20-24 septembrie 2009 - Biblioteca Metropolitana Bucuresti

A lesser-known Agniṣṭoma Prayoga of the SāmavedaSUCHETA PARANJPETilak Maharashtra Vidyapeeth – PuṇeVedānāṁ sāmavedo ‘smi, so says Lord Kṛṣṇa in the Bhagavadgītā. Butin spite of this, the Sāmaveda (SV) has always received scanty attention bythe Vedic scholars. In fact, it has got negative attention; so much so thatduring the time of the smṛti literature people dared to say that a personchanting Veda mantras should stop the chanting if he happened to hear theinauspicious noises like barking of a dog, braying of a donkey, or, believe itor not, but also the chanting of a Sāman, since it was considered inauspious:sāmavedasyāśucir dhvaniḥ. For various reasons, the SV suffered this stepmotherly treatment in the circle of Vedic scholars. But the last century sawa ray of hope and a renewed interest in the SV, and scholars turned theirattention to studying and publishing SV material.Among the three schools of the SV, Jaiminīya is (or should I say“was”?) prevalent mainly in Southern parts of India, Tamilnādu andKerala. In 1975, a rite named śyenaciti was performed in a place namedPanjāl near Shornur, in Kerala, sponsored by Frits STAAL, in which theaudgātram was of Jaiminīya school. This gave quite a push to the study ofthe Jaiminīya ritual practice and texts. In that trip to Panjāl, I was fortunateenough to collect some Jaiminīya ritual manuals in Grantha script from aplace called Koduntiruppally, near Palghat, which was then a big center ofthe Jaiminīya SV. Many of these mss. are ritual manuals for the audgātram.As I worked for my doctoral research on the Jaiminīya ritual texts(mainly on the Jaiminīya Śrauta Sūtra (JŚS)), I collected copies of a fewmore mss. on the same subject, mainly from the Oriental ManuscriptLibrary, Baroda. Almost all of them were unpublished. Out of theseancillary texts, one seemed very distinct from the rest. It was called:Ādhānapūrvakāgniṣṭomaprayoga, referred to henceforth as Prayoga, byone Śrīnivāsādhvarīndra (no. 280, acc. no. 10881 B, PL 18-66).