Bha.t.ta Bhaaskara Mi;sra's Bhaa.sya on the Taittiriiya

[Ashok Aklujkar]

Arlo,

On 2003-08-22 10:40, you wrote:
> I guess not too many
> Indologists are ever fishing in this neck of the woods... Or are they?

In your first message you wrote:
>In fact the page-headers of vol. II of the Mysore edition suddenly change
between p. 183 and 185 from ``Tattiriiyabraahma.nam
Bha.t.tabhaaskarabhaa.syopetam'' to ``Maadhaviiyabhaa.syopetam''. This is
around TB 2.4.5.44 = Aanandaa;srama ed. 2.4.5.1, not anywhere near the last
4 anuvaakas of TB 2 mentioned by R. Shama Sastry (several prapaa.thakas with
their own anuvaakas follow!), nor anywhere near the place where the
commentary of Saaya.na actually seems to start being printed.
>Does anybody know the exact extent of the portions printed with Bha.t.ta
>Bhaaskara Mi;sra's commentary, or can anyone point me to a source where they
>have been listed? I have checked, as far as I am able to do so, Tsuji's
>Genzon Yajuruweda Bunken / Existent Yajurveda-Literature, to no avail.
>Is anybody aware of the existence of complete versions of his commentary on
>TB either in manuscript or in print?<

As your last sentence indicates, the final answer to your query must come
from your own examination of the mss or the same examination carried out for
you by other competent scholars. Those ms catalogues which give detailed
descriptions of the mss, including their beginnings and ends, will be
helpful in the meanwhile.

Appearance of wrong page headers is not an unparalleled feature of editions.
So, I would not take them as posing a serious problem. It is quite likely
that in anticipation of what he was going to print in the last 4 anuvaakas
R. Shama Sastry instructed the compositor to change the page header but did
not notice until the formes were printed that the compositor had effected
the change at an earlier point than desired. Much would depend on how many
formes were simultaneously finalized by the editor or the press for
printing.

The eva in your second passage, ata;s ca tatra saaya.nabhaa.syam eva
nive;sitam, is significant. Here Shama Sastry assures the reader that for
the last 4 anuvaakas no mixing with B-B's commentary has taken place -- only
S's commentary has been incorporated in the edn. Your translation > Hence
this edition supplies Saaya.na's comm. (the `Maadhaviiyabhaa.sya') for those
anuvaakas< should be strengthened to the suggested extent.

The third passage
>>> ko;saantaraalaabhaac ca taittiriiyasa.mhitaayaa.m ca braahma.ne ara.nyake ca
>>> lupta.m du.spa.tha.m ca bha.t.tabhaaskarabhaa.syam apahaaya
>>> saaya.nabhaa.syam eva nyave;si |
informs us that where no sufficient guidance was forthcoming from the ms/mss
of B-B's commentary, either because no ms existed for the part concerned or
the available mss were difficult to read/interpret, supplementation with S's
commentary was done in the TS, TB (other than the last 4 anuvaakas) and TA.
One, of course, hopes that Shama Sastry has annotated such places in some
way, at least through an abbreviation of S's name or commentary title,
through reproducing variants in footnotes or through employment of a
different typeface. Have you already checked if any pattern can be detected?
Perhaps Shama Sastry began the mixing roughtly where the headers change.

Whether a pattern exists or not, we should keep the following in mind in
evaluating Shama Sastry as an editor: Early editors of Skt texts, especially
the traditionally trained ones in India, for understandable reasons, were
more frequently seeking to make a text available or to make a text
available-and-intelligible than to give historically revealing readings or
explanations with exact ascriptions etc.

ashok aklujkar