Purana Perennis: Reciprocity and Transformation in Hindu and Jaina Texts.

• Author: Rocher, Ludo

Purana Perennis grew out of a conference on the puranas held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in August 1985, a conference of which Velcheru Narayana Rao was the true adhvaryu (dixit David Knipe in his concluding remarks). The essays collected in this volume all deal with one of the central themes of the conference: "the relationship between the so-called Mahapuranas, or 'Great' Puranas, of the Sanskrit tradition (themselves texts that the Indologist, i.e., Sanskritic, Establishment largely ignored) and many other sorts of Puranas" (Wendy Doniger, p. viii).

In the first chapter Laurie Patton deals with a Sanskrit text which, at first sight, one would not expect in a volume devoted to the puranas: Saunaka's Brhaddevata. Yet, the Brhaddevata is "a curiously Puranic kind of text" (p. 24). Patton argues against Alf Hiltebeitel's concept of "transitional periods" and "transitional texts," because the term "traditional" implies that there is something stable at both ends. One might as well look upon all texts as transitional, at least to a certain extent; and Patton refers to Wendy Doniger's work on a text of the "stable" Vedic period, the Jaiminiyabrahmana. Guided by the date which Muneo Tokunga recently proposed for the two re-writings of Saunaka's original Devatanukramani (Harvard diss., 1979, and JAOS 101 [1981]: 275-97), Patton shows (and illustrates with passages from the text) how, in a variety of ways, the Brhaddevata, "in its handling of Vedic subject matter, also includes material more common to both Epic and Puranic texts" (p. 13).

Part I, "From Veda and Epic to Purana and Upapurana," continues with two contributions by Wendy Doniger. The first, "Echoes of the Mahabharata: Why is a Parrot the Narrator of the Bhagavata Purana and the Devibhagavata Purana?" deals with Suka, because "[t]racing the saga of Suka from the Mahabharata to the Bhagavata to the Devibhagavata affords us a splendid working example of the process of transformation of traditional texts through what A. K. Ramanujan has called 'intertextuality,' the way in which Indian texts engage in conversation with one another" (p. 32).

The second article by Wendy Doniger is devoted to the Kedarakhanda of the Skandapurana, "The Scrapbook of Undeserved Salvation." What sets the Kedarakhanda apart is that, unlike other puranas where the unifying theme may be spacial or temporal, this first book of the first section of "the sandiest of all Puranas" has "an intellectual...