Volume 1 - Sanskrit Web

General Significance of Whiineys Work
xxxvii
General significance of Whitney's work. — Its design, says Whitney
(above, p. xix, Annoiinceniciit), is " to put together as much as possible of
the material that is to help toward the study and final comprehension of
this Veda." Thus expressly did the author disavow any claim to finality for
his work. As for the translation, on the one hand, the Announcement
shows that he regarded it as wholly subordinate to his commentary ; and
I can give no better statement of the principles which have guided him in
making it, than is found in the extracts from a critical essay by Whitney
which I have reprinted (above, p. xix), and from which moreover we may
infer that he fully recognized the purely provisional character of his translation.
I am sorry that infelicities of expression in the translation, which
are part and parcel of the author's extreme literalness (see p. xciv) and do
not really go below the surface of the work, are (as is
said below, p. xcviii)
the very things that are the most striking for the non-technical reader
who examines the book casually.
As for the commentary, on the other hand, it is plain that, taking the
work as a whole, he has done just what he designed to do. Never
before has the material for the critical study of an extensive Vedic text
been so comprehensively and systematically gathered from so multifarious
sources. The commentary will long maintain for itself a place of
first-rate importance as an indispensable working-tool for the purposes
which it is designed to serve. I have put together (below, pages xcii—
xciii)
a few examples to illustrate the ways in which the commentary will
prove useful. A variety of special investigations, moreover, will readily
suggest themselves to competent students of the commentary ; and the
subsidiary results that are thus to be won (the " by-products," so to say),
are likely, I am convinced, to be abundant and of large interest and value.
Furthermore, we may confidently believe that Whitney's labors will
incidentally
put the whole discipline of Vedic criticism upon a broader and
firmer basis.
Need of a systematic commentary on the Rig-Veda. — Finally,
Whitney
seems to me to have made it plain that a similar commentary is the indispensable
preliminary for the final comprehension of the Rig-Veda. That
commentary should be as much better and as much wider in its scope as it
can be made by the next generation of scholars; for it will certainly not be
the work of anyone man alone. It is a multifarious work for which many
elaborate preparations need yet to be made. Thus the parallel passages
from the Rig-Veda and the other texts must be noted with completeness
on the margin of the Rik Samhita opposite the padas concerned ;
for this
task Bloomfield's Vedic Concordance is likely to be the most important
single instrument. Thus, again, Brahmana, ^rauta, Grhya, and other
texts appurtenant to the Rig-Veda, together with Epic and later texts,