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Text and Authority in the Older Upaniá¹£ads
Series: - Brill's Indological Library, Volume: 30
Author:
The Upaniá¹£ads have often been treated as a unified corpus of religious and philosophical texts, separate from the older Vedic tradition. It is well known that the Upaniá¹£ads were initially composed and transmitted within specific schools of Vedic recitation, or ÅÄkhÄs, but the ÅÄkhÄ affiliation of each Upaniá¹£ad has received very little attention in the scholarly literature. The author offers a new interpretation of the older Upaniá¹£ads in the light of the Vedic school affiliations of each text. This book argues that issues of textual authority, and in particular the authority of the various Vedic schools, are central in the Upaniá¹£ads, and that the Upaniá¹£ads can, on one level, be read as texts about text. While analyzing the theme of textual authority in the Upaniá¹£ads, the author also outlines a theory of textual criticism as applied to orally transmitted texts that will be of use to textual scholars in other fields as well.
Signe M. Cohen, Ph. D. (1999) in Sanskrit, University of Pennsylvania, is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She has published on Sanskrit philology and Hindu and Buddhist thought.
"Cohen's volume is wonderfully straightforward and judicious in its philological conclusions, and it is highly recommended as a guide to the Upanisads themselves." â Timothy Lubin, Washington and Lee University, in: JAS
All those interested in ancient Indian religion and philosophy, Sanskrit philology, and textual criticism.