Pruvodce dejinami staroindicke literatury.

• Author: Zvelebil, Kamil V.
• Position: Reviews of Books

Pruvodce dejinami staroindicke literatury. By DUSAN ZBAVITEL and JAROSLAV VACEK. Trebic: ARCA JIMFA, 1996. Pp. 537.

I have yet to learn of a better and more detailed survey of ancient Indian literature--in any of the so-called great languages, whether English, German, or French--than this ambitious book in Czech, entitled The Guide through the History of Ancient Indian Literature. This remarkable achievement of two Prague Indologists, Zbavitel and Vacek, has three particularly outstanding qualities. First, nothing of any importance or interest is left out. Second, and probably more importantly, two classical Indian literatures are dealt with in equal detail: Sanskrit (plus Pali and Ardhamagadhi) in seventeen large chapters and Tamil in four chapters. The book's Third notable feature is that it contains plenty of translated texts, mostly poems, some prose, to illustrate the type and quality of the literature in question. Thus, e.g., the chapters on Tamil poetry contain twenty-one samples of mostly lyrical Tamil poems; there is a splendid translation of Rgveda II.12; there are translations of non-hymnic parts of the Veda, etc.

Vedic literature (Zbavitel) is introduced by a general discussion, followed by a rather detailed (pp. 16-37) treatment of the Rgvcda. This method--i.e., first to consider general matters, and sometimes each genre (e.g., the great national Sanskrit epics), and follow with detailed critical discussion--is found throughout the book.

Zbavitel deals in the first one hundred and seventy-three pages with the earliest flowering of ancient Indian literature--that of the Vedas (including the ritual and philosophical texts, i.e., the Brahmanas, Aranyakas and Upanisads), and of the "national epics." A brief but important chapter is dedicated to "great textbooks" (pp. 109-30); and the literature of Buddhism and Jainism, in the respective languages, is described in pp. 73-108. In addition to passages of detailed descriptive and explanatory nature, the authors do not hesitate to bring in critical discussion of various hypotheses and theories. In a relatively brief review one cannot go into details concerning this aspect of the book; I shall mention only a few points which seem to me to be of great interest.

There is, for example, a critical treatment of the so-called akhyana theory (pp. 28-29) of Windisch and Oldenberg regarding the form of the earliest Indian literature (Vedic, the Brahmanas, the Jatakas, the epics, the Puranas), supported by Winternitz and Alsdorf, but disputed by L. Rocher and Jan Gonda. Zbavitel tends to agree with Gonda's views. On p. 23 he...