Yet another argument occasionally adduced in support of the non-originality of the extant Puranas is that, where the descriptions of the contents of other Puranas, sometimes included in the Purana lists, do not correspond with the contents of the current editions, it is assumed that these descriptions refer to different, i.e., earlier versions, bearing the same title. This argument, which would seem inherently weak, is far stronger in those instances where the total number of 9lokas is given for the different Puranas and these totals are greatly at variance with those of the present editions.

A final argument, employed especially by R. C. Hazra, is based on quotations from the Puranas in dharma texts: when these quoted passages fail to occur in the present editions, it is assumed that to this degree at least the latter have diverged from the originals.

The dominant view in Purana research, then, harkening back to Wilson, has been that for every Purana as it exists today in MSS or printed editions there must have been an older original Purdna which through the centuries has suf- fered vast changes by the augmentation and diminution of its contents. Curiously enough, this predominant attitude was not shared at all by Vans Kennedy, Wilson's contemporary, who, believing their object to have been exclusively religious instruction, regarded the Puranas as very heterogeneous and haphazard compilations from the very beginning, brought together without system and hence not different today from their former discordant and diffuse state.

The next stage in Purana research was the postulation of a single original Purana, or ur-Purana, from which the originals of the individual Puranas were derived. Early in the twentieth century this idea of a common origin of all the Puranas had become widely accepted and reached its culmination in the comparative method of reconstruction adopted by F. E. Pargiter, subsequently modified and perfected by W. Kirfel, who, by applying the canons of textual criticism, treated the existing Puranas as manuscript copies of an original text, a methodological approach which has had an enormous effect on the recent study of the Purdnas.

In the final section of the Introduction Professor Rocher

points out that according to Indian tradition too, there was

originally only one Purana, a so-called Purdnasamhitd, which, by a process not clearly, or at least not unanimously detailed in the Puranas, divaricated into the eighteen current Puranas in the course of its transmission from one generation of pauranikas to another.

The chapter following this general survey of Purdna scholarship is devoted to a miscellany of considerations concerning the Puranas from the Indian focal point. A good

lasted eighteen days and involved eighteen aksauhinTs (com- plete armies), that the GTta has eighteen adhydyas (p. 34).

deal is said and diversely exemplified regarding the immense liberties taken in the transmission of the Puranas, in sharpest contrast to the perfect fidelity of the Vedic tradition. These liberties involve every aspect of the transmission of these texts, for whose vitiation copyists, editors and translators share responsibility. Many of the translations are wholly unreliable, often being a paraphrase or a mere summary. The particular edition of a Purana employed by a translator is often not identified, and sometimes a translation will, on close inspection, be found to follow a different version of the Purana from that which is printed with it. We may reasonably infer, then, that this state of affairs is ultimately attributable to the fact that the Puranas are not, after all, sacred texts, so that no one in the line of transmission of a Purana need have felt any compunction about the matter of fidelity so long as the spirit of the tradition was preserved. The fluidity of the puranic tradition is in larger measure due also to its being essentially an oral tradition, even to this day, far more subject to change and embellishment than were it a bookish tradition. In the transmittal of the Puranas a major role was played by the siita, an individual of probably mixed caste, but of high rank in the court and a speaker of Sanskrit, who combined in himself the office of charioteer and equerry as well as that of chronicler and bard. Held in high repute for his broad learning, the sata recited from memory, as does the bhdt, the stories of the Puranas as well as the genealogies and eulogies.

In view of the essentially oral character of their transmission, then, it is not surprising that Puranas bearing the same name should diverge from one another, both in minor matters of readings and the wording of verses as well as in the inclusion and exclusion of whole sections and chapters. These discrepancies can be such as to lead to different recensions of the same Purana, which may belong to different areas of the country. Needless to say, these divergences are reflected not only in the MSS but also in the printed editions, and not rarely MSS turn up whose contents are quite different from those of any of the printed editions. It is pointed out by Professor Rocher that, in spite of their being aware of these matters, there has been a general tendency among scholars nevertheless to rely on the printed editions as though they were the standard versions of the Puranas.

It has been habitual to divide the Puranas into Mahapu- ranas and Upapurdnas and to regard the latter as of relatively little importance. In consequence, the Upapurdnas have been greatly neglected. Yet the distinction implied by the prefixes is practically meaningless, as the two kinds of Purdna do not differ materially from one another; nor is their categorization firmly fixed, an Upapurana sometimes appearing in a list of Mahapuranas and vice versa. In fact, the term Mahapurdna appears to be of late origin and, we may suppose, once having been established, all else was classed as Upapurdna.

In addition to these two categories, there are a number of other works which are of distinctly puranic character. Among



Reviews of Books 635

these are the Mahatmyas, whose purpose is to magnify the sanctity or greatness of all manner of things. Many of them claim allegiance to particular Purdnas, or are actually incorporated within them. Some Puranas, on the other hand, are themselves really Mahatmyas, e.g., the Brahmapurana, which is largely a glorification of Utkala (Orissa). Also to be classed with the Puranas are the so-called local Purdnas (sthalapu- rdna), many of which were unfortunately never committed to writing. There are, moreover, the caste-Puranas, which seem to be a sort of extension of the family history or vadi?J- nucarita, one of the alleged five laksanas of a Purdna. Apart from the history of a particular caste, they contain much other information, as exemplified by the Mallapurdna, which, in treating of the Mallas or Jethis of Gujarat, a caste of professional wrestlers, provides information on their prac- tices.

Finally, there are the vernacular Puranas, some converted from Sanskrit originals, others entirely vernacular in origin. They are to be found in all the principal vernaculars and constitute a very voluminous literature. The puranic style of composition travelled also to Further India, the Old Javanese Agastyaparvan, a prose dialog, and the Brahmindapurdna being especially worthy of note.

It is pointed out that the chief difference between individual Puranas is the degree to which extraneous matter is incorporated, in some cases rendering them encyclopedic in their comprehensiveness. While some of this incorporated material is doubtless merely summarized from other works, attempts have been made to determine whether some sections or chapters are actually fragments of otherwise lost texts.

The Puranas have much in common with other branches of Sanskrit literature, especially with the great epics-the Ma- habharata and, to a much lesser extent, the Ramdyana. Many of the episodes, such as that of Sakuntala and the churning of the ocean, occur, though with differences of detail, both in the Mahdbhdrata and the Puranas. Various Puranas contain gltas modeled on the Bhagavadgrti in the Mahdbhdrata, e.g., the ?ivagftd in the Padmapurdna and the I.'varagTtd in the Karmapurdna. Moreover, like most of the Puranas, the Ma- hdbharata begins with the arrival of the sita in the Naimisa forest. The story of the Rdma-yana is told in several of the Puranas. There is also much in common between them and the Dharmagastras, many topics treated in the latter being treated in the former, and the Puranas are often quoted in the commentaries and the dharmanibandhas. Several well-known authors, e.g., Kalidasa and Bana, were familiar with some Purdnas and drew material from them. Among Buddhist texts too, there are traits in common with the Puranas. Thus, the Lalitavistara actually calls itself a Purana, and the Svayam- bhupurana is a Buddhist Mahatmya of sacred places in Nepal.

Jaina literature possesses numerous works with the ele- ment purana in the title, e.g., the HarivariSapurana of Jina- sena, a massive work of the Digambaras, and the Trisas-

tilaksanamahapurdna by yet another Jinasena. Among the Svetambaras is the well-known Trisastisaldkdpurusacarita by Hemacandra-all purana-like works.

It is commonly assumed that the Puranas originally consisted of a kernel upon which were engrafted over the centuries various extraneous materials, portions of which may have been independent works. Some of these passages have been studied comparatively, not only within the Pura- nas, but with similar matter in non-puranic works. But Professor Rocher suggests that the term Purana was applied originally not only to this so-called kernel (which may have consisted of the five characteristics or pahca laksandni), but also to each engrafted story. Each, then, was a Purana in its own right, and only later did this term come to be used of a group or collection of stories. By comparing these short Puranas, which he calls mini-Puranas, many details stem- ming from the defective transmission of the MSS can be improved and corrected, but he expresses caution concerning the limitations of this process. Because of the essentially oral tradition whereby the Puranas have been transmitted by bards or storytellers, it is questionable whether it is feasible to apply to them the canons of textual criticism, as has been done with the Mahabhdrata and Rarmyana.

It follows that dating the Puranas is a hazardous task, and Professor Rocher, after a summary discussion of the various views as to when they originated, commencing with Wilson's opinion that they are all post-garnkara, concludes that it is not possible to assign a date to any Purana as a whole.

The Puranas do not teach a single coherent religion, but rather reflect an immense variety of trends and attitudes. Though Visnu and giva are their dominant figures, Visnu is pre-eminent in the so-called Mahapuranas. But worship of Brahma too, is not by any means absent, the Puskarakhanda of the Padmapurdna being chiefly devoted to his worship. Although innumerable avatdras or incarnations of Visnu are mentioned, they are gradually reduced to ten and are con- stantly alluded to, their purpose being to restore the pre- ponderance of good over evil. Of all the avatdras that of Krsna is most often referred to, though worship of his consort Radha seems to be found only in the "late" Puranas.

One reason for the lesser eminence of giva is very likely his role as destroyer rather than preserver of the universe. Although avataras of giva are also mentioned, they are dealt with far less prominently than those of Visnu. Siva's consort Parvati, unlike Visnu's, plays a major role, and as his ?akti is often more powerful than giva himself. Of giva's two sons, Skanda (or Karttikeya) and Ganega, the former, whose worship is intrinsic to gaivism, is accorded far greater attention-the bulkiest of all the Puranas bearing his name- although his prominence therein is said not to be greater than in several other Puranas. Apart from the two Ganapatya Puranas, where he is, of course, elevated to the highest rank, Ganega's position elsewhere is far less dominant.



636 Journal of the American Oriental Society 108.4 (1988)

Endless controversy, often charged with emotion, has re- volved around the value of the dynastic lists in some Puranas as valid historical documents. Their first champion was the British historian Vincent A. Smith, who, while admitting their faults, felt that their compilers had access to authoritative sources, a view he expressed particularly with regard to the lists of the later Andhra kings. Much more vigorous and vociferous in his defense of the historicity of these dynastic lists was Pargiter, who, through the conviction of his articles and books, quickly gained numerous adherents, especially among Indian scholars. Though there are many reputable scholars who disparage the Puranas for historical purposes, the Puranas have been increasingly used in the reconstruction of Indian history with varying degrees of caution and critical acumen.

Apart from this questionable historical aspect, the Pura- nas are an extremely valuable source of detailed information on the Indian cyclical system of time. This complex system, which plays so important a role in the cosmogony of the Puranas, is founded, on the one hand, upon the four yugas or ages, named after the throws in the game of dice, in a descending order of duration and perfection, and, on the other, somewhat incongruously with the former, upon the fourteen manvantaras or intervals of a Manu. The whole system is dominated by concepts of the Samkhya darsana.

Another view of Pargiter, which drew considerable oppo- sition, even from those who had become adherents of his pronouncements on the Puranas as historical sources, was that they were the product of the ksatriya class, that is, that they grew up among court bards and priests, independently of brahmanical literature. Nevertheless, this theory was accepted or partially so by several scholars. Still further controversy was aroused by Pargiter's proposition that they were originally composed in Prakrit.

Finally, the Puranas are an important source for early Indian ideas of cosmography and geography. A brief outline is given of the puranic conception of the universe-which is oviform, with the earth (bhirloka) in the center and seven celestial planes above and seven pdtdlas and seven narakas below. In the center of the earth is the continent of Jambu- dvipa, a circular mass of land surrounded by a series of seven circular continents separated from one another by oceans. Jambudvipa is in turn divided into seven parts or varsas by mountain ranges running from west to east. The southernmost area, separated on the north by the Himavat range, is called Bharata(varsa), viz., India-many peoples, rivers, mountains and cities of which are Vientioned, though not all have been successfully identified.

Such in outline, then, are the principal matters treated in Part I. Part II is entirely given to an alphabetical listing of all the known Maha- and Upapuranas, including also those of which only the titles are known. Far from being a mere skeletal catalog, this list is in some ways the heart of the

whole work, as under each entry are presented not only a discussion of the general content and other particulars of the Purana, but also the necessary bibliographic details of the various editions and translations, as well as the existing literature on it, whether studies of the whole or part or some aspect thereof. The value of this catalog is really inestimable, both as a survey of the whole primary and secondary literature and also as a means of gathering the basic material regarding a particular Purana. Following this alphabetical list there is a very general bibliography of those titles to which frequent reference is made in the footnotes.

Without indulging in any exaggeration one may charac- terize this comprehensive work by Professor Rocher as an embodiment of scientific and meticulous scholarship- perhaps an avatara would be a more appropriate term in this context. Even the cursory reader will be convinced that Professor Rocher has read with close scrutiny every one of the Puranas, and studied its bewildering array of variant forms, whether in printed editions or MSS-and even though that undertaking were sufficient to render pale the most ardent investigator-that he has also read and digested the whole of the vast literature that has grown up about the Puranas during the past 150 years or so. Those who like abundant footnotes will not be disappointed: there is a veritable pleasure-garden of them on every page. The im- pression is ubiquitous that nothing is left yet to be explored, not the smallest point undocumented.

WALTER HARDING MAURER

UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII AT MANOA

Mdlushdhi and Rdjuld: A Ballad from Kumdain (India) as sung by Gopi Dds. By KONRAD MEISSNER. 3 vols. Wiesbaden: OTTO HARRASSOWITZ, 1987. Pp. lii + 289 + map. DM 124.

The folk ballad of Malushah1, a king of the Katyur dy- nasty, and Rajula, daughter of the trader Sunapati Shauk and his wife Gangula, is well-known in the regions of Kumaun and Garhwal of modern-day Uttar Pradesh. The story has been retold in Hindi and English versions. Ac- cording to Konrad Meissner, however, only one printed version of the text-a truncated version of some 49 pages by Dr. Krisnanand Jo1i-has been published in the original Kumauni.

Anyone interested in interpreting the folklore of Kumaun will be greatly indebted therefore to Meissner for his efforts in making available an excellent and thorough edition of the Malushah1 and Rajula ballad. The task has not been easy. The ballad does not exist in any authoritative written form. Detailed knowledge of the poem has been restricted to a



Documents

The Purāṇasby Ludo Rocher