This volume, based on a panel convened at the Thirteenth World Sanskrit Conference, held in Edinburgh in 2006, comprises ten papers treating the question of how Sanskrit texts begin and how, through their beginnings, they structure and situate themselves within the wider domain of Sanskrit discursive practices. The papers are a remarkably diverse collection in the subjects they treat and the methodological approaches they adopt. (The title of the book misleadingly implies that it is concerned only with the beginnings of śāstras—technical and philosophical texts; several papers deal instead with the openings of poetic texts.) On the whole, this tremendous diversity is an asset rather than a drawback. The book does not offer the reader a complete, definitive, state-of-the-art understanding of the role of the “beginning” in Sanskrit philosophical and poetic texts—no such understanding exists—but it does provide a wide-ranging and valuable survey of the questions that are posed by the “beginning,” and the variety of theoretical and methodological approaches that can be brought to bear upon them.
The papers display considerable diversity, even in their understanding of what exactly constitutes the “beginning” of a text. Some take this quite concretely to be the opening verse or sentence of a work, while others view it more generally as the conceptual basis or cognitive or motivational prerequisites that lie at the beginning of a particular textual enterprise.
Several papers take the form of historical surveys of the development of benedictions or opening verses in particular domains. Christopher Minkowski's paper is the most ambitious, charting the evolution of the maṅgala, or benedictory verse, across a wide range of śāstras, and exploring the efforts of later authors to invent maṅgalas for early texts that lacked them. Piotr Balcerowitz and Giuliano Boccali provide narrower studies of inceptional practices in Jaina epistemological texts and Sanskrit court epics, respectively. Balcerowitz finds a shift in these practices that reveals a transformed self-understanding among Jaina epistemologists who, influenced by the sixth-century Buddhist philosopher Diṅnāga, cease to write for an exclusively Jaina audience, and begin to address a wider, pansectarian philosophical community. Boccali charts variations in the ways early court poets open their epics, which diverge in important respects from the sorts of openings called for in later theoretical treatises on poetry.
Phillip Maas offers the most concretely philological study, tracing the manuscript history of Patañjali's Yogaśāstra and demonstrating convincingly that the benedictory verse long taken to be its opening is in fact a much later addition.
Marcus Schmücker and Johannes Bronkhorst, both examining texts in the Vedānta tradition, take “beginning” more broadly to represent the very act or undertaking the study and practice of a śāstra. Schmücker examines the argument of the thirteenth-century Viśiṣṭādvaita theologian Vedāntadeśika that Śaṅkara's view of how and why one undertakes the study of Vedānta is incoherent, as it requires that both the means and the motive of study be based on a kind of ignorance (avidyā). Bronkhorst examines seemingly contradictory statements of Śaṅkara's regarding the opening of his śāstra, concluding that those readings suggesting Śaṅkara saw the older Mīmāṃsā hermeneutic tradition and Vedānta as part of a single śāstra are misguided.
The remaining studies consider, in various ways, how the openings of śāstric and literary texts illuminate their structure and their agendas. Jan Houben shows how the Dvādaśāranayacakra, a sixth-century Jaina doxographic text, develops its treatment of various systems out of a single, basic formula. Silvia D'Intino finds in the introductions to seventh- and fourteenth-century commentaries on the Ṛgveda indications that their authors held significantly different views on the nature and significance of Vedic mantras. Gary Tubb shows how authors on poetic theory dealt in their openings with the “murkiness” and alleged subjectivity surrounding their subject, and the efforts of Jagannātha Paṇḍitarāja, perhaps the last great poetician, to establish the field on a scientific basis. Walter Slaje finds in the opening of Kalhaṇa's Rājataraṅginī evidence that its author saw himself above all as a poet, in contradiction to other recent scholars, who have seen him as a historian writing in deliberate opposition to the poetic tradition.
Surprisingly, indigenous theorization of śāstric beginnings—the famous four anubandhas that texts ought to state or imply in their opening sentences (the topic of the text, its purpose, the relation between them, and who is fit to read it)—remains largely unaddressed. It is alluded to by Tubb, and briefly discussed by Edwin Gerow in the preface to the volume, but one might wish that the growth and (often contested) rise to preeminence of this fourfold scheme had been explored as part of this volume. This in no way detracts, of course, from the merits of the papers that are included. This is a worthy introduction to a field of inquiry that is, perhaps, just beginning.
