08

‘The composer-priests were Āṅgirasas and Bhārgavas’ : clans of priests and composers of circles of the Rigveda discussed by Witzel 1997b: 262, 292. H.W. Bailey related the word Āṅgirasas to English angel.

‘These were spectacular finds …’ : Bhattacharyya, Durgamohan. 1957. ‘A Palm-Leaf Manuscript of the Paippalāda Samhitā: Announcement of a Rare Find’. Our Heritage 5:81–86. 1970. Paippalāda Samhitā of the Atharvaveda. Volume Two. Edited from Original Manuscripts with Critical Notes. Calcutta: Sanskrit College. Bhattacharyya, Dipak. 1997. The Paippalāda Samhitā of the Atharvaveda. Edited from Original Manuscripts with Critical Notes. Calcutta: Sanskrit College. Volume Two. Edited from Original Manuscripts with Critical Notes. Calcutta: Sanskrit College.

‘Dhātar, the arranger, is a creator … similar to the demiurge of the ancient Greeks’ : Plato, Timaios, describes how the demiurge fashions the world, putting everything together like an architect, not like a creator ex nihilo, ‘out of nothing.’

‘The principal composers of the Atharvaveda were closely related to chanters of sāmans …’ : Stanley Insler in lectures, apparently unpublished, but see Insler 1998a. ‘An early treatise on phonetics and phonology’: Deshpande 1997 and 2002.—‘The second Kautsa was a grammarian-cum-ritualist and keenly aware of the difference between language and mantras’: there is urgent need for a book on Kautsa, the earliest rationalist thinker of India. The sources should be put together, in the original and translation, from Yāska’s Nirukta, one of the Vedāṇgas (Vedic sciences, p. 261) and from Jaimini’s commentary on the Pūrva-Mīmāṃsā-Sūtra. Yāska probably belongs to the fifth century BCE like Pāṇini, but the priority remains open: Cardona, George. 1976. Pāṇini: A Survey of Research. The Hague: Mouton (Indian reprint, 1980: Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas), p. 273. Jaimini must be later than the third century BCE: second century according to Nakamura, Hajime. 1983. A History of Early Vedānta Philosophy. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, English translation, p. 400. Some of the relevant materials have been discussed in Oertel, Hanns. 1930. Zur indischen Apologetik. Stuttgart: 1930.

‘His thesis was that, unlike language … “mantras are without meaning”’ : On Kautsa’s thesis in general see the first section of Chapter 11, ‘The Meaninglessness of Mantras,’ pages 191–4 which runs parallel to the meaninglessness of ritual in Chapter 12 and corresponds to the gap between Vedic ritual (as described in the Śrauta Sūtras) and mythology (as described by the Brāhmaṇas): earliest and clearest statement by Tsuji, Naoshiro. 1952. On the Relation between Brāhmaṇas and Śrautasūtras. Tokyo: The Toyo Bunko, in Japanese with English Summary, p. 187: ‘Brāhmaṇa-writers pursued an object different from that of Sūtrakarās. The former endeavoured to interpret the meaning of mantras and to explain the origin and mysterious significance of ritual proceedings, and in doing so they happened to give, often rather briefly or vaguely, prescriptions as to this or that action of a rite which they presupposed to be well known to the initiated. The Sūtrakarās, on the contrary, aimed at a systematic description of each Vedic ritual in its natural sequence.’ Echoed by Renou 1953: 29 and Dandekar 1982:77 (related to Dandekar 1997:43), already quoted in the text p. 227.

‘The second Kautsa was a revolutionary but … gave reasons for his views’ : Thite, G. U. 2004. ‘Vicissitudes of Vedic Ritual’, in Griffiths and Houben, (eds.), 2004: 558–9 argued that ‘What Kautsa seems to have meant is that not the mantras but rather their meaning is meaningless.’ Since it corresponds in time to the third or Sāmavedic period in the history of Vedic ritual, ‘which seems to be the decadent period,’ these rituals are impossible to perform, therefore fictitious and probably also of Sāmavedic origin. I refer to these ideas because we shall relate the meaninglessness of mantras, the meaninglessness of ritual and the Samaveda to each other in Chapters 11 and 12—without implying any decadence except in #250.

‘Since the Śrauta ritual of the Yajurveda is performed for its own sake … the more philosophic Upaniṣadic or Buddhist emphasis on knowledge (jñāna) or wisdom (prajñā)…’ : p. 315 with note.