Asko Parpola : Jaimini-Kalpa with Bhavatrata-Vrtti

This book publishes primary sources on ancient South Asia.

The Jaimini-Kalpa (JK) is a previouly unpublished Sama-Vedic text composed in Sanskrit around the sixth century BCE. It was discovered by Asko Parpola in 1966 in a unique miscatalogued manuscript in the Tanjore Maharaja Serfoji's Sarasvati Mahal Library in Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu, South India. A rather exhaustive decades-long hunt for manuscripts of Jaiminiya texts in South India and elsewhere did not produce any further manuscripts of this text; but another unique manuscript from the Thanjavur library, Candrasekhara's Prayoga-Vrtti, a Medieval work, contains many quotations from it.

The Jaimini-Kalpa is the Jaiminiya counterpart of the Arseya-Kalpa of the Kauthuma school of Sama-Veda. These texts have as their purpose to give the kalpa or klpti 'arrangement' of the Sama-Vedic liturgy in all Soma sacrifices: which samans ('songs') are to be sung on which text verses and in which order and with what repetition of the stotra verses at the different services of pressing the Soma juice in a given rite.

The JK has been commented in Sanskrit by Bhavatrata and his student and son-in-law Jayanta, who lived in the South Indian state of Kerala around 700 CE. Their commentary, which cites the commented passages of the bJK only by their first two and last two syllables, was first published, with many errors, in 1966 by Premnidhi Sastri on the basis of a single faulty manuscript. The present edition is based on the best existing manuscripts, all from Kerala.

With the coomentaries and Candrasekhara's applications (prayoga), the JK is so voluminous that it has to be printed in two volumes. The latter volume has an appendix, AP's index to the Jaiminiya-Uha-Gana and Jaiminiya-Uhya-Gana, the two song books of the Jaiminiya-Samhita giving the samans in their modified form and in their ritual order, that is, the order of the Soma sacrifices in which they are sung.

Also published in the latter volume is Jayanta's commentary on selected passages of the Jaiminiya-Arseya-Brahmana, with a critical apparatus giving all the variae lectiones of all available mss.

Asko Parpola is Professor emeritus of Indology / South Asian Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland