Skandapurāṇa 26 in the Vārāṇasīmāhātmyasaṃgraha

The Skandapurāṇa’s account of king Divodāsa’s evacuation from Vārāṇasī

by Olli-Pekka Littunen

Published on April 06, 2023

I had the opportunity to read a preliminary edition of chapter 37 of the Vārāṇasīmāhātmyasaṃgraha (VMS) with the participants of this spring’s Skandapurāṇa workshop. The VMS is a compendium of Vārāṇasīmāhātmyas, that is, texts praising the greatness (māhātmya) of Vārāṇasī as a pilgrimage destination. The VMS palm-leaf manuscript is often quite difficult to make sense of. It contains texts copied from earlier sources, attributed to various Purāṇas. However, the VMS chapters often do not correspond with the extant versions of those Purāṇas: chapter 37 has been attributed to the (now lost) Puṣkarapurāṇa. The VMS manuscript has been written by at least two scribes, and later altered by at least two correctors, who have changed the texts with varying degrees of success. As a result of both intentional and unintentional changes, the language of the VMS can be quite irregular, and does not always follow the grammatical rules of classical Sanskrit.

As VMS 37 largely corresponds with Skandapurāṇa (SP) chapter 26, it made sense to read it during the Skandapurāṇa workshop held in the last week of March at Leiden University and compare the two texts. The story of SP 26 is about the evacuation of Divodāsa from Vārāṇasī to make room for a new home for Śiva and Pārvatī. We managed to go through the entire chapter, and also my translations of it, and I got valuable feedback on how to improve many aspects of my work. Because of the irregular language and sometimes poor physical state of the palm-leaves, we also went through the manuscript images for chapter 37, focusing on the most difficult parts, and tried to make sense of the text.

The most important part of the reading sessions was to compare VMS 37 with SP 26. It is very likely that the author of VMS 37 had access to a text which corresponded largely with what is now SP 26. There is no obvious reason in the text itself as to why VMS 37 is attributed to the Puṣkarapurāṇa instead of the Skandapurāṇa, but it might have something to do with the story of a king called Puṣpavāhana (after whom the city of Puṣkara has been named) and the story of king Divodāsa, who is a very central figure in VMS 37 as he is the king who ruled Vārāṇasī before Śiva took over. Another chapter in the compendium connects these two stories, and such a conflated understanding of Puṣpavāhana and Divodāsa, perhaps as referring to a single king, could have led to the Puṣkarapurāṇa attribution of VMS 37.

In our meeting we observed several differences between VMS 37 and SP 26. Firstly, the initial verse of SP 26 has quite certainly been intentionally omitted, as it refers to the frame narrative of the Skandapurāṇa, which is not relevant to the Māhātmya transmitted in the VMS. Secondly, at some point of the transmission of VMS 37, one side of a folio has most likely been lost. When compared with SP 26, VMS 37 has a gap of eight verses, and the palm-leaf manuscript of VMS 37 transmits approximately 8-10 verses on each side of a palm-leaf. Thus, a gap of eight verses is approximately the length of a single side of a folio. Thirdly, close to the end of VMS 37, a verse interrupts the narrative structure of the text. This verse is most likely additional, as it awkwardly cuts off a section of discourse between Śiva and his “deputy” Nikumbha. Lastly, VMS 37 uses the epithet Svalīnā when referring to the goddess. It is quite likely that this word relates to the liṅga called Svalīneśvara/Svarlīneśvara, which appears often in Purāṇic texts related to Vārāṇasī. As SP 26 refers to the goddess as Mahādyuti instead, Svalīnā may be an intentional change made by a scribe/author to connect the text more directly to the liṅga in Vārāṇasī, and as such also to a more concrete pilgrimage construction where this specific liṅga plays an important role.

We saw that for the most part, VMS 37 follows SP 26 quite faithfully. In addition to the aforementioned differences, the rest of the discrepancies can be largely explained as being a result of errors in scribal transmission, perhaps accompanied by minor changes such as not including speaker indications in some places where they could have been deemed unnecessary.

By reading the manuscript and emending the text where needed, we managed to “fix” most of the problematic parts of chapter 37. The last two verses have unfortunately become metrically too corrupt to be accurately reconstituted to an earlier, metrically sound state. However, we still managed to grasp the approximate meaning of those verses through translation. In sum, the reading sessions were successful and helped me immensely to get the text to a more satisfying state and understand its relation to SP 26. Of course, some problems remain, but I believe with such irregular material, full certainty cannot be achieved – at least not unless new manuscript evidence pops up in the future.