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A Vedic Concordance c4.s1: General Plan of the Concordance

A Vedic Concordance c4.s1

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English

General Plan of the Concordance

c4.s1.1

The Concordance is part of a larger scheme.—The plan of this work dates back to the year 1892, when two separate announcements of it were published—the one in the *Proceedings of the American Oriental Society* (for April, 1892, *Journal*, volume xv, page clxxiii), and the other in the *Johns Hopkins University Circulars* (for June, 1892, volume xi, number 99). At that time, as the reader of either of these announcements will see, I sketched the plan of a three-fold apparatus designed to facilitate and deepen the study of the Vedas: one part of it was a universal word-index to the Vedas; another was an index of subjects and ideas; and the third, which I promised to undertake myself, was a Vedic Concordance. As commonly happens in such cases, the fulfilment of the last-named part of the plan cost much more time and labor than was expected. With correspondingly greater satisfaction I now present the result to those of the Hindu people who look upon the Vedas as their sacred books, and to all scholars in this field of Indian antiquities. That result is, an alphabetic index to every line (or *pāda*) of every stanza (or *ṛc*) of the published Vedic literature and to every liturgical formula thereof (*yajus*, *prāiṣa*, and so on), that is, an Index to the Vedic Mantras.

c4.s1.2

Conditions of the problem which the Concordance involves.—The Vedic mantras represent parts of a mass of traditional material which was more extensive even than that which has come down to us,—material current in the various schools of Vedic learning, preserved from generation to generation by memory, and handed down from teacher to pupil by word of mouth. I have, for my part, little doubt that this oral tradition was supported at a comparatively early time—when we cannot say—by written tradition (see AV. xix. 72). As a natural consequence of the fallibility of both oral and written tradition, what was originally and essentially one and the same stanza or formula was handed down in the texts of the various schools in more or less varying forms. The variants are often of the same general character as those which appear in the various forms of ballads, or in recensions of church hymns: there are simple differences in the order of the words; differences due to the substitution of a more familiar, handy, or modern word or grammatical form for an archaic, inconvenient, or obsolescent one of equivalent meaning or function. To this must be added the very important point that there are also many cases in which a given mantra passage, composed under certain definite circumstances, was later on adapted and changed to serve a new purpose.

c4.s1.3

Furthermore, Vedic literary production is often in a high degree imitative and mechanical. The poets or priests, more or less consciously, fell into habits of expression such that entire lines of different stanzas or hymns, and considerable sequences of words of different prose passages, show much similarity. This ranges from complete identity to a likeness which is sometimes so vague or fleeting as hardly to be recognizable, save to the practised eye of the expert Vedic student.

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