Ideological distortions of MSS

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

Dmitri <dmitris at PIPELINE.COM> wrote:

>The question, I'd like to ask indologists on this listserv is:
>Is there a known sanskrit MSS of which two versions exists, those
>two versions are different, and the difference might be attributed
>to a deliberate editing of the earlier version to bind the meaning of
>a passage towards a religious, ideological or scholastic dogma?

Rather than the yogasUtras or similar texts, it seems to me that you would
have better luck finding widely different versions of hagiographic texts.
The Sankaravijaya of anantAnandagiri (usually attributed to Anandagiri, but
mistakenly) comes to mind. Compare the 1868 Bibliotheca Indica edition with
the 1971 Madras edition. There are two distinct sets of mss. for this text
that cannot be easily reconciled with each other, as mentioned in the
preface to the Madras edition. There are quite a few indications that one
set of mss. represents a reworking of an older version of the text.

Within the more standard sUtra-s and their commentaries, it is perhaps not
very well known that as compared to all known earlier commentators, the
Dvaitin AnandatIrtha (madhva) has a very different number (total) and
numbering of the vedAntasUtras. Sankara, bhAskara and rAmAnuja mutually
differ only in very minor ways, e.g. whether a given string of text is one
sUtra or two consecutive sUtras. I don't think it has ever been investigated
whether madhva's unique reading is particularly motivated by religious or
ideological dogma.

Vidyasankar