Wie man den Veda lesen kann.

• Position: Book review

Wie man den Veda lesen kann: Gandharva und die * Zwischenzustande * im Rgveda und im Kommentar des Sayana--Wege der Interpretation eines ar-chaischen Textes. By Cornelia Haas. Historische Sprachforschung, Erganzungsheft, vol. 43. Gott-ingen: VANDENHOECK & RUPRECHT, 2004. Pp. 266.

This revision of a 2004 University of Wurzburg dissertation offers its readers advice on "how one can read the Veda." Indeed, one could read the Veda thus, but should one? The answer is emphatically no.

The specific focus of the work is the rare and shadowy figure of the Gandharva in the Rig Veda (the word occurs twenty times), and the author attempts to connect it thematically and functionally with the Gandharva in much later Buddhist texts, particularly the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Abhidharmakosa. In these latter texts, she tells us, the Gandharva is the being, representing the transmigrating soul, who inhabits the temporal period between death and rebirth, seeking to be implanted in the new womb. Her aim is to find traces of the association of the Gandharva and rebirth in the Rigvedic passages mentioning the Gandharva. Thus the subtitle.

It is her methodology that purportedly gives us the main title. Her procedure is to consider each Rigvedic Gandharva passage in turn, and immediately afterwards to cite, translate, and discuss Sayana's medieval commentary on the same passage. This is supposed to provide an illuminating confrontation between Western ("textimmanenter Analyse") and indigenous (Sayana) Rigvedic hermeneutics (p. 11; see also back cover). In truth, however, the confrontation is rather muted, for she subjects both the original text and Sayana's commentary to the same capricious treatment: an extremely aggressive reading of the Sanskrit followed by an extremely imaginative interpretive paraphrase--after which both the Rig Veda and Sayana come as close as it is possible to force them to endorsing her views on the ur-Buddhistic Gandharva. In the end Sayana sounds very much like Haas, and when he resists, one can sense some irritation at his independence in comments such as "Auch dies ist jedoch leider nicht eindeutig belegbar"(p. 210).

The difficulties she faces in proving her thesis start, of course, with the fact that most interpreters do not consider rebirth ("Wiedergeburt") to be yet a part of the Rigvedic belief system. In positing it, or something like it, she follows Th. Oberlies, who in his Die Religion des...