Jagatprakasamallas Muladevasasidevavyakhyananataka.

• Author: van der Kuijp, Leonard W.J.

The geological fact that about thirty thousand years ago the Kathmandu valley was a Pleistocene lake has precipitated a vast literature in especially Sanskrit, Nevari and middle Indo-Aryan languages which deal with the divine or semi-divine origins of this lake and how it came to be transformed into the fertile valley it now is. It is again in danger of being flooded--in many places this has already happened--this time by concrete and cement.

There are essentially two accounts of its origin, a Hindu and a Buddhist one.(1) In the first volume under review, H. Brinkhaus focuses primarily on the Hindu dossier of this legend, since the two accounts are so radically different, concluding that "a textual connection between the older Pauranic traditions of both sides ... cannot be established". Brinkhaus' meticulous and uncanny text-critical skills, already known from previous publications, especially from his work on the Mischkasten, are here brought to bear on the relevant Sanskrit Hindu pauranic literature, which consists of the Vagvatimahatmyaprasamsa, also known as the Pasupatipurana (PasP), the Nepalamahatmya (NepM), which claims to be part of the Himavatkhanda (HimKh), but which is absent in each and every known manuscript of the latter, and the Nepalamahatmya, which in fact does constitute a major portion of the Himavatkhanda. He takes us on a rather involved and at times tortuous, but always fascinating, journey through a text-historical thicket of enormous complexity affecting the transmission of these texts, where he is able to show convincingly that PasP actually consists of two separate texts, of which the second part, the Pasupatipurana proper, was clearly Saiva from the very beginning, while its first section, the Vagvatimahatmyaprasamsa, seems to have been originally conceived as a Vaisnava work, which subsequently underwent a Saiva recoding. On the basis of a detailed comparison of a selection of passages from all three texts (here the influence of P. Hacker's approach to anonymous texts is unmistakable) Brinkhaus comes to the well-nigh inevitable conclusion that both the NepM and the HimKh represent intermediate phases of the process that ultimately led to the welding together of the PasP's two parts. This he does by way of an in-depth examination of those passages that deal with the genesis of the goddess and river Vagvati/Vagmati |= present day Bagmati~ (along which lies the well-known Pasupatinath temple complex) and the...