The Skandapurāṇa: What’s in a Name?

by Peter Bisschop

Published on August 07, 2023

Employing the metaphor of a “world of ever-shifting Purāṇic sands,” Wendy Doniger once wittily characterized the Skandapurāṇa as “surely the shiftiest, or perhaps the sandiest of all.” When she wrote these words in 1993, the first volume of the critical edition of the Skandapurāṇa had yet to come out, in 1998, and so she could not take into account the discovery of what the editors called “the original Skandapurāṇa (SP): the earliest surviving work of that name, and the work cited as Skandapurāṇa by several early authors.” One might also refer to this text as ‘the early Skandapurāṇa’ or simply ‘the Skandapurāṇa’, because it is the only Skandapurāṇa that goes under this title alone and was not, yet, considered a khaṇḍa (‘section’) or saṃhitā  (‘collection’) of it. The early Nepalese palm-leaf manuscripts indeed simply refer to the text in the colophons as ‘the Skandapurāṇa’ (iti skandapurāṇe). Things soon get complicated, however, because two later recensions of the same text are attributed in the colophons of the manuscripts to the so-called ‘Revākhaṇḍa’ and ‘Ambikākhaṇḍa’, while the editio princeps of the Nepalese scholar Kṛṣṇaprasāda Bhaṭṭarāī, taking a que from the latter, published the text under the title ‘Ambikākhaṇḍa of the Skandapurāṇa’(Skandapurāṇasya Ambikākhaṇḍaḥ, 1988).

The Skandapurāṇa presents a unique opportunity for historically grounded text-critical research that has been much lacking in Purāṇa studies. The preservation of a variety of manuscripts from different periods in time, including the oldest surviving dated manuscript of a Purāṇa (manuscript S1, dated 810 CE), allows us to trace, supported by clear evidence, the extent of change a single Purāṇa may undergo in its transmission. It also calls for critically reconsidering the terms used in the study of Purāṇas. For a start, from an analytical perspective, it is important to be precise in one’s references. As a consequence, since the publication of the critical edition of the Skandapurāṇa, it no longer suffices to attribute a particular passage to ‘the Skandapurāṇa’, when one is actually referring to a passage from, say, the Kedārakhaṇḍa, the Kāśīkhaṇḍa, or any other text attributed to the Skandapurāṇa. It is much better to refer to the individual khaṇḍa in question because that is the actual text where a particular passage is found; adopting such a title prevents any potential confusion about the text in question, and is by far the most informative and clear.

There is, however, also a higher perspective that we need to consider. The Skandapurāṇa effectively forces us to think and move beyond the usual categories and boundaries of what constitutes ‘a text’. From this higher perspective, the Skandapurāṇa is not just a single work, but rather a meta-Purāṇa that includes all compositions, at any time and place, that take up the name, claim to be part of it, or are recognised as such. Rather than being an individual work written by a certain person at a particular moment in time and place, it constitutes an open-ended textual tradition that expands and changes across time and space. To this effect, the Skandapurāṇa—and this applies to Purāṇas more broadly—while being a canonical text, resists the kind of fixedness and stability that is typically associated with the term ‘canonical’ in Western culture. Rather than a single text with a fixed form, the Skandapurāṇa is a living text-tradition with multiple manifestations and forms.

References:

R. Adriaensen, H.T. Bakker, H. Isaacson (eds.), The Skandapurāṇa. Volume I: Adhyāyas 1-25. Critically Edited with Proglegomena and Introduction. Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1998. [p.4]

Kṛṇṣaprasāda Bhaṭṭarāī (ed.), Skandapurāṇasya Ambikākhaṇḍaḥ. Kathmandu, 1998.

Wendy Doniger, ‘The Scrapbook of Undeserved Salvation.’ in: Wendy Doniger (ed.), Purāṇa Perrennis: Reciprocity and Transformation in Hindu and Jaina Texts (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), pp. 59-81. [p.59]