Origin and Growth of the Puranic Text Corpus, With Special Reference to the Skandapurana.

• Author: Rocher, Ludo
• Position: Book review

Origin and Growth of the Puranic Text Corpus, With Special Reference to the Skandapurana. Edited by HANS T. BAKKER. Papers of the 12th World Sanskrit Conference, vol. 3.2. Delhi: MOTILAL BANARSIDASS, 2004. Pp. xi + 208.

More than two decades ago my guru, Professor Jan Gonda, asked me to prepare a volume on the Puranas for his new History of Indian Literature. Writing on a genre of Sanskrit literature, without being able to read all its component parts, was an exasperating and risky task. Most elusive of all was the Skandapurana, or rather Skandapuranas. In self-defense I cited Kane's judgment (History of Dharmasastra 5.2, p. 911) that the Skandapurana "is the most extensive of all the Puranas and poses perplexing problems." It took me more pages than for any other Purana to describe, as well as I could, the seven khandas of the Skanda in the Venkatesvara, Vangavasi, and Gurumandala editions, as well as the texts claiming to belong to one of its six samhitas, plus the sundry, not unimportant, mahatmyas also considered to be part of "the" Skandapurana. Only in the last paragraph did I draw attention to an unpublished text written very early, without khandas, of which it was said that it "had to be the original Skanda," thereby implying that "there has indeed at one time been one cohesive Skanda" (The Puranas, 1986, pp. 228-37).

It is this latter Skandapurana, which was practically unknown in the 1980s, that became the object of intensive research by a group of scholars led by Hans T. Bakker, at the University of Groningen. The first volume, containing adhyayas. 1 to 25 of the text, was published in 1998. Subsequent to the volume that is the object of this review the first half of the second volume of the text, containing the Varanasimahatmya (adhyayas 26-31.14), has been completed by Bakker and Harunaga Isaacson, in 2004.

Bakker's essay on the structure of the Varanasimahatmya in the present volume is partly overtaken by the elaborate introduction to volume IIA. One question that the study of the original Skandapurana raises is how and why a puranic text--and puranic texts generally--was/were expanded to its/their more recent and more popular recensions. Julie Torzsok tries to answer this question by means of...