VEDIC HINDUISM by S. W. Jamison and M. Witzel - people.fas ...

Jamison & Witzel VEDIC HINDUISM 4
Before we treat Vedic religion in detail, it might be well to give a thumbnail
characterization. The religion of this (roughly) 1000-year period, though not
static, is reasonably unified. From the very first, it shows a highly developed
ritual, with particular emphasis on the power of the word. As the religion
develops in the Vedic period, it moves in two superficially contradictory
directions -- on the one hand to an increasingly elaborate, expensive, and
specialized system of rituals; on the other towards abstraction and
internalization of the principles underlying ritual and cosmic speculation on
them. But the beginnings of both trends can be seen in the earlier texts.
I. GENERAL TREATMENTS
a. The texts
Any study of Vedic religion thus must begin with the texts. Fortunately, due to
the care with which most of the texts were transmitted and to the last 150 years
or so of intensive and painstaking philological work, we are reasonably lucky, in
that most of the important texts exist in usable (though generally not, strictly
speaking, critical) editions, that many possess careful translations6 with, at least,
minimal commentary, and that the vocabulary and the grammar (morphology
and syntax) of the texts have been and continue to be subject to the scientific
scrutiny that is a necessary precondition for even first order textual
interpretation. Serious lacunae will be noted below.
A useful and detailed overview of Vedic texts can be found in Gonda's
surveys (1975, 1977), and Santucci's brief outline (1976) gives a handy
conspectus of text editions and translations (though omitting the Sūtras). A
conspectus of the Śrauta Sūtras has been given by Kashikar 1968; for the G�hya
6 The remarks by W. Doniger, 1991, p. lxi sqq. on older translations of Manu tend more to
justify her attempt at a new translation rather than to discredit the older ones. Note, for
example, her insistence of translating, e.g. all the technical terms for coins, at 8.132ff., whereby
a "straw" (pala, equalling 4 gold pieces!) is said to weigh an incredible 1.33 ounces or 37.76
grams. "Straw" simply appears as the first meaning in the Petersburg Wörterbuch and thus in
Monier-Williams, while it is just a medieval, lexicographer's term, derived from the real life
word palåla, palål� (AV) "straw". -- More seriously, Doniger translates even words like karma
and dharma without indicating that it is the latter word that is rendered variously as "duty,
law, justice, right, religious merit, religion" (cf. p. lxxvi). A reader will never know that the
Sanskrit term dharma was intended. (More on the problem of translation see below, on �ta, at
the end of ch. I, with n. 30).