Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LII/3

"SCRIPTURE" IN INDIA: TOWARDS A TYPOLOGY

OF THE WORD IN HINDU LIFE*

THOMAS B. COBURN

I

At first glance, it appears obvious that the religious traditions of theworld have scriptures. Virtually all of the major traditions, and many ofthe minor, have produced written documents, and the mere fact of their"writtenness" invites comparison between one tradition and another. Thelogic behind F. Max Muller's massive editorial undertaking some onehundred years ago—the publication in Fnglish translation of the fiftyvolumes of the Sacred Books of the East—is a compelling one. And asimilar logic runs through much of what we do today in the scholarlystudy of religion. When we do research, a major focus of our attention isupon the literary remains of the world's religious movements. When weteach, a fair portion of what we ask of our students is that they becomefamiliar, in some measure, with the written documents of whatevertradition they may be studying. At one level, the association of "reli-gions" with "scriptures" is so obvious as scarcely to merit comment.

At another level, however, this easy association calls for closer examina-tion. We now know, for instance, in a way that was less obvious in Muller'sday, that while the Aoesta, the Lotus SQtra, and some of the Upanisadsmay clamor for inclusion in any roster of "Sacred Books of the East," thereare important differences in the ways these documents have been re-garded, and in the roles they have played, in the Zoroastrian, Buddhist,and Hindu traditions, respectively. Such differences become even morepronounced, we now know, as one begins to consider the literature that, for

Thomas B. Coburn (Ph.D., Harvard) is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Clas-

sical Languages at St. Lawrence University. His publications include "The Study of the

Purfinas and the Study of Religion" (Religious Studies 16 [1080] no. 3); 'Consort of None,

Sakti of AIL The Vision of the DefA-Mahatmya' (in John S. Hawley and Donna M. Wulff,

eds., 77x Divine Contort: Radha and the Goddesses of India, Berkeley Religious Studies

Series, 1982); and DexA-Mahatmya; The Crystallisation of the Goddess Tradition (Mod-

Is] Banarsidass, forthcoming).

*A much earlier draft of this essay was written for the National Endowment for the

Humanities 1982 Summer Seminar on "Scripture as Form and Concept." I am much

indebted to the members of the Seminar, and particularly to the Director, Wilfred Cant-

well Smith, for their very helpful comments.

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436 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

one reason or another, was denied inclusion in Max Muller's canon. It is, ofcourse, the detailed examination of particular documents in particular tra-ditions that has been one of the chief glories of modern scholarship. Thesheer massiveness of what we now know about individual scriptures, par-ticulary those of the Judeo-Christian tradition, is overwhelming. And yet inthe teeth of this erudition, there persists a suspicion that we have not beenasking the most salient questions of our documents, that, for all of ourmethodological sophistication, we remain bound by certain preconceptionsas to what scripture is, and how its study ought to proceed. It was WilfredSmith who raised these questions most pointedly for biblical scholarshipover a decade ago (1971). Subsequently, similar questions, and similarlynovel solutions, have been posed by Gerald Larson for our understandingof the Bhagavad Gttfl, and by Smith (1980) and William Graham for ourunderstanding of the Qur'fin. The first half of Graham's essay is an effort tocast these discussions—and, in fact, the whole of scholarship on scripturalmatters—in a mold that will facilitate scholarly consideration of "scrip-ture" as a generic phenomenon.1 As Graham is aware, the utility of such aconcept will be determined gradually, as specialists from across the spec-trum of religious studies examine the data in their respective fields in lightof generic considerations. It is to this exploration that the present essayseeks to contribute, through reflection upon various features, "scriptural"and otherwise, of the Hindu religious tradition.

Having admitted an aspiration to explore the notion of scripture inIndia, however, one finds oneself immediately in that familiar position incomparative studies, where the terms in which the original question isasked turn out to be ill-suited for understanding the data at hand. Threeconsiderations may indicate why it is necessary to conceptualize our ven-ture here as a typology of the Word, rather than one of scripture, inHindu life.

The first pertains to the connotations of the English word "scripture."Although the Oxford English Dictionary reports that the specificallyJewish and Christian sense of "scripture" (and allied terms such as "holywrit," "canon," and "bible") has been supplemented over the course ofthe past century or so by a generic use of the term (Graham: note 4),what has remained constant is the assumption that we have here to doprimarily with a written phenomenon, with something that has beeninscribed on a page. Indeed, one suspects that the Latin scriptur&, "writ-ing," and scribere, "to write," are never far from awareness in muchdiscussion of scriptural matters. And yet it is precisely the thrust ofGraham's article, and of his ongoing work, to show how this expectationof "writtenness" may mask certain important features of how holy words

1 Graham's first nineteen footnotes provide the basic bibliography for this

phenomenology.

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Coburn: "Scripture" in India 437

have been operative in human history: they have been oral/aural reali-ties at least as much as they have been written ones, and the way thatthey have found their way into human lives is not through the eye, butthrough the ear. To argue the contrary is but to admit that we are heirsof Gutenberg, for the very notion of silent, individualized reading isscarcely known prior to the advent of the printing press (Goody andWatt: 42). Consequently, in an effort to appreciate the spoken and heardquality of "scripture," we here embark upon a study of the Word inIndia, some embodiments of which have been reduced to writing, butmost of which have retained the oral/aural quality as primary.

Our second consideration pertains to a distinctive feature of Indianculture. If one leaves aside the cryptic evidence from the Indus Valley,writing seems to have been known in the subcontinent from perhaps 600B.C.E. (Gough: 73). This is at least half a millenium after the earlieststrata of the Vedic corpus were composed, and there has never been ahappy marriage between the holy words of India, composed and trans-mitted orally, and the writing process. Particularly in contrast with, say,China, scribes in India have been of low social standing (Lancas-ter: 224-25), and the very act of writing was held to be ritually pollut-ing: a late "Vedic text, the Aitareya Aranyaka (5.5.3) states that a pupilshould not recite the Veda after he has eaten meat, seen blood or a deadbody, had intercourse or engaged in writing" (Staal, 1979:122-23). Theprofoundly spoken character of India's holy words is a matter on whichwe will reflect below, but for the moment it will suffice to note that weshould not be misled by the fact that most of these words have eventu-ally found their way onto the written or printed page. This is not theirprimary home, and Staal is not simply being mischievous in discerning asymbolic significance to the fact that Indian books "still tend to fallapart" (1979:123).

If our first two considerations address the fact that "scripture" inIndia is not necessarily something written,2 the third raises the possibilitythat the very notion of scripture as a reified, boundaried entity fails todo justice to the Hindu situation. As suggested earlier, such assertions as:"the fixed and established books of God . . . form the core of world reli-gions" (Goody: 16) are not, on the face of it, absurd. One can clearlyobserve what might be called a process of crystallization of scripture,

S In light of both the ease of misunderstanding here and the importance of the notion

of "oral tradition" in past scriptural studies, it is worth emphasizing that when we speak of

the orality/aurality of scripture, we are not indicating an oral supplement to a written

tradition. Rather, we are calling attention to the vocal, spoken quality of holy words,

which come to life, as it were, only in utterance and hearing. Our remarks below on the

guru-student relationship are apposite here. The work of William A. Graham, currently in

progress, stands to illuminate greatly the oral/aural quality of scripture in a variety of

historical contexts.

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438 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

and the coherence of tradition around scripture, in a great variety ofsettings. In some, such as the Jewish or Christian, the crystallizationprocess may be drawn out, while in others, such as the Muslim, it maybe quite abrupt. Following our earlier argument, it is possible to con-ceive of the scripture thus crystallized as constituting a fundamentallyoral/aural presence in the lives of the faithful, but we must go still fur-ther in refining our expectations, I think, if we are not to misconstrue theHindu scene. India has, in fact, known verbal material that is highly"crystallized," i.e., quite specific, boundaried, and even written. Suchitems as the Upanisads, or Tulsl Dfis's R&mByana, appear to be roughlycomparable to Western notions of scripture in this regard. For reasonsthat will become clear in the sequel, however, I would propose that weunderstand such compact and circumscribable phenomena as a subset ofhow Hindus have dealt with holy verbal phenomena in general, i.e., withwhat might be designated the Word, some of whose manifestations aredynamic, open-ended, and nonrevertible, rather than boundaried andreified.

As a starting-point, let me propose that the most useful unit, theatom or lowest common denominator, if you will, for discussing theHindu situation is simply the verbal utterance of a particular individualat a particular point in time. He or she may, of course, be reading thewords from a written document, or reciting a fixed pattern of wordsfrom memory, but he or she may also be telling a familiar story in anengaging new way. I would urge that all of these possibilities have abearing on scriptural matters in India, and, in particular, I would urgethat we not be obsessed with either the "writtenness" or the verbal fixityof sacred utterances as we approach the Hindu situation.

The specific utility of this apparently oblique way of discussing"scripture" in India will become apparent after reviewing the traditionalways of conceptualizing Hindu religious literature—ways that we haveinherited both from our scholarly predecessors in the West and, in adifferent fashion, from Hindus living in various times and places—andthen indicating some difficulties that arise when these concepts arebrought face-to-face with the facts of religious history. Part II of thisessay will therefore rehearse common views about the scriptural life inIndia. Part III will isolate and comment upon some unresolved difficul-ties and often unarticulated implications of our inherited views. Part IVwill then broach a typology of holy verbal utterance in Hindu life. Byapproaching the matter in this way, we will not simply be testing aWestern notion against Hindu data, but we may also, through fidelity toHindu views, glimpse new dimensions to the phenomenon of scripturewhen it is generically conceived.

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Coburn: "Scripture" in India 439

II

Virtually all discussions of the religious literature of India that see fitto take cognizance of Hindu categories also see fit to begin with a discus-sion of kruti and smrti (Lanczkowski: 82; Noss: 127; van Buitenen,1974:932-33; Walker: 372). We may take van Buitenen's opening re-marks on "The concept of a sacred book in Hinduism" as representative(1974:932-33):

Orthodox Hindu authors commonly divide their sacred literatureinto two classes, Sruti and Smrti: Sruti (literally "learning byhearing") Is the primary revelation, which stands revealed at thebeginning of creation. This revelation was "seen" by the primevalseers (ffi) who set in motion an oral transmission that has contin-ued from generation to generation until today. The seers werethe founders of the lineages of Brahmins (Hindu priestly elite)through which the texts have been, and continue to be, transmit-ted. From this heritage the Brahmins derive their function assacred specialists and teachers. Smrti (literally "recollection") isthe collective term for all other sacred literature, principally inSanskrit, which is considered to be secondary to Sruti, bringingout the hidden meanings of the revelation, restating it for a wideraudience, providing more precise instructions concerning moralconduct, and complementing Sruti in matters of religion. Whilethe distinction between Sruti and Smrti is a useful one, in prac-tice the Hindu acquires his knowledge of religion almost exclu-sively through Smrti.

This awareness of two levels of sanctity in Hindu sacred literature hasprompted some to declare that "to the expression 'Holy Scripture' therecorresponds in the case of the Indians the expression 'Sruti" (Winter-nitz: 55), but even in such cases it is recognized that Sruti admits ofvarious subdivisions. Of these, it is "the Vedic San-hitas [that] occupypride of place in Shruti literature" (Lanczkowski: 83), and, of the Sam-hitas, it is the Rg Veda, dating perhaps from 1200 B.C.E., that is foremostin both antiquity and sanctity. The four SamhitSs—9g, Yajur, SQma,Atharva—are understood as corresponding to the four kinds of ritualspecialist (Farquhar: 4-23), and all four Sarnhitas are seen to have gath-ered other subdivisions of sacred literature around them during the sub-sequent millenium: the Brahmanas or ritual discussions, the Sranyakas or"forest books," the Upanisads or esoteric mystic teachings, and theSrauta, Gryha, and Dharma Sutras or manuals of ritual and ethics. It ispossible to schematize this growth of Sruti, known as the Vedic corpus,in terms of a chart which indicates how individual texts are associatedwith the particular categories and schools of the Vedic tradition (vanBuitenen, 1974:935).

There are several ways of indicating the relationship between thisVedic corpus, which appears to be reasonably well defined, and the

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440 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

much more heterogeneous smrti literature. Renou has offered theintriguing suggestion that "the division between Sruti and Smrti alsomarks the frontier between orality and editing" (1965:84), which, ifborne out by further research, has major implications for the idea ofscripture in India.3 More fully developed at present is the idea broachedearlier by van Buitenen, that Sruti is of divine or transcendent origin,and that it has received subsequent elaboration and interpretation athuman hands in the form of smrti. Mackenzie Brown, in discussing thePuranas, puts it this way (18-19):

Truth was fully revealed ["heard", as Srut{\ in the past. . . . TheVedas are revealed truth, and even the perfect expression of thattruth. But. . . they are reserved for the twice-born classes [upperthree castes] and are not to be recited in public. Sudras and womenare prohibited from even bearing the Vedas. The Pur&nas, on theother hand, may be heard by all, especially in the kali yuga whendharma is in universal decline. The Purinas are an "easier" form oftruth, adapted to the conditions of class and world age. . . . It isassumed that the [Purfinic] revisions are made in complete harmonywith the truth contained in Sruti. The Puranas represent, then, aninterpretation or clarification of the fruti, revealing the eternal,immutable truth in a comprehensible form to all mankind in hischanging, historical situation. The process of revealing truth by itsvery nature is never ending. The truth, once revealed in huti, mustever be newly interpreted or explained in gmfti.

In addition to the Puranas, smrti seems clearly to include the DharmaSastras, the two epics, the RamHyana and the Mahabharata, the Tantras,and assorted other items. The full scope of that assortment cannot bespecified, however, for the concept of smrti is necessarily open-ended.What validation as smfti consists of is "acceptance among the same classin society who were the source of the knowledge of Sruti, the brahminclass" (Dimmitt and van Buitenen: 4; see Biardeau: 121). Since the mate-rials that have received such validation have varied enormously boththrough the centuries and by region, it is senseless even to attempt tocircumscribe the material that Hindus have designated as smrti.

Recently, however, it has proven popular, and illuminating, toschematize the growth of the Hindu tradition and its literature through adiagram arranged on chronological principles (Hopkins: 142; Kinsley: 12).In these two diagrams, it is Sruti that occupies the left third of the chart andthat comes to an end, in the sense of both telds and terminus, with theUpanisads, the "Vedinta" or "end of the Veda." The balance of the chart is

3 See also Renou'i equally suggestive remark pertaining to the substance, rather than

the form, of these two kinds of literature: T h e Smrti Introduces a direct formulation,

which could be called a rational thought, consisting of erudite texts or (pre-)scientific

texts; the Snrti, quite to the contrary is essentially symbolic, basing itself on an indirect

and 'second' semantic" (16).

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Coburn: "Scripture" in India 441

comprised of smrti material. An alternative way of making this same basicpoint is in terms of the distinction between "Brahmanism," the religion ofthe Indo-Europeans, revolving around the sacrifice (yajfia), and the post-Buddhist congeries of movements collectively referred to as "Hinduism,"revolving around devotion to a personal deity (bhakti), especially in imageform (pOjfl) (deBary: xvii-xxi, 3-6,205-10).

Finally, we may note that while virtually all discussions of Hindureligious literature make mention of the categories of iruti and smrti,these categories are not usually employed as organizing principles indiscussing the specific contents of the literature. Instead, the tendencyhas been to present summaries of particular documents, which aregrouped together according to label (SamhaitS, Pur&na, etc.), accordingto their apparent sectarian preference (Saiva, Vaisnava, etc.), or, whenthe discussion ranges beyond the specifically religious literature, accord-ing to genre (drama, poetry, etc.) or the language employed (Dimock,Farquhar, Renou, 1964, Renou and Filliozat, Winternitz). While it isapparent that sometimes the Srutismrti distinction has been implicitlyoperative in the determination of salient subdivisions of the material(e.g., Vedic, post-Vedic, etc.), there apparently has been little effort tothink systematically about the full range of terms that are employed inthe discussion of Hindu religious literature. The prevailing view of thatliterature, which has been summarized here, is, of course, reasonablyapt. It has provided us with a framework for understanding an enormousvariety of material, and for orienting the detailed study of particulartexts—which in India, as in the West, has been the strong suit of modernscholarship—into the overall pattern of growth of the Hindu tradition.Nonetheless, there are reasons to believe that certain important featuresof Hindu scripture have been either overlooked or understated by thisview. It is to these features that we now turn.

in

Comprehensive inquiry into the terminology and phenomenology ofHindu scripture is clearly beyond the scope of this essay. A highly prom-ising direction for future research, for example, is into the. variety ofways that the term "Veda" has been employed, by both Hindus andWestern scholars, along with an inquiry into our other inherited termsfor Hindu scripture: Upanisad, Pur&na, iruti, smrti, and the like. Simi-larly, the nuanced interplay of "text" and "context" (Singer) shows everysign of continuing to be a major focus of monographic studies of Indianphenomena. The salient material, however, is massive and its full analy-sis must be left for another occasion. What can be done at present.is toindicate in a preliminary way why the time is ripe for such a compre-hensive inquiry into what might appear to be familiar matters. As a

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442 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

prolegomenon to such an inquiry, we may here focus upon three issuesto which insufficient justice appears to have been done in our currentways of thinking about Hindu scripture.

1. The first issue pertains to what might be called the primacy ofexperience and the ontology of language. The central revision or clarifi-cation of our inherited views that it effects is its demonstration that,while it is tempting to say that historically huti precedes smrti (as, forinstance, the Hopkins and Kinsley charts indicate), the distinction of thetwo categories on grounds of relative chronology cannot be sustained.

To appreciate this point, let us return to the basic affirmation that Srutiis that which has been "'seen' by the primeval seers (fsi)* (van Buitenen,1974:933). The verbal root of Sruti is the common verb Sru, "to hear,"which suggests that the notion of "holy hearing" may be an appropriateway to conceptualize the ffi's experience. The root of r?i is less certain—itmay come from drS, "to see," or from f$, "to flow," and is perhaps related toarc or fc, "to praise" (Monier-Williams)—but there is no quarrel over thefact that it refers to one who has had the most intimate apprehension ofcosmic truth. The fact that the metaphors of hearing and seeing areapplied to the ffi in relation to this truth is significant. This identification oftwo senses as mediators of the ffi's experience is no mixing of metaphor,but an effort to convey the holistic and supremely compelling nature ofthat experience. It engages one through, and yet transcends, the senses. Itseizes one with a unique and irresistible immediacy. It is in such experi-ences that the human becomes contiguous, even identical, with the divine.In discussing a word often allied with f$i, kavi, "poet," Gonda notes thatthis "is one of those words which show that there was jn principle no differ-ence between mental and other qualities attributed to divine and humanpersons" (45). Elsewhere (61,63-64,66), he observes:

The Indian aestheticians . . . were . . . of the opinion that theexperiences of the poet, representing the hero of his work andthat of the listener, reader, or, in general employer of the workare identical. . . . This consciousness of the presence of truth, ofthe divine, the eternal or ultimate reality in a work of art whichhas been created by a truly inspired artist, together with thealmost universal belief that words, especially duly formulatedand rhythmically pronounced words, are bearers of power, hasgiven rise to the traditional Indian conviction that "formulas" area decisive power: that whoever utters a mantra sets power inmotion. . . . [Mantras] represent the essence of the "gods." Theyare not made, but "seen" by those men who have had the privi-lege of direct contact with divinity or the supra-mundane.

Ultimate reality, on this view, may in fact be greater than whatever ispredicated of it (neti, neti), but it is affirmed at least to have sound-form.By virtue of the extraordinary perspicacity and auditory acuity of certainindividuals in illo tempore, the rest of us are now able to participate in that

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Coburn: "Scripture" in India 443

ultimate reality. It is mantras that are the sacrament by means of whichthis participation is effected.

We must, however, go further, for Hindus have not restricted them-selves to using the language of the senses to talk about this revelatoryexperience. The crucial concept here is pratibha, which carries a basicmeaning of "a flash of light, a revelation, usually found in . . . the senseof wisdom characterized by immediacy and freshness" (Kaviraj: 1), but itis also used in technical discussions of philosophy, yoga, and aesthetics tomean "that function of the mind which, while developing without anyspecial cause, is able to lead on to real knowledge, to an insight into thetranscendental truth and reality" (Gonda: 319). This notion has a bearingon a wide range of topics (see Kaviraj: 1-44, and Gonda: 318-48), but,for our purposes, one of its features is central: it is not limited to thegreat seers of the past. It is accessible in the present. In illo tempore is(or can be) now. Though the concluding remarks of the illustrious Gopi-nath Kaviraj have something of a Tantric ring to them, they capture theessential interrelationship of the divine, the human, and the verbal inHindu life (see also Gonda: 341).

We have seen In the preceding pages that the development of thefaculty of omniscience can not be effected unless the mind is puri-fied and freed from the obscuring influence of the dispositionsclinging to it from time immemorial. What is known as the "divineeye" is really the mind in its purified condition. . . . It is apparent,therefore, that every man, in so far as he is gifted with a mind, isgifted with the possibility of omniscience. . . . [If we would ask howthe impurities of the mind are to be cleared away,] the whole ques-tion turns upon the practical issues of mystic culture and we can dono more than briefly touch upon the matter in this place. . . . Thishelp comes from the Guru, a spiritually awake person, in the formof an influx of spiritual energy from him. . . . Concurrently withthe opening of this vision to the Yogin he begins to hear the eternaland unbroken sound of Nfida (i.e., Omk&ra), the sweet and all-obliterating Divine Harmony. . . . When this light and sound arefully realized, but before plunging into the Absolute, the Yogin iselevated into the highest plane of cosmic life. . . . Being himselfsaved, he now becomes, if he so desires it, the saviour ofhumanity. . . . He is the Ideal of Perfect Humanity which is Divin-ity itself in concrete shape and is the source of light and life and Joyto the world, deep in darkness and sorrow. It is from him that the"Scriptures" proceed and the world receives guidance and inspira-tion. (41,42,43,44)

If this kind of ultimately transforming experience continues to be alive option and produces "scriptures" throughout the course of Hinduhistory, an important qualification must nonetheless be added. As Kavirajmakes clear, it is the guru-student relationship that is central to the spir-itual perfection of the student. While "scriptures" may proceed from a

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444 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

perfected individual as by-products of his perfection, they are in no waya substitute for an aspiring yogi's personal relationship with a guru. Toput it another way, the guru-student relationship may well take awritten document as its starting point, but so intimate and personal isthat relationship, and so essential is it to the correct understanding of thewritten (or orally preserved) word, that there exists the widespread cus-tom that if a teacher does not find a student worthy of inheriting hismanuscripts, he will, in his old age, simply discard them by throwingthem into a river—as one would ashes that had been cremated. Writtendocuments, unvivified by personal relationship, are lifeless.

A corollary of this qualification is that, if we would identify thevessels in which the ffl's or guru's transforming experience is, as it were,"preserved," we ought not, for reasons already cited, look into writtendocuments. We ought rather, perhaps, to look at other instances whereHindus speak of holistically engaging, sensual, and particularly visual,apprehension of the divine. While I cannot pursue this matter in detailhere, the use of the word d{S, "to see," or its derivatives in other contexts issurely not coincidental. Darsana, for instance, "seeing," is the standardword for "philosophy," and one of the reasons that Hindu philosophy issaid to be pervasively salvific is because it bears this heritage of "spiritualapprehension." The same word is also employed in what appears, to theoutsider, to be quite a different context, to label "the single most commonand significant element of Hindu worship," viz., what happens "whenHindus go to the temple, [and] their eyes meet the powerful, eternal gazeof the eyes of [the image of] God" (Eck: 1). One could argue, in fact, that"images are not only visual theologies, they are also visual scriptures*(Eck: 32). If we spread our net wider, to include other than the sightsense, we may note that rasa, "taste," looms as a major concept in Indianaesthetics and in various theologies, particularly those of Krishna, toconvey the nature of the divine-human encounter (Dimock, Hawley andWulff). It would appear, therefore, that not only has the kind ofexperience that Hindus understand to have generated Sruti been currentthroughout Hindu history.4 Beyond this, the holy words that are Srutimust be seen alongside other transforming, sacramental activities, such asphilosophical argumentation, the worship of the divine in image form,and the highly nuanced moods (bhQvas) of Krishna devotees.

4 Though T. M. P. Mahadevan shares the common view that iruti is virtually gynono-

mous with the Vedas—a view of iruti that I am here urging be enlarged—he provides anunderstanding of the frutt-tmrti relation that works well in the larger context: "Sruti Isprimary because it is a form of direct experience, whereas Smrti b secondary, since it is arecollection of that experience" (28). Such a definition would then allow us to reinterpretvan Buitenen's remark, cited earlier, that the Hindu acquires his religious knowledgefrom tm^ti at meaning: most Hindus do not have experiences of mystical consummation,but they base their religious lives on the records of such experiences.

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When the experiential foundation of fruti as an ongoing phenome-non in Hindu life is acknowledged in this fashion, then a number ofotherwise puzzling (or, more often, ignored) aspects of the Hindu tradi-tion may be viewed in a new light, with a new clarity. We may glancebriefly at one of them.

The traditional Hindu view is that there are 108 Upanisads, and, ofthese, a dozen or so are identified as "early" (see van Buitenen, 1974:935),i.e., composed in the half-millenium or so after about 700 B.C.E. And yet inthe word-index of Vedic material that began appearing five decades ago,the Vaidika-padanukrama-kopi (VPK),5 no fewer than 206 Upanisads areindexed and some of these "have been written occasionally even in modemtimes and certainly right up to the Middle Ages" (Lanczkowski: 88). Therelatively recent origin of these Upanisads, together with the fact that someof them are highly sectarian and that there even exists an "Allah Upani-sad," written in praise of Islam at the instance of Darah Shikoh in the sev-enteenth century (Walker: 534), is exceedingly problematical for any viewthat takes only the early Upanisads as normative and that sees sWuti as his-torically prior to smfti. The tendency (under Brahmanical and/or Westerninfluence?) has been to dismiss these compositions precisely because oftheir lateness and their alleged "corrupt" character (Bouquet: 47;Walker: 534). The fact remains that some Hindus have called them Upani-sads. This fact becomes far less problematical, and is actually highly illumi-nating, when seen in relationship to our contention that iruti must be seenas an ongoing and experientially based feature of the Hindu religioustradition.®

2. The second issue on which our inherited expectations for "scrip-ture" in India appear less than fully adequate might be called the sociol-ogy of language and the power of holy hearing. While it is tempting toassume that scriptures, either read or heard, serve a didactic role inhuman lives, the central fact here is that, for many Hindus, the holinessof holy words is not a function of their intelligibility. On the contrary,sanctity often appears to be inversely related to comprehensibility.

To appreciate this point, let us return to Brown's observation thatthe Significance of the" Pur&nas is that they "may be heard by all" (18).Notice that he does not tie their significance to the fact that they couldbe understood by all, for they have scarcely been an open book. Nor, for

6 The appearance of this word-index is itself a reflection of the novel approach to the

Vedas that has emerged over the course of the past century, on which see our concluding

remark on the role of Max MQller.6 A similar argument, which I here omit in the Interest of brevity, could be made with

regard to the interpretation of the "supplements* or khilat to the flg Veda, some of which

are virtually modern: see Kaihikar. esp. p. 007. Furthermore, while the view of the Bha-

gewad CUB is a complex one, we might note that, at 2-52, it employs the crucial verb tru

in both the past passive and future passive participial forms (iruta and trotooya).

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that matter, have most of the items usually considered the scriptures ofIndia. And the reason that these scriptures, even if universally heard,were never widely understood is that they were composed in Sanskrit.Over the past thirty years, the symbolic significance of Sanskritic lan-guage and culture has generated a widespread discussion of "Sanskritiza-tion" which it is not necessary to review here. What we may simply noteis that "the name of the language, one of the few not derived from aregion or a people, states its own program: sarjxskrtQ bha$& is the rituallyperfected and intellectually cultivated language" (Diraock et al.: 10). Tobe able to speak and understand Sanskrit is a badge of religious andintellectual privilege, for it is the "refined" or "well cooked" language, incontrast to the Prakrits, those uncouth grunts of hoi polloi. Sanskrit wastherefore always an individual's second language, unintelligible tospeakers of the many local vernaculars, but always, for one who knew it,the language of preference (Dimock et al.: 11). Simply hearing this cul-tured language bordered on being a numinous experience.

There is an additional dimension, however. It is not just that Sanskrithas an aura of elegance in the present. It also provides linkage to theprimal time. Van Buitenen puts it this way (1966:35-36):

Central to Indian thinking through the ages is a concept ofknowledge which . . . is foreign to the modem West. Whereas forus, to put it briefly, knowledge is something to be discovered, forthe Indian knowledge is to be recovered. . . . One particular pre-conception, related to this concept of knowledge concerning thepast and its relation to the present, is probably of central signifi-cance: that at its very origin the absolute truth stands revealed;that this truth—which is simultaneously a way of life—has beenlost, but not irrecoverably; that somehow it is still availablethrough ancient life-lines that stretch back to the original revela-tion; and that the present can be restored only when this originalpast has been recovered. . . . Sanskrit is felt to be one of the life-lines, and Sanskritization in its literal sense, the rendering intoSanskrit, is one of the prime methods of restating a tradition inrelation to a sacral past.

All of this is not to say, of course, that Sanskrit has not beenused—by those capable of using it—with every intent to communicatemeaning. The case of Ramanuja—the great theologian of Sri Vaisnavismwho stands at the juncture of the two traditions of Tamil devotionalismand Sanskrit "orthodoxy"—is a splendid instance of someone whose pietyis deeply indebted to non-Sanskritic sources, but who writes in Sanskritbecause of its prestige and symbolic significance, and who does so withgreat clarity and precision.

Such an instance, however, must not distract us from the basic point,viz., that the sanctity of Hindu scripture—most of which has been com-posed in Sanskrit—does not necessarily depend upon its intelligibility to

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Coburn: "Scripture" in India 447

one who hears or recites it. Nowhere has this been more clearly demon-strated than in the way the Rg Veda—apparently the centerpiece of theentire scriptural tradition—has functioned in Hindu life. Lake all verbalcompositions, the Rg Veda was produced in an historically particularcontext (Staal, 1963), of which the most vivid brief account is Lanman's:"To the student of the Veda it is a source of perhaps contemptuous sur-prise, and to the teacher a source of some little embarrassment, that thisvenerable document smells so strong of the cow-pen and the byre" (12).Be that as it may, these particularized features of the Rg Veda havebeen essentially irrelevant, have passed virtually unnoticed, throughoutmost of Hindu history because of what Renou calls the characteristicallyIndian preoccupation with form rather than meaning (1965:25). Whatthis has meant is that "at all times, recitation constituted the principal, ifnot the exclusive, object of Vedic.teaching, the same as today . . . whilstthe interpretation of the texts is treated as a poor relation" (Renou,1965:23; see Ingalls, 3—4). Such recitation has been undertaken for avariety of ritual purposes, especially as an instrument or intermediary ofdevotion (Renou, 1965:40), and, in this context, matters of verbal signifi-cation pale in significance. This has elicited a suggestive comparativeremark about the role of the reciter (Srotriya, master of Sruti): "Thesrotriya who recites without understanding should not be compared witha clergyman preaching from the pulpit, but rather with a medievalmonk copying and illuminating manuscripts, and to some extent with allthose who are connected with book production in modem society" (Staal,1961:17). It may, of course, be that the Rg Veda and other Vedic materi-als have been particularly prone to this manner of treatment, because oftheir composition in the preclassical form of Sanskrit known as Vedic: itseems likely that their existence in an arcane, archaic language wouldhave reinforced the prior disinclination to interpret on ritual grounds.However, the propensity to memorize and to recite holy words—perhapsas a manifestation of devotion (bhakti), perhaps with the aspiration ofhaving one's consciousness transformed by the mantras, as notedearlier—runs, very, very deep in Hindu life. There is scarcely a festivalin India that is not accompanied by the recitation of some classical text,most often in Sanskrit, in which case, as we have seen, it cannot be intel-ligible to more than a select few, or in an archaic and therefore, at best,rather opaque form of the vernacular. (See Scheduler and Hess: 79 onthe role of Tulsi Dfis's Hindi Rimayana in Rfimlllfi.) Whatever else wemay conclude about the scriptural life of India, justice must be done tothe fact that, at least some of the time, Hindus have affirmed that theholiness of the Word is intrinsic, and that one participates in it, not byunderstanding, but by hearing and reciting it.

3. The third issue on which it appears necessary to rethink some ofour familiar patterns of thought might be called the dialectic between

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sruti and smfti, or the double desideratum of literally preserving anddynamically recreating the Word. While it is tempting to assume thatconsiderations of content, or genre, or label, or name may enable us tocategorize a given text as either Sruti or smrti, closer examination revealsa subtle and highly suggestive movement between these two kinds ofholy Word.

Let us begin with the observation that "scripture," like "cousin,""weed," or "poison," seems necessarily to be a relational concept: itdepends for its definition, not upon its intrinsic properties, but uponthose properties in relation to people, who value it for better or worse.7

While the implications of this fact are only gradually coming to beexplored (e.g., Smith, 1980), it seems likely that the existence of twocentral terms for Hindu scripture, Sruti and smfti, may be a reflection oftwo different kinds of relationship that can be had with verbal materialin the Hindu tradition. We have already had grounds to question thesufficiency of understanding Sruti as chronologically prior to smrti andto observe that Sruti, in the form of the so-called late Upanisads, has defacto functioned as an open-ended category in Hindu life. We must nowgo one step further, however, to observe that, in some cases, there hasbeen an observable shift over time in the way a particular instance ofthe Word, a particular "text," if you must, has been regarded by individ-uals within the tradition.

Let us begin with the Bhagaoad Glta. The logic for understandingthe Glta as smrti is strong and the case for such understanding is regu-larly made (Bharati: 274; Larson: 661). The text is, after all, situated inthe Mahabharata, which is perhaps the premier instance of smrti, andits didactic intent converges magnificently with the traditionally under-stood role of smrti. Bharati is surely correct in lamenting the recentfacile identification of the Glta as "the Hindu Bible" (274-75), but mat-ters are also more complex than he allows. In his last remarks on thistext, to which he devoted so much attention throughout his career, vanBuitenen concludes that the post-Gita evidence (the views of variouscommentators and the author of the VedQntasutras) "attests to the near-Sruti prestige of our text at a very early date" (1981:12). There is addi-tional evidence to strengthen such an interpretation. It is a fact, forinstance, that the material that has traditionally been understood as Sruti(the Vedas, Br&hmanas, etc.) has shown a much higher degree of textualintegrity than smfti material, i.e., textual variants are far fewer in Sruti.It is worth noting then that, in the critical edition of the Mahabharata,the variant readings in the text of the Bhagacad Glta are substantiallyfewer than in the rest of the epic. Beyond this, the testimony of thecolophons is that the Glta is of a piece with the Upanisads, for, at the

7 I am indebted to Wilfred Smith for this comparative way of putting matter*.

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Coburn: "Scripture" in India . 449

end of the first chapter, out of the fifty-three manuscripts used to consti-tute the Glta portion of the Bhismaparvan, forty-seven read bhagavadgi-tasu upanisatsu, "in the songs (verses) of the Blessed One, which areUpanisads."8 Finally, in the Vedic word-index referred to earlier (VPK),there are no intrinsic grounds for including the Gita at all, since, in itsorigin, it is not Vedic. In the volumes that index the Upanisads, however,the Glta is included, based on the rationale that it is "based on or . . .very intimately related to the Upanisads" (vol. Ill, part i, intro.: xiv).The Bhagavad GUa may have originated as smrti, but it appears to havefunctioned in Hindu life very much as Sruti.

A similar shift has occurred with regard to the Devi-Mahitmya, alsoknown as the Candl or Ehirga-SaptaSatl, 700 (Verses) to Durga. Thistext appears as thirteen chapters in one of the early Purfinas, where itseems to be a cleverly accomplished insertion in an older text, with theSaptaSatl itself probably dating from the sixth century C.E. In terms ofcontent, it is a vivid and utterly appropriate piece of smrti. But in termsof function, (1) it has had an independent liturgical life of its own; (2) inthe liturgical context, it "is treated as if it were a Vedic hymn or versewith fsi, metres, pradhanadevata, and oiniyoga (for japa)" (Kane: 155n);and (3) it has gathered around itself no fewer than sixty-seven commen-taries, the most common concern of which is with how the mantras ofthe text, and the modest number of variants, should be properly dividedso as to arrive at the requisite 700 verses for recitation (Sarma).

If we enlarge the scope of our discussion here beyond the specificterms Sruti and smrti, it becomes possible to identify a central dynamicof Hindu treatment of the Word. That dynamic revolves around thetension between (1) the desire to preserve and recite, and not necessarilyto understand, a verbally fixed (usually oral) text, and (2) the desire tounderstand, both for oneself and for others, religious ideas that are pre-sented in verbal form.9 Since we have just seen that the treatmentaccorded the Devl-Mahatmya seems to be a reflection of the former ofthese desires, we must note that there is a complementary process that isalso at work in the functioning of the text. According to Babb: "It isimportant to realize that Saptashati, like all Hindu texts, has two distinctkinds of religious significance. It has, first of all, a kind of intrinsic po-tency as a collection of sacred utterances. The chanting of the mantras

8 The colophons' use of the plural of uponifad is fascinating, but we cannot pursue the

matter here. At a minimum, it substantiates our claim that the terms for various kinds of

Hindu scripture stand in need of careful reexamination.9 It may appear banal to say that "words" present "ideas." However, as we strive for a

phenomenology of scripture, it is important to realize that words do not necessarily serve

this function, as the Hindu phenomenon of mantra demonstrates. Conversely, we need to

be reminded that "ideas" can also be vividly conveyed through such nonverbal media as

music and art.

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450 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

of which it is composed is a way of pleasing the goddess and tap-ping her powers. But the mantras have meaning of another sort, fortogether they constitute one of the principal scriptural delineations ofthe goddess. The text is to be understood as well as chanted, and conse-quently in the editions available in the Raipur bazaar the Sanskritstanzas are given together with their Hindi translation* (218, my italics).A similar dialectic may be discerned with regard to the Hindi flflmfl-yana (RSmacaritam&nas) of Tulsi Dfis. In origin a sixteenth-century "re-creation" or "transcreation" of the Rama story, which had been toldmany a time, in many a version, since Valmiki's original Sanskrit compo-sition a millenium and a half earlier, Tulsi DSs's Ramiyana has beenexperienced as so powerful and so holy that it is now recited verbatimduring Ramlili even though, as noted earlier, its classical Hindi isscarcely transparent to modern Hindi speakers. Held in counterpoint tothis recitation, however, are the dialogues between the actors in thefestival drama, which occur in modern Hindi and which both translateand elaborate upon the words of Tulsi Das (Schechner and Hess: 79). Asa final nuance in this dialectic, we should note the evidence recentlypresented in Hawley's At Play with Krishna. The story of the cowherdKrishna, has, of course, been retold in vital and compelling fashion oninnumerable occasions, and a direct line runs from its first appearance inthe HarivatfiSa, through the Visnu and Bh&gavata Pur&nas, into themodern vernaculars. On some occasions, such as in the Bh&gavata, or inJayadeva's GltS. Govinda, the story has crystallized into a form thatmight be deemed "canonical"—which in the Hindu case would thusmean "worthy of being recited verbatim." As the Krishna tradition livesin the dramas of contemporary Brindavan, however, there is no "canon,"because there is no "text." There are, of course, familiar songs and plotstructures, and lines are remembered from past performances, but "theplays are constantly being recomposed," and the elements of indepen-dence and spontaneity are crucial to the vitality of the performances(xii-xiii). India, it would appear, wants both the literal preservation andthe dynamic recreatidn of the Word, and the movement between thesetwo foci—whether or not they be called Sruti and smrti, respectively—isboth subtle and continuous.10

10 The argument has been made by Buck, drawing on Hindu material, and by Slater, on

a broader scale, that ttorie* may be fruitfully undentood as living at the heart of religiouslife, and of religious traditions. While appreciating that they have presented an importantdimension of human religiousness, I find their analyses do not go to the heart of (at leastHindu) matters: as we have seen, India does indeed love to re-create traditional stories,but she also loves to preserve (through recitation) the memorable verbal creations of thepast The typology that I will broach below may be understood as endeavoring to retainthe best of the Buck-Slater argument, while seeing it in relation to other crucial featuresof the Word in Hindu life.

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Coburn: "Scripture" in India 451

IV

We turn now from a consideration of specific issues in the Hindutradition to a typology that arises out of this consideration, and thataspires to alleviate some of the conceptual difficulties encountered intrying to talk about Hindu "scripture." I offer the typology in two differ-ent forms, the former, I think, quite defensible and clearly related towhat has gone before, the latter more speculative.

The typology is designed to indicate the varied ways that Hindushave related to a range of verbal materials that have originated at differ-ent times and places. At the outset, I urged us to think of the basic unitfor discussing the Hindu situation as the verbal utterance of a particularindividual at a particular point in time, and it will now be apparent whywe have to proceed to such an extreme "atomizing" of the material.More abstract approaches, based on prevailing conceptualizations, get usinto difficulties: the same verbal event—the same utterance—has beenvariously regarded at different times, and even such familiar categoriesas Sruti and "Upanisad" appear to break down when pushed hardenough. In order to keep from being misled by our existing terminology,I am proposing that we let the atomization process go as far as possible,to the level of individual verbal utterance. And then let us see the man-ner of relationships that Hindus have had with the utterances that areconsidered sacred. I refer collectively to such utterances as "the Word."

There is a further reason why I have called this, not a typology ofscripture, but a typology of the Word. We have seen that Hindus haveemphasized the oral/aural over the written aspect of words. More thanthat, however, they have understood that which is mediated through r§isand gurus to be verbal-and-yet-more-than-verbal. To convey its nature,they have used a variety of metaphors, not just of audition, but of sight,the experience of knowing and being known. And if it be objected thatthis sounds more like a typology of revelation than one of scripture, thenso be it. It has to be noted immediately, however, that while the Word(vOc, Veda, etc.) may be more like "revelation" than "scripture," theclosest analogy that we ordinary mortals have for its nature is that it isverbal, has sound-form. Gonda explains its distinctiveness as follows: "Thecategories of language are, so to say, a diaphragm, an obstacle whichcomes between the reality and our consciousness. Whereas in ordinaryusage this diaphragm makes its existence and influence felt, poeticallanguage is devoid of these categories and therefore attains to realitybefore its solidification into discursive thought. Thus poetical language isrelated to other extraordinary forms of expression, for instance, on thereligious plane with mantras" (67; see also 346). The Word, therefore, as Iam using it here has a deliberate multivalence: it indicates a verbal andhumanly articulated reality, but it also has metaphysical overtones and

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452 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

more than a hint of the mysterium tremendum.The first formulation of the typology suggests that Hindus have done

five things with these holy verbal events. There is overlap, of course, andfew pure "types" exist. Nonetheless, for the sake of convenience we maythink of there being five ways that Hindus have been engaged with theWord.

1. They have frozen it, captured it verbatim, treated it as sound eter-nal, the hum of the universe. While it is primarily the Vedic material,and particularly the fig Veda, that belongs here, other material may betreated in this fashion, as we have seen. This is the way, it seems to me,Hindus have treated that which they regard as Sruti. There are obviouslymany cases where non-Sruti material has been committed to memory,but it would appear that the major thing Hindus are saying when theycall certain verbal events kuti is that they are eternal, intrinsicallypowerful, and supremely authoritative. They are never outmoded. Theyare worthy of recitation, regardless of whether they are "understood."Indeed, mantras do not "mean" anything in the conventional semanticor etymological senses. Rather, they mean everything.

And if we are bewildered by that affirmation, the Hindu responsewould be for each of us to find an appropriate guru, to receive from him(among other things) a mantra, to recite it faithfully, and eventually wewill come to see the point. This is, in many ways, the most characteristi-cally Hindu view of the Word, and of the various views in India, itappears to be the most radically disjunctive with Western notions ofscripture.

2. Hindus have also treated certain stories as salvific and/or normative,and so they have told them over, and over, and over again. Particularlycompelling versions of a story may hold people's attention for centuries,and a really powerful version may come to be regarded as if it were Sruti.Nonetheless, even in those cases, what is important is that the story beintelligible to those who hear it. And this may, of course, entail "transcrea-tion" out of Sanskrit into one of the vernaculars. This is what seems to havebeen happening through the centuries to the stories of Krishna Cop&la andRfima, and, perhaps, more broadly in the rich corpus of Hindu mythology.

3. Hindus have composed commentaries as a way of making someembodiments of the Word intelligible in the present. Certain kinds ofWord, such as the sutra literature, invite or virtually demand commen-taries because of their deliberate brevity. (It is said that the author ofsuch a text would sell his grandson to save a syllable.) Other kindsdemand commentaries because they are in Sanskrit (or classical Hindi)and therefore require a vernacular commentary in order to make themintelligible: instances of this we have seen in the treatment accorded theDurgjb-Saptaiafi and the RUrnayana of Tulsi DSs. The pattern of writingcommentaries, however, is uneven, clustering around certain texts such

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Coburn: "Scripture* in India 453

as the sQtra and bhakti literature, and sometimes surprisingly absent, asin the case of most Pur&nas. One suspects that inquiry into the pattern oftexts that have attracted commentaries is a matter that would repayfurther investigation.

4. Some embodiments of the Word in India have generated imita-tions of themselves. The terms of imitation, however, i.e., what it is thathas been deemed worthy of emulating, have varied. Van Buitenen(1966) shows how, for the Bh&gavata PurHna, it is archaic language,Vedic Sanskrit, that is being reproduced. Aiyar, alternatively, indicatesthe huge variety of texts that have called themselves "Glt&s" in spite ofsometimes departing fantastically from the concerns of the BhagavadGltQ proper. If one were inclined to such terminology, one might saythat this response to the Word is a kind of "imitative magic," while ourfifth type would be magic of the "sympathetic" variety.

5. Finally, some embodiments of the Word have lived on by receiv-ing additions into themselves. Indeed, a large portion of what Hinduscall smrti, specifically the epics and Pur&nas, seems to welcome additionswith open bindings. One might expect this—with its attendant problemsfor the task of critical editing—where the material is what has tradition-ally been called smfti, for the very concept is that of an authoritative,but open-ended Word. Even in what has traditionally been called Sruti,however, we have seen that there has been a de facto open-endedness.The urge to enfold the new into the old is but one way that Hindus havedealt with the Word, but it appears to cut across the full range of Hindu"scriptural" material.11

The second formulation of the typology is a drastic simplification ofthe first, and it, in turn, will bring us to a final remark. Might it be possi-ble, one may ask, to reduce this five-fold manner of dealing with theWord to two basic types? The former might be called "scripture," andthe latter "story." Or following Karman's distinction in sacred art (119),one might call the former "sacramental," and the latter "didactic." Oneis tempted, perhaps, to suggest a correspondence with the Creek discrim-ination of logos and mythos. Regardless of the appropriateness of termsdrawn from other contexts, the basic distinction is this. Hindus have

11 It is worth emphasizing that the two epics of India, so often lumped together in discus-

sions of the literature, might, according to this typology, best be understood as representing

different ways that Hindus have dealt with the Word: the story of RAma is comparatively

brief and simple and, while any particular version may admit of being memorized (type 1),

it has primarily retained its vitality through being retold in a variety of ways, in a variety of

languages (type 2). The MahObhirata, by contrast, is not a story, but a library or encyclope-

dia. (See Dimock et aL: 53 for a superb account of what would be involved in conceptuali-

zmg a Western equivalent.) And it seems to have retained its vitality by incorporating

divene local traditions into Itself (type 5), a process in which uniting appears to have played

a rigniflrant role (Winternltz: 464-65).

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shown a propensity to treat certain instances of the Word as eternal andimmutable, and they have been engaged with some of them (the RgVeda) now for about three and a half millenia: this is type 1 in our firstformulation of the typology. Hindus have treated other instances of theWord as dynamic, as spawning all manner of elaboration, some of itbeing verbal—and therefore including types 2 through 5 above—butmuch of it being found in festival life, image worship, philosophy, andaesthetics, i.e., in darkm(a) and rasa. The test of whether such elabora-tions are authentic is the simple one of whether or not they receive thesanction of what we might call Verbal specialists: at times, this meansthe sanction of Brahmins (Dimmitt and van Buitenen: 4), but it can alsorefer to those whose spiritual credentials are experiential, the perfectedyogis cited by Copinath Kaviraj (44). If I were then to press the casethat, for Hindus, it is the former of these types that comes closest to"scripture" as a generic phenomenon—because it is compact, bound-aried, and therefore capable of being "canonized" (Buck: 93)—then Ihave enabled myself to observe that, in a Hindu context, the Word hasbeen operative in scripture, but that it is a larger-than-scriptural phe-nomenon. And that is an assertion for which I think I would find sometheological support in other religious traditions.

In pressing such a case, however, I would then have to note that thedistinctively Hindu way of engaging oneself with this compact, bound-aried verbal material is to recite it, not necessarily to understand it. Andthat is likely to contrast strikingly with the scriptural situation elsewherein the world.

In anticipation of future efforts to attain clarity on such matters, a finalword must be said about the context in which the study of any particularscriptural tradition is undertaken. The thrust of our exploration in thisessay has been into the concepts and nature of the Hindu religious tradi-tion. It is well known, however, that the very concept "Hindu" is a late one,dating only from the arrival of the Muslims, to say nothing of the moregeneral danger of reification in conceptualizing the religious life (Smith,1963). We must be reminded of these facts because there is evidence thatthe development of the narrowly "Hindu" phenomenon of scripture hasoften been intertwined with non-"Hindu" matters. Staal, for instance,argues that it was the Buddhists who first committed a sacred oral text towriting, in 35-32 B.CE. (1979:123). While the Buddhist use of holy words isitself far from clear (cp. Dimock et al.: 11, and Norman), it would be fruit-ful to explore Staal's contention here in relation to Renou's suggestion,cited earlier, that the division between sWuti and smrti also marks theboundary between orality and editing. Similarly, while we know thatSSyana, the great fourteenth-century commentator on the IjLg Veda, hadhis predecessors (Renou, 1965:23), it is a fact that he flourished after theMuslim entry into India and one then wonders whether he might reflect

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Coburn: "Scripture" in India 455

the Islamic tradition that texts are for exegeting, as well as for reciting. Bethat as it may, it is now clear that the great significance ascribed to the RgVeda in modern India derives in large measure from the labors of anOxford professor to accomplish the unprecedented task of publishing thattext in its entirety. The professor was, of course, Max Muller (Rocher).Finally, there are indications that Western notions of critical editing and ofan "original text" have represented a sometimes startling intrusion uponHindu reality, with consequences that are complex and often ill-understood (Coburn). All of this evidence would suggest that, while we arebecoming more alert to the great variety of ways that verbal material hasfunctioned religiously in human lives, both Hindu and other, a fully ade-quate understanding is not yet upon us.

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