ABSTRACT

Ancient Indian texts: strong in size, weak on critique Compared with Europe and the Middle East, South Asia has a larger population and range of languages, a similar land mass, and probably a vaster literature of religious diversity, stretching back through several millennia. Yet the absence of critical textual editing is underlined by seasoned western scholars, reviewing the field of Vedic Hinduism:

The shocking truth is that even for Vedic texts, not to speak of other Sanskrit texts, there hardly exists any truly critical edition. What we have are the generally reliable standard editions, largely of the last [i.e. the 19th] century by European and American Indologists (Whitney, Bloomfield) which, however, in reality are editions with the variae lectiones more or less diligently recorded. They all lack a stemma of the MSS. In some cases, such as Roth-Whitney’s Atharvaveda, it is extremely difficult to get even a vague idea of the distribution of the MSS at a certain passage.