When one works on the intellectual history of the Sanskrit cosmopolis*, by contrast, one still needs to map the entire territory, whose extension still escapes us. Very few elements of the landscape have been fixated, and might still need to be re-assessed.

What are the mountains, main cities as well as rivers, bridges, routes that we would need to fix on the map? Key authors, key theories, key schools, as well as languages and manners of communication and how they worked (public debates? where? how?).
I mentioned authors before schools because for decades intellectual historians looking at the Sanskrit cosmopolis emphasized, and often overemphasized the role of schools at the expense of the fundamental role of individual thinkers, thus risking to oversee their individual contributions and to flatten historical developments, as if nothing had changed in astronomy or philosophy for centuries. This hermeneutic mistake is due to the fact that while the norm in Europe and North America after Descartes and the Enlightenment has been increasingly to highlight novelty, originality is constantly understated in the Sanskrit cosmopolis. It is not socially acceptable to claim to be novel and original in the Sanskrit world, just like it is not acceptable to be just “continuing a project” in a grant application in Europe or North America.
Still, schools are often the departure point for any investigation, since they give one a first basic understanding of the landscape. How does this exactly work?
For instance, we know that the Vedānta systems were a major player in the intellectual arena, with all other religious and philosophical schools having to face them, in some form of the other. However, it is not at all clear which schools within Vedānta were broadly influential, where within South Asia, and in which languages. Michael Allen, among others, worked extensively on Advaita Vedānta in Hindī sources, but were they read also by Sanskrit authors and did the latter react to them? Were Hindī texts on Vedānta read only in the Gangetic valley or throughout the Indian subcontinent? The same questions should be investigated with regard to the other schools of Vedānta (Viśiṣṭādvaita, Dvaita, Śaivādvaita…), the other vernacular languages they interacted with (respectively: Tamil and Maṇipravāḷam, Kannaḍa…), and the regions of the Indian subcontinent they originated in. And this is just about Vedānta schools.
Similarly, we still have to understand which other schools entered into a debate with philosophy and among each other and which interdisciplinary debates took place. Scholars of European intellectual history know how Kepler was influenced by Platonism and how Galileo influenced the development of philosophy. What happened in the Sanskrit cosmopolis?
Dagmar Wujastyk recently focused on the intersection of medicine (āyurveda) alchemy (rasaśāstra) and yoga. Which other disciplines were in a constant dialogue? Who read mathematical and astronomical texts, for instance? It is clear, because many texts themselves often repeat it, that Mīmāṃsā, Nyāya and Vyākaraṇa (hermeneutics, logic and grammar) were considered a sort of basic trivium, to be known by every learned person. But the very exclusion of Vedānta from the trivium (it cannot be considered to be included in “Mīmāṃsā” unless in the Viśiṣṭādvaita self-interpretation) shows that the trivium is only the starting point of one’s instruction and is not at all exhaustive. And we have not even started to look at many disciplines, from music to rhetorics.

One might wonder whether it is not enough to look at reports by today’s or yesterday’s Sanskrit intellectuals themselves in order to know what is worth reading and why. However, as discussed above, such reports would not boast about innovations and main breakthroughs. Sanskrit philosophy (and the same probably applies to Sanskrit mathematics etc.) is primarily commentarial. That is, authors presuppose a basic shared background knowledge and innovate while engaging with it rather than imagining to be pioneers in a new world of ideas. In a commentarial philosophy, innovations are concealed and breakthroughs are present, but not emphasised. Hence, one needs a lot of background knowledge to recognise them.

I would like to map the territory to realise who was studying what, where and how. How can this be done? The main obstacle is the amount of unpublished material, literally millions of manuscripts that still remain to be read, edited, translated and studied (I am relying on David Pingree’s estimate). Editing and translating them all requires a multi-generational effort of hundreds of people. However, a quick survey of them, ideally through an enhanced ORC technology, would enable scholars to figure out which languages were used, which theories and topics were debated, which authors were mentioned, and who was replying to whom.

This approach will remind some readers of the distant reading proposed by Franco Moretti. I am personally a trained philologist and a spokesperson for close reading. However, moving back and forth between the two methods seems to be the most productive methodology if the purpose is mapping an unknown territory. Close reading alone will keep one busy for decades and will not enable one to start the hermeneutic circle through which one’s knowledge of the situation of communication helps one better understanding even the content of the text one is closely focusing on. As hinted at above, this is particularly crucial in the case of a commentarial philosophy, where one needs to be able to master a lot of the author’s background in order to evaluate his contribution.

*As discussed several times elsewhere, I use “Sanskrit philosophy” or “Sanskrit intellectual history” as a short term for “philosophy in a cosmopolis in which Sanskrit was the dominant language of culture and everyone had to come to terms with it”, as with the use of “philosophy in the Islamic world”, that includes also thinkers part of the Islamic world but who were not themselves Muslims.

(The above are just quick notes. Any feedback is welcome!)

In Sanskrit intellectual history there is not a single word for “commentary” and several words focus on different aspects (`bhāṣya’ for an extensive commentary spelling out aphorisms (MBh, ŚBh, ŚrīBh…), `vyākhya’ or `vyākhyāna’ literally meaning `explanation’ and often used as a synonym of bhāṣya when writing a subcommentary thereon, `vārttika’ originally for a concise commentary in aphoristic form (Kātyayana’s V), later for texts encompassing such form (NV), or written in verses (ŚV) or encompassing verses (PV, TV), `ṭīkā’ for a subcommentary (Bṛ, NVVTṬ…), `ṭīppaṇī’ for a commentary on only specific points here and there and so on, please read more in Preisendanz 2008 and Ganeri 2010). These plurality of words suggests (like the proverbial case of the many words for ‘snow’ in the Inuits’ language) a long familiarity with the practice of commenting, seen as entailing many different approaches to a text (or texts). (Btw: I am not at all claiming that this is unique to the Sanskrit world, don’t start telling me about many Latin words from glossa onwards).

Typically, these texts tend to focus either on the single text they are commenting on or on it together with the one this was, in turn, a commentary thereon (for instance, Vācaspati’s commentary on the NV, taking into account also the NBh and the NS). Another characteristic of such commentaries is that they will explicitly refer to texts of opposing schools, whereas they will just silently reuse texts of their own school, since they feel them as part of their own history, immediately recognisable to themselves and their audience.

Which kinds of texts would one comment upon?
1. In the standard case in philosophy, texts of one’s own school; but also
2. Authoritative (usually religious) texts that did not belong to one’s own tradition, but that one wanted to gain for one’s own tradition (for instance, Abhinavagupta’s commentary on the Paratriṃśikā).

What is the role of commentary in Sanskrit philosophy? It is the standard way of writing philosophy. There was a small number of aphoristic texts which did not present them as commentaries (but which often evoke other views and quote other authors), and starting possibly with Maṇḍana (8th c.) some monographs were written on specific topics, however, the practice of commentaries remained the standard and most common way of doing philosophy, enabling one to write about many topics. A common misunderstanding to be erased is therefore the equation of commentaries with non-original and pedantic work. This was most of the time not the case with philosophical commentaries.

However, the circumstances change with time (as to be expected) and if we look at commentaries post 13th c. the situation looks different.
I will focus on especially two aspects:

1. 1. the relation between text and commentary
2. 2. the relation between commentary and its sources

Concerning 1., many commentaries become increasingly not just about a single text (or a sequence of texts), but interact more with a network of texts (as I have discussed elsewhere in the case of Veṅkaṭanātha’s Seśvaramīmāṃsā, see Freschi 2018).
A very noteworthy case is that of the relation between the Advaitasiddhi and the Nyāyāmṛta. The latter is a very influential text of the Dvaita Vedānta school by Vyāsatīrtha, in some sense we could say that it is the text through which the Dvaita Vedānta becomes part of the mainstream philosophical discourse. How could this happen? Because Vyāsatīrtha took up Madhva’s (the founder of Dvaita Vedānta) central theses, but stripped them of Madhva’s idiosyncratic style and “repackaged” them in the powerful argumentative style of Navya Nyāya. Form is not only a matter of style when it comes to philosophical discourse and this change meant that Madhva’s core ideas and intuitions were now formulated in a strongly inferential form and made a really compelling case for their validity.

At this point, the Advaita Vedānta school could not continue to ignore Dvaita Vedānta. An Advaita Vedānta champion, Madhusūdana, took up the challenge and wrote a detailed response to the Nyāyāmṛta in the form of a detailed commentary (almost line-by-line) to it. This was not the kind of appropriation commentary I discussed above but rather a close rejoinder. At the same time, Madhusūdana needed to invoke his own set of authorities to join the discussion, thus contributing to the network-isaiton of the commentary.

Concerning 2., something I noticed in Veṅkaṭanātha’s commentaries is that they (against what I described above and in Freschi 2014) quote and mention people of Veṅkaṭanātha’s school and silently reuse opponents. Why so? It seems that quotations and reuse have shifted into a way to give prestige and authority to one’s position as part of the school, in a way that the reuse of opponents’ names and direct quotes would not be able to do.

The latest issue of the Buddhist Studies Review (33.1—2, 2016) has been published online. The printed issue will follow soon.

The core of the issue is constituted by a collection of articles on the topic of “Reuse and Intertextuality in the Context of Buddhist Texts” and edited by Elisa Freschi together with Cathy Cantwell and Jowita Kramer. Please scroll down for the table of contents.

I would be happy to receive any feedback on the project of dealing with reuse and intertextuality within the specific subfield of Buddhist texts. The Introduction is available OA on Academia.edu.

P.S. the TOC below replaces the wrong one which was erroneously sent out on Monday the 23rd.

Reuse and Intertextuality in the Context of Buddhist Texts

Guest edited by Elisa Freschi, Cathy Cantwell and Jowita Kramer

Table of Contents

—Introduction: Reuse and Intertextuality in the Context of Buddhist Texts [Open Access]
Elisa Freschi, Cathy Cantwell 1-7

Reuse in Buddhist śāstric texts

—Reuse of Text in Pāli Legal Commentaries
Petra Kieffer-Pulz 9-45
—Some Remarks on Sthiramati and his Putative Authorship of the Madhyāntavibhāgaṭīkā, the *Sūtrālaṃkāravṛttibhāṣya and the Triṃśikāvijñaptibhāṣya
Jowita Kramer 47-63
—Veṅkaṭanātha’s Engagement with Buddhist Opponents in the Buddhist Texts he Reused
Elisa Freschi 65-99

Reuse in Buddhist narrative literature

—Walking the Deckle Edge: Scribe or Author? Jayamuni and the Creation of the Nepalese Avadānamālā Literature
Camillo A. Formigatti 101-140

Reuse in Buddhist canonical literature

—Intertextuality, Contradiction, and Confusion in the Prasādanīya-sūtra, Sampasādanīya-sutta, and 自歡喜經 (Zì huānxǐ jīng)
Charles DiSimone 141-162
—Re-making, Re-marking, or Re-using? Hermeneutical Strategies and Challenges in the Guhyasamāja Commentarial Literature
Paul G. Hackett 163-179

Reuse in Tibetan Buddhist texts

—Re-presenting a Famous Revelation: Dudjom Rinpoche’s Work on the ‘Ultra Secret Razor Lifeforce Vajrakīlaya’ (yang gsang srog gi spu gri) of Pema Lingpa (padma gling pa, 1450–1521)
Cathy Cantwell 181-202
—Rewritten or Reused? Originality, Intertextuality, and Reuse in the Writings of a Buddhist Visionary in Contemporary Tibet
Antonio Terrone 203-231

Final Reflections

—Thoughts on Originality, Reuse, and Intertextuality in Buddhist Literature Derived from the Contributions to the Volume
Vesna A. Wallace

• they have a given text as their main interlocutor/they are mainly about a given text
• like with Origene’s commentaries, they are a genre in its own right, not a minor specialisation for authors at their beginnings (Sakai 2015, section 4, suggests that authors in fact needed to have already become acknowledged authorities before being entrusted with the honour of composing a commentary on an influential text.)
• they are characterised by a varied but strong degree of textual reuse
• they allow for significant degrees of innovation (This is evident in the case of the Navya Nyāya commentaries on the NS. Outside the precinct of philosophy, juridical commentaries often reflect the recent juridical developments much more than the original text they are commenting upon.)

As for reuse, one might object that reuse is much more present in later commentaries such as the Seśvaramīmāṃsā than in earlier ones, such as the Śābarabhāṣya. However, the ŚBh does indeed quote extensively from a previous commentator and the fact that contemporary readers do not recognise many other reuses does not rule out the possibility that Śabara did in fact extensively reuse but, as it is often the case throughout Indian philosophy, without marking his reuses, as he could assume that his audience would have recognised what was happening. In other words: the seeming increase in the amount of textual reuse from, e.g., the 2nd c. to the 14th. could be due more to the increase of our awareness of reuse. In this connection, it is worth remembering that:

• commentaries are also an important source for the retrieval of (written or oral) texts which would otherwise be lost

Commentaries bring us back within a close analysis of a text, often even in an advanced classroom milieu. Thus, they need to evoke important textual authorities, including the ones which happen to be fashionable at their time and might have been lost or never recorded in script.

By contrast, commentaries diverge sharply as for other characters. So much, that even the first item listed above might need to be re-conceived in a plural form, with texts entangling at the same time various others, as it can comment on various different texts and discuss with various others, named and unnamed ones. The landscape of Indian philosophy (perhaps of all philosophical traditions?) is complex and invariably entangled.

What is your experience with the genre of commentaries? Do you have counter-examples or would you rather agree with my preliminary assessment?
For a first attempt towards the definition of the genre of commentaries, see here. I am grateful to Ramakrishna Bhattacharya for his feedback on this post (see below).

What makes a text a “commentary”? The question is naif enough to allow for a complicated answer. First of all, let me note the obvious: There is not a single word for “commentary” in Sanskrit, where one needs to distinguish between bhāṣyas, vārttikas, ṭippanīs, etc., often bearing poetical names, evoking Moons, mirrors and the like.

Sanskrit authors, thus, had in mind a widely different set of texts which we all bring back to the seemingly single category of “commentary”. Some of them are chiefly line-by-line or word-by-word explanations (an illustrious example is Manorathanandin’s commentary on Dharmakīrti’s PV). Others entail elaborate philosophical disquisitions (such as Vācaspati’s Nyāyakaṇikā on Maṇḍana’s Vidhiviveka). Still others just comment on a few words or sentences every 10 pages or so (such as Cakradhara’s Granthibhaṅga on Jayanta’s Nyāyamañjarī).
Some of them are part of a longer history, that they fully embrace. This is especially true in the case of the philosophical sūtras and of their first Bhāṣya-commentary, which tends to be fused in a single text. This last sentence could also be interpreted as saying that a sūtra-part was only later extracted out of the respective Bhāṣya.
Vācaspati’s commentary of the Nyāyasūtra, for instance, embeds comments also on its Bhāṣya by Vātsyāyana, but typically also on the Vārttika thereon. Others focus only on one text and neglect the successive history. Śrīprapāduka’s commentary on the same Nyāyasūtra, for instance, explicitly focuses only on it.
What is constant in all these cases is that a commentary is in close dialogue with a root text (with or without its commentaries), which remain(s) its main interlocutor(s).
This makes the definition wide enough to encompass texts such as the Nyāyamañjarī itself, which comments extensively on some selected Nyāyasūtras (Graheli 2016 contains an appendix with the sūtra numbers and the impressive amount of pages dedicated to each of them). Similarly, Veṅkaṭanātha’s Seśvaramīmāṃsā comments anew the Mīmāṃsāsūtra, programmatically neglecting the commentary by Śabara.
Thus, we could sum up the relation “A is a commentary of B” as “B is the main interlocutor of A”. **UPDATE: The relation of “being the main interlocutor” can be more loosely understood if A and B belong to the same śāstric tradition, whereas it needs to entail a very close (e.g., page-by-page or line-by-line) dialogue in order to consider A, which is polemical about B, a commentary of it.**
However, the picture may become still more complicated, because a text A apparently commenting on B may have in fact in view most of all B’s other commentary, C, so that C, though never mentioned, is A’s main interlocutor.
Coming back to the example mentioned above, the Seśvaramīmāṃsā comments on the Mīmāṃsāsūtra, but while having constantly in view the Śabara’s Bhāṣya thereon and, more strikingly, Rāmānuja’s Bhāṣya on a different sūtra, namely the Brahmasūtra. One ends up with a net of main interlocutors rather than a single one.

**I thank Amod Lele for the discussion in the comments on the same post at the Indian Philosophy blog.

*These dates are based on Potter’s online bibliography, previously printed as Potter 1995.

—Catherine Cantwell, Jowita Kramer, Robert Mayer and Stefano Zacchetti (eds.) (in press), Authors and Editors in the Literary Traditions of Asian Buddhism, special issue of the Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, vol. 36.*

—Elisa Freschi and Philipp Maas (eds.) (forthcoming), Adaptive Reuse in premodern South Asian Texts and Contexts, to appaear in the series ‘Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes’, Harrassowitz: Wiesbaden. The TOC can be read here. The initial CfP with the initial abstracts can be read on Academia.edu. My contribution is avalaible in a non-final version on Academia.edu.

—Catherine Cantwell, Elisa Freschi and Jowita Kramer (eds.) (forthcoming), Originality and the Role of Intertextuality in the Context of Buddhists Texts, special issue of the Buddhist Studies Review. My contribution to it is avalaible in a non-final version on Academia.edu.

—Elisa Freschi (forthcoming), The reuse of the iconography of Hayagrīva in texts and iconography, submitted to a journal and available in a non-final version on Academia.edu.

Further, the following references have been mentioned on the Indology mailing list in a related thread:

• Bart Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (OUP, NY, 2013) (by Patrick Olivelle).
• Electronic Text Reuse Acquisition Project (by Jonathan Silk).
• Jacob Schmidt-Madsen analysed textual reuse in the case of an Āyurvedic manuscript for his BA thesis The Florence Fragments – palm leaves among papyri.**
• Reynolds & Wilson, Scribes and Scholars (by Dominik Wujastyk).

*TOC: Cathy Cantwell and Robert Mayer, ”Introduction”
Jonathan Silk “Establishing/Interpreting/Translating: Is it just that easy?”
Robert Mayer “gTer ston and Tradent: Innovation and Conservation in Tibetan Treasure Literature”
Cathy Cantwell “Different kinds of composition/compilation within the Dudjom Revelatory tradition”
Jowita Kramer “Innovation and the Role of Intertextuality in the Pañcaskandhaka and Related Yogācāra Works”
Oskar von Hinuber “Building the Theravāda Commentaries: Buddhaghosa and Dhammapāla as authors, compilers, redactors, editors and critics”
Lance Cousins “The Case of the Abhidhamma Commentary”
Sarah Shaw “In what way is there a saṅghavacana? Finding the narrator, author and editor in Pāli texts”
Marta Sernesi “The Collected Sayings of the Master: On Authorship, Author-function, and Authority”
Martin Seeger ” ‘The (Dis)appearance of an author’: some observations and reflections on authorship in modern Thai Buddhism”
Péter-Dániel Szántó “Early works and persons related to the so-called Jñānapāda school”

** Jacob has been so kind as to send me his thesis (in Danish language) and an English abstract of it. The relevant part of the latter reads as follows: “I continue with a discussion of tradition and innovation in classical Indian scientific literature based on Sheldon Pollock’s notion of “the Shastric paradigm” (Pollock 1985), and link it to a sample analysis of quotational techniques applied in the Florence Fragments. The main conclusion drawn is that while Pollock and others tend to focus on commentaries as the sine qua non in traditional innovation, my analysis shows that a more subtle, and ultimately more powerful, manipulation of original material is likely to take place in the act of transmission itself.” (emphasis added) If I am interpreting correctly his thesis, the quotational techniques identified by Jacob are: 1. polyphony (the use of many sources on the same topic), 2. fragmentation (the division of a single textual passage in several parts according to the topics dealt with), 3. recontextualisation (of a given textual passage in a new context).

The occurrences of Hayagrīva in the Mahābhārata (henceforth MBh) have been neatly summarised in van Gulik 1935, pp. 10–15 and in Nayar 1994, chapter 3. Van Gulik notes that in different portions of the Mahābhārata we find Hayagrīva connected with the recitation of the Vedas and that in MBh 12.335.43–69 Viṣṇu horse-headed brings back the Vedas and kills their thieves, the two asuras Madhu and Kaiṭabha, who had stolen them from Brahmā. The following is an excerpts of the main action (my tentative translation):

Having entered the mythical stream, [Viṣṇu-Hayagrīva] performed the supreme Yoga |

Performing the sound according to the rules of phonetics, he pronounced the Oṃ || 12.353.50 ||

The sound was resonant and went in each direction and was charming |

It was in the whole earth and had all good qualities || 12.353.51 ||

Then, the two asuras, made up an agreement regarding the Vedas (presumably: regarding when to come back and pick them up) |

and having threw them on the bank of the mythical stream, they run whence the sound came from || 12.353.52 ||

At that point, the king god carrying a horse head, |

Hari, grasped all the Vedas which had arrived to the bank of the mythical stream || 12.353.53 ||

He gave them back to Brahmā and went then back to his own nature |

[…] Then, the two [demons] sons of Danu, Madhu and Kaiṭabha, who did not see anything [as the source of the charming sound they had head before] |

went back quickly to the place [where they had left the Vedas] and they looked || 12.353.55 ||

Where the Vedas had been thrown, the place was empty! |

[…] Then there was a fight between them and Nārāyaṇa |

The two Madhu and Kaiṭabha, whose bodies where filled with rajas and tamas, |

were killed by the [now become] ‘Killer of Madhu’ (Madhusūdana, a name of Viṣṇu), who thereby pleased Brahmā || 12.335.64 ||

rasāṁ punaḥ praviṣṭaś ca yogaṁ paramam āsthitaḥ |
śaikṣaṁ svaraṁ samāsthāya om iti prāsr̥jat svaram || 12.353.50 ||
sa svaraḥ sānunādī ca sarvagaḥ snigdha eva ca |
babhūvāntarmahībhūtaḥ sarvabhūtaguṇoditaḥ || 12.353.51 ||
tatas tāv asurau kr̥tvā vedān samayabandhanān |
rasātale vinikṣipya yataḥ śabdas tato drutau || 12.353.52 ||
etasminn antare rājan devo hayaśirodharaḥ |
jagrāha vedān akhilān rasātalagatān hariḥ |
prādāc ca brahmaṇe bhūyas tataḥ svāṁ prakr̥tiṁ gataḥ || 12.353.53 ||
[…]
atha kiṁ cid apaśyantau dānavau madhukaiṭabhau |
punar ājagmatus tatra vegitau paśyatāṁ ca tau |
yatra vedā vinikṣiptās tat sthānaṁ śūnyam eva ca || 12.353.55 ||
[…]
atha yuddhaṁ samabhavat tayor nārāyaṇasya ca || || 12.353.63 ||
rajastamoviṣṭatanū tāv ubhau madhukaiṭabhau |
brahmaṇopacitiṁ kurvañ jaghāna madhusūdanaḥ || 12.353.64 ||

The connection with the Veda, perhaps both with their oral and written form (although it is possible that what is rescued is still an oral version of the Vedas), is here very evident. It is also interesting that this version of the rescue of the Vedas is the only one which will be referred to in Pāñcarātra and in Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta texts. I will also come back (in a future post) to the motif of the ocean, which is sometimes connected with Hayagrīva (although the word rasā might also mean ‘lower regions, hell’, its connection with tala `bank’, as well as the evidence derived from parallel texts, seem to suggest the meaning ‘stream’). However, the rationale for the fact that Viṣṇu assumed exactly a horse head is altogether absent (unlike in the case of his Matsya or Varāha-avatāras, where the transformation had to do with the task to be accomplished).

Another mention of Hayagrīva in the MBh has it figure as the name of a demon slaughtered by Viṣṇu:

The two Madhu and Kaiṭabha have been slain by [Viṣṇu], who lies on the ocean |

Having reached a different birth, Hayagrīva has also been slain in the same way || 5.128.49 ||

Instead, the following one is a summary of the Hayagrīva story in one of its Purāṇic forms:

A horse-headed Asura called Hayagriva once invoked Brahma and sought from him [\dots] a boon by which he could be defeated by none other than another being who also had a horse’s head, also called Hayagriva. Such a creature did not exist […] The Devas did not know what to do. […] When they went to Vishnu, they found him taking a nap, resting his chin on his bow. Taking the form of termites, the Devas ate into the bowstring so that the bow shaft snapped with such force that it severed Vishnu’s neck. To save the headless Vishnu, the Devas sacrificed a horse and placed its head on his neck. Vishnu thus transformed into a horse-headed being. […] Vishnu challenged Hayagrīva to a duel, smote him with his mace and restored the Veda. […] Brahma then restored Vishnu’s head. (Skanda Purāṇa). (Pattanaik 2006, s.v)

There are various versions of this story (other versions have, e.g., Viṣṇu loose his head because of a curse and involve no good finality for it, see Nayar 1994, chapter 3) and in any case the story looks somehow strange, since:

• it looks like an ad hoc explanation for Viṣṇu’s horse head
• it looks like the conflation of three different stories, i.e., the slaughter of the demon Hayagrīva, the slaughter of Madhu and Kaiṭabha, who had stolen the Vedas, and the slaughter of the demon Hiraṇyakaśipu. As for the latter, according to the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, after years of ascesis, the demon Hiraṇyakaśipu had obtained from Brahmā a boon of his choice and asked for immortality, but Brahmā refused. Therefore, Hiraṇyakaśipu asked to be killed neither by a human being nor by an animal, nor by a demon, nor by a God. He is at last killed by Viṣṇu in the form of Narasiṃha, who is neither a human being, nor an animal, nor a God. The request by Hayagrīva seems very similar.

It may be objected that once one does not accept the Purāṇic versions of the story, it is difficult to make sense of Viṣṇu’s horse head. In fact, this might be due to either an ancient (Vedic or perhaps Indoeuropean) attribute of a deity, linking it to the horse because of the latter’s importance in the Vedic mythology or the inclusion of a pre-existing deity in the Smārta pantheon through the device of turning it into an avatāra of Viṣṇu.

Thus, in my opinion Hayagrīva is a (perhaps Vedic) deity, perhaps assimilated to Viṣṇu or always identical with him, and the horse head is linked to the importance of the horse in the Vedic culture. The same importance has led to the invention of several demons with horse attributes, until someone conflated the two stories into one, with added details from other demons’ slaughters (Madhu and Kaiṭabha and Hiraṇyakaśipu).

On Hayagrīva see also this post (about the Hayaśīrśa Saṃhitā) and this one (about Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta texts on him).

1. genre: it seems that philosophy is a special case, in which literality of quotations is especially evaluated, whereas commentaries on religious texts are mid-way (as shown by Jowita) and religious and ritual texts reelaborate more freely (as shown by Cathy)
2. time: surprisingly enough, Petra Kieffer-Pülz’ findings concerning Pāli harmonise with my own ones on Sanskrit and confirm that after a certain century, authors tend to be much more specific as for their sources, adding author’s and work’s names*
3. authorship: unexpectedly, even a strong concept of authorship, as the one common in kāvya does not prevent a free reuse, since the readership still regards authored texts as it regards other kind of texts (as shown by Camillo Formigatti using the example of the avadāna-collections)

We did not have time, instead, to discuss further about geographic differences, nor about the impact of multilinguism (which had been dealt with by Charles DiSimone in his talk) on the accuracy of textual reuse.

Further elements you would take into account? Further applications of the elements we highlighted?

*Kiyotaka Yoshimizu has kindly reminded me of an article by Larry McCrea in this volume) on how Dignāga’s way of referring literally to his opponents has changed at once the Indian way of doing philosophy and of engaging with one’s opponents. Could Dignāga be the source of such later developments?

This post is a part of a series on the IABS. For its first day, see here. Please remember that these are only my first impressions and that all mistakes are mine and not the speakers’ ones

Purva Mimamsa authors are generally not interested in the topic, whereas several Uttara Mimamsa (i.e. Vedanta) ones deal at length with the status of the Mimamsasastra (I am tempted to say that, similarly, Christians alone are concerned with the unity of the two testaments within the Bible).
A particularly puzzling element, in this connection, is the status of an “intermediate part” of the Mimamsasastra, variously called madhyamakanda (as opposed to the karma– and brahmakandas or to the purva– and uttara– ones, i.e., the Purva Mimamsa Sutras, henceforth PMS and the Vedanta Sutras, henceforth UMS), or Sankarsa(na)kanda, but also devatakanda or upasanakanda. Neither of these names is found together with any other one, so that it seems clear that the basic assumption for the Mimamsa (both of Purva and Uttara Mimamsa) authors interested in the topics was that there were (at most) three basic texts of the Mimamsa Sastra.
Now, the problem is that the extant Sankarsa Kanda (henceforth SK), preserved in a few manuscripts and edited together with a commentary by Devasvamin or with a later one by Bhaskararaya, is a rather boring text, dealing with technicalities of the ritual. I would locate it in the Srauta-Sutra–Purva Mimamsa milieu, in the sense that it deals with technical details and does not seem to me to aim at more general problems. Thus, it makes good sense that Sabara twice refers to it (see this post) or that Somesvara does it once, but that no more Purva Mimamsa energies are dedicated to it. I might be wrong, but I am reminded of the complements to Panini’s Astadhyayi, such as the Dhatupatha, in the sense that Sabara seems to refer to the SK as to an appendix of the PMS, which does not need a specific exegetical attention (and, in fact, he did not comment on it).

A further significant detail is that the content of this SK does not correspond neither to the appellation devatakanda, nor to the function ascribed to it by Venkatanatha/Vedanta Desika and by other Vedantins, i.e., the discussions of deities, later to be subsumed within the brahman in the UMS.

By contrast, the SK–Devatakanda referred to by such Vedantins as Vedanta Desika in his Sesvara Mimamsa fits nicely in a progressive scheme: the PMS deals in this interpretation with karman, the SK with deities and the UMS with brahman.
Which sutras are attributed to the one or the other? Sabara (two sutras), Somesvara and Sankara (one sutra, see below) mention sutras also found in the extant SK, whereas later Vedantins either do not quote anything at all or quote a) the sutra quoted by Sankara (so Ramanuja, SriBhasya ad 3.3.43), b) the same three (or four) theistic sutras referring to Visnu and not found in the extant SK (so Venkatanatha in his Satadusani and in the Tattvatika, and Madhva in the Anuvyakhyana).
I counted three to four sutras because Madhva’s Anuvyakhyana mentions three (athato daivi (scil. jijnasa?), ya visnur aha iti and tam brahmety acaksate), which should occur, respectively, at the very beginning and at the very end of the SK. Venkatanatha does not mention the first one, but has the last two preceded by ante harau taddarsanat. tam brahmety acaksate makes indeed a smooth transition to the UMS. Jayatirtha’s commentary to Madhva attributes them to a Devasastra, an appellation which could refer to the SK-devatakanda previous to its confusion with the SK (see below).
Further four slokas from some sankarsanasutresu and not present in the extant SK are found within Utpala Vaisnava’s commentary on the Spandapradipika.

A further significant element is the connection with the Pancaratra. Already Sankara mentions the SK in his UMS-Bhasya in the context of a sutra (3.3.43) which is interpreted as discussing the validity of the vyuha doctrine of the Pancaratra. Further, Kanazawa mentions a very interesting passage by Mukunda Jha Bkashi, the editor of Raghavabhatta’s Padarthadarsa (15th c.), who writes that the PMS refer to the Brahmanas, the SK to the Pancaratras and the UMS to the Upanisads, thus distinguishing them on the basis of their referring to a different part of the Veda. In the passage the editor comments upon, Raghavabhatta attributes the upasanakanda to Narada and the UMS to Vyasa (who is regularly identified with Badarayana, see, e.g., Venkatanatha’s Satadusani 3). Who is this Narada? In any case, the name is connected with the Vaisnava milieu and it figures together with Sankarsana in the guruparampara leading to Vyasa in the (Vaisava) Hayagrivopanisad (Kanazawa, p. 41).
And the connection with the Vaisnava (and perhaps Kasmirian) milieu and, thus, with the Pancaratra is reinforced by Utpala Vaisnava’s quote.

To sum up, the extant SK does not seem to properly fulfill the role assigned to it by Vedantin authors.
A possible explanation could be that Vedantin authors used the name of a text which was assumed as part of the unitary Mimamsa Sastra but was either lost or little known (remind the lack of quotations of the extant SK in Vedanta Desika) and confused it with a different text which fulfilled a role which they needed to see fulfilled, i.e., that of introducing God in the Mimamsa system. Perhaps Kanazawa is right in pointing out that the very name SK might have helped, due to the importance of Sankarsana in the Pancaratra vyuha doctrine (Kanazawa, p. 40).

It is still difficult to tell how and when exactly did this superimposition of the one text on the other take place, but, as already hinted at, it seems to have taken place in Vedanta-Pancaratra milieus and Sankara may have played a major role in it, since he quotes from the extant SK, but in the context of a theological-Pancaratrika discussion. It might, thus, have been Sankara (or his Pancaratra opponent) who made the SK’s role shift from sheer technical discussions to theological ones. In other words, previous to Sankara there might have been a technical SK and a theistic text (perhaps only a few sentences). If we accept Jayatirtha’s authority, the latter had already a Vedantic flavour and we might speculate that it had been used by Vaisnavas (perhaps: Pancaratrins) who wanted to vindicate the Vedanta status of their system. Sankara’s quote of the former SK in a context where one could have expected the latter may have created the confusion between the two, a confusion which was very much welcomed for non-Advaita Vedantins and which harmonises nicely with further tripartitions (e.g., the one between karman, jnana and bhakti).

A further scenario would require one to assume that no SK-devatakanda ever existed and that some Vedantins artfully manipulated the evidences regarding the SK, but since attestations regarding it range well beyond the borders of an interconnected group of people, this scenario is at the moment less likely.

Last, it is possible that there existed a tradition of interpreting the extant SK in a theistic way and that it was in this connection that some further theistic sUtras have been attributed to it. Although this hypothesis clashes with the fact that no sutras of the extant SK have been transmitted together with the SK-devatakanda ones, it is probably right in pointing out that the confusion was quite ancient. Anandagiri’s explanation of the name sankarsa, for instance, refers to the technical contents of the extant SK, but then calls it devatakanda (sankarsyate karmakandastham evavasistam karma samksipyocyate iti sankarso devatakandam).

The Purva Mimamsa milieus seemingly remained unaffected by this move (remind Somesvara’s quote from the extant SK as late as in the 12th c. and the general lack of interest for the SK).

Which scenario seems to you more plausible?

On the SK, see this post and this one