[INDOLOGY] Death's Footprint

[George Thompson]

 Dear Jarrod, Dipak, and all,

In 1995 I published [in IIJ 38, pp.1-30] a paper entitled "The Pursuit of
Hidden Tracks in Vedic."  In it I discuss RV 10.18.2 briefly.
Unfortunately I do not have a pdf of this.  Buy I can quote what I said
there:

"Similarly metonymic is the expressive magic used in an apotropaic practice
attested in a funeral hymn, RV 10.18.  In st..2 the relatives of the
deceased are required to "erase the footprints of death" [I leave out all
Skt text to save time], as they leave the funeral pyre to return to
everyday life.  The hope is expressed in st. 3 that death will thereby not
follow them as they return home, to dancing and laughter....  {T]hese
relatives are afraid that the deceased's spirit will not be satisfied with
his leave-taking, that he will trouble his family unless he is adequately
appeased, that death may thus pursue the living.  Among other
precautions... the ritual of erasing the footprints is a means pf
preventing death's pursuit....

What interested me back then about the term pada is its wide semantic
range.  This also attracted Renou's attention in his 1958 monograph *Etudes
sur le vocabulaire du Rgveda*.  To give a sense of what I was thinking
then, I wrote a version of it for *Semiotica: Journal of the Intl.
Association for Semiotic Studies.*  The ediitor-in-chief at the time was
Thomas Sebeok, whose work I was introduced to b Frits Staal.  The title of
that paper was ""From 'footstep' to 'word' in Sanskrit."

In both papers I suggested that the Vedic rsis, absorbed as they were in
their riddling, esoteric brahmodyas, were highly sensitive to signs of all
sorts [not just footprints but also words] and to the inferences that we
draw from them.   In both papers I conclude that not only were the Vedic
rsis sophisticated proto-linguists [as Frits has argued], but that they
also had a science which I called "Vedic semiotics."

Well, I was more exuberant then than I am now.

Maybe this is of some interest to you all.

Best wishes,

George







On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 12:16 PM, Dipak Bhattacharya <dipak.d2004 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> *pada* may mean ‘place, station’.
>
> There is a discussion on pāda/pada by Renou. Unfortunately I cannot go
> into the details immediately. But I remember that it occurred either in the
> Introduction Générale AiG I 1957 or in ‘Notes sur la version “Paippalāda”
> de l’Atharvaveda’ *Journal Asiatique* 1964, 421-450. I may give further
> information later.
>
> Best
>
> DB
>
> On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 10:05 PM, Jarrod Whitaker <whitakjl at wfu.edu> wrote:
>
>> Colleagues:
>> Has anyone written on the phrase mr̥tyóḥ padám (mr.tyo'h. pada'm) in the
>> RV and AV (or later texts)? My cursory search has come up short.
>>
>> Does death leave a footprint behind (possessive or subjective genitive)?
>> Or are the footprints left by the living for death to follow (objective
>> genitive)? The latter seems to be the reasonable conclusion, but it's not
>> evident in the genitive phrase. The phrase appears in the RV's funeral hymn
>> (10.18.2), where the living wipe out "death's footprint" when they return
>> home, which suggests they erase their own trail so death can't follow
>> them,  but in stanza 1 death is banished along his own
>> faraway/distant/remote path (which is different to the gods), which
>> suggests that death does follow (and leave?) his own footprints or trail.
>> Perhaps it's some kind of "plenary" genitive indicating both
>> possibilities...
>>
>> Happy New Year!
>> JW
>>
>> Jarrod Whitaker, Ph.D.
>> Associate Professor,
>> Graduate Program Director,
>> Department for the Study of Religions.
>>
>> Faculty, Department of Women's,
>> Gender and Sexuality Studies.
>>
>> Wake Forest University
>> P.O. Box 7212
>> Winston-Salem, NC 27109
>> whitakjl at wfu.edu
>> p 336.758.4162
>>
>>
>>
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