La vision de Markandeya et la manifestation du lotus: Histoires anciennes tirees du Harivamsa (ed. cr., Appendice I, n[degrees] 41): Introduction, traduction annotee et texte sanskrit.

• Author: Colas, Gerard
• Position: Hautes Etudes Orientales 43, Extreme-Orient 7 - Book review

La vision de Markandeya et la manifestation du lotus: Histoires anciennes tirees du Harivamsa (ed. cr., Appendice I, n[degrees] 41): Introduction, traduction annotee et texte sanskrit. By ANDRE COUTURE. Hautes Etudes Orientales 43, Extreme-Orient 7. Geneva: LIBRAIRIE DROZ S.A., 2007. Pp. 351.

This book contains a study, French translation, and Sanskrit text of the Puskarapradurbhava (PP), a work of twenty-six chapters that certain manuscripts add to the end of the Harivamsa (HV).

The study consists of four chapters. Chapter one examines on fresh grounds the questions of the edition and date of the HV and of the place of the PP in that work. The only edited ("accessible" in Couture's wording) commentary is Nilakantha's, which dates from the seventeenth century. This commentary interprets the HV from a late Vedantic point of view, which seems to deviate from the obvious meaning (p. 22). Most other quoted commentaries are lost (p. 22). Arjunamisra's commentary, which could be earlier than 1534, is apparently too corrupt to deserve being edited.

P. L. Vaidya, the author of the Critical Edition of the Mahabharata, including the HV, excludes the PP from the HV, adducing the testimony of two ancient Sanskrit summaries of the HV that do not mention the stories of the PP. One is Ksemendra's Bharatamanjari (ca. 1046). But this summary only reflects the textual condition of the HV in Ksemendra's time and place (Kasmir). It would be imprudent to consider it (as Vaidya does) as the exclusive testimony of the HV before the transmission of the HV hypothetically became more complex. The second so-called summary appears in South Indian manuscripts. It consists in a passage where Bhisma selectively recalls various events of Krsna's life. Couture stresses that Bhisma does not mean to be exhaustive. His account is not supposed faithfully to reflect any historical state of the HV. According to Couture, even if the PP was inserted into the HV between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, this does not mean that it did not belong earlier to the same specific vaisnava or bhagavata tradition as the HV.

Couture praises the great value of the immense work involved in Vaidya's Critical Edition. He also shows the weaknesses of Vaidya's attempt to isolate the (approximately) sixth-century condition of the text. He does not share Vaidya's view of the HV. For him the HV was not a fixed text, but "un texte chatoyant qui tient compte des hesitations de l'histoire de la...