The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c12.4

c12.4

on a chronological scale, so as to make the divergent statements into points on a line of development. This has often been done, and the results have provided us with interesting surveys of the textual evidence,² but all this effort does not detract from the fact that the sources do contain the most diverse views. Rather than to try to make up for the apparent lack of a consistent theory, we stay nearer to the intentions of our sources if we view their fulsomeness and inconsistency as evidence of their struggle with a real but intractable problem that was too important to gloss over.