Text layers in the Gita

[Madhav Deshpande]

G. Mueller brings up an important point.  However, I would like to suggest
that a search for possible layers within the text of the BG and Mbh do not
obviate the need to study the received shape of these texts.  On the other
hand, they offer us a dimension which is not available otherwise.  While
it is true that the final shape attained by these texts needs to be
studied as having influenced their interpretation for most of later
period, a reconstruction of earlier layers provides us significant insight
into the evolving history (albeit hypothetical) of how the transmitters of
the text possibly responded to emerging religious and philosophical
trends.  The tradition itself admits alternative shapes of the text of the
Mbh (cf. manvaadi bhaaratam kecit aastiikaadi tathaapare, and the Suutra
reference to Bhaarata-mahaabhaarataacaaryaa.h, suggesting a Bhaarata text
different from the Mahaabhaarata).  Thus, one direction of study, in my
opinion, complements the other.  Best,

                                        Madhav Deshpande

On Tue, 27 Mar 2001, Gunthard Mueller wrote:

> I don't think anybody on this list would argue against the significance of
> attempts to see if there is an original version to be found, of identifying
> any authentic first text, of analysing and interpreting it.
> But-- in the case of the Gita, the Septuaginta and so many other
> influential works, it may not have been any Urversions that had the immense
> cultural impact, but the derivational packages into which they developed.
> So I find it perfectly understandable if these derivational packages are
> analysed in the shape and form in which they were presented and through
> which they shaped and formed their audience.
>
> Wouldn't you agree that literary texts can take on a momentum
> far beyond the control of the authour. A particular shape may
> be imposed (norming/denorming; ie attempts at canonization,
> or interpolations, historic layers, or syntheses). A particular function
> might be imposed, of which the author may not have dreamt, or a
> particular interpretation --maybe quite alien to the original intent--,
> to the point of unrecognizability. Ancillary texts (commentaries,
> exegetic works, vitae of members of a tradition following this text, ...)
> may start surrounding the text, antibody-like. The original cell may
> get less and less visible. A larger picture emerges, or many larger pictures.
> At this point, the text may have become many texts.
> Isn't the Gita a text that took on just such a dynamism of its own.
> And isn't it even itself an interpolation in another text.
>
> I see no contradiction between studying these forms of the texts
> and the reconstructed Urtext, as long as one is conscious of the fact that we
> are dealing with very different animals.
>
> On a different note, I believe that some of the matters with which the Gita
> or other religious texts are concerned cannot be tackled purely with the
> tools of logic, and will therefore never be totally harmonizable, no matter
> whether an individual authour writes on them with black ink on white paper
> in monitored real time, or whether the text is a historical amalgamation...
>
> Sorry to Dominik for writing another rather long mail.
> If it helps, please consider half of it devoid of meaning...
>
> Yours,
> Gunthard Mueller
>
> gm at e-ternals.com
>
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> Martin Gansten wrote:
>
> > >This really is an old hat - orientalist, colonialist eh?-,  but which older
> > >"Hindu" text does not have  such layers? To interpret the Upanisads or the
> > >Gita as a unitary text is about as bad as doing the same thing with the
> > >Hebrew Bible, based on the various Christian or Mormon points of view.
> > >(Valid for a Christian/Mormon but telling us little about the authors'
> > >intent of the Hebrew Bible).
> >
> > I would disagree with that, as far as readings of the Gita alone are
> > concerned. For one thing, the Hebrew Bible is a far longer text; and from
> > what I am given to understand -- though no Hebraist myself -- the books
> > comprising it vary considerably in style, etc. The Gita has but 700 or so
> > verses (the Kashmiri version, incidentally, is some 45 verses longer, not
> > shorter), and the style is internally consistent -- as, in my opinion, is
> > the doctrinal content. It is synthetic, certainly, but historically
> > multi-layered? I think not.
> >
> > The traditional Vedantic view of the Gita *and* all the (classical)
> > Upanishads as a unitary corpus (zaastraikaarthya), on the other hand, *is*
> > comparable to a unitarist interpretation of the Bible. Whether we need to
> > label it 'bad', even from a scholarly point of view, is a different matter.
> > In my view, ahistorical readings of a text are not necessarily 'bad' unless
> > actually posing as historical.
> >
> > Martin Gansten
> > Lund University
>