The Teetotaller

Sir Henry Thomas Colebrooke’s (1765-1837) essay On the Vedas of 1805 [1] certainly should be regarded as the initial work of scientific study of the Veda of the Abendland. It took 25 years until the first edition of Ṛgvedic text appeared, and that is Friedrich August Rosen’s Rig-Vedae specimen of 1830, which contains a couple of hymns [2] next to notes and a latin translation on 27 pages. The Orientalist Rosen was appointed to the chair for for Sanskrit at the London University already with 22 years (sic!), and in a letter to his teacher Franz Bopp he wrote that for this work he has read a manuscript which was deposited in the British Museum by the collector Colonel Polier [3]. That one is the very first one recorded in Bendall’s catalogue of 1902 [4], the manuscript is written in Devanāgarī and dated vikrama saṃvat 1838 (approx. 1781). The Swiss Antoine Louis Henry Polier (1741-95) served in the East India Company between 1759 and 1789 and in a letter to the trustee Sir Joseph Banks from 1789 – it is kept together with his collection of manuscripts (Add. 5346-56) – he wrote that the items were copied on his behalf in Rajasthan (cf. op.cit.). Rosen’s specimens appear later again in Christian Lassen’s Anthologica Sanscrita from 1838 next to notes [5].

After that in the year 1833 the missionary John Stevenson published an edition of the first 39 hymns of the Ṛgveda next to extracts from commentaries and a paraphrase in Bombay under the title The threefold science printed at the American Mission Press [6]. Otto von Böhtlingk (1815-1904) examined this edition – which was pretty rare in Europe – for his Chrestomathie of 1845 and was quite disappointed [7].

Rosen’s new edition of the complete first aṣṭaka (- 1,121) in unaccented Devanāgarī next to the padapāṭha in transliteration and a latin translation appeared in 1838 under the title Rigveda-Sanhita liber primus sanskritè et latinè. The rich annotations are breaking with verse 28,1 in the Śunaḥśepa cycle (1,24-30) because Rosen unfortunately died already with 32 years on his birthday in 1837. The preface tells that two other manuscripts in London have been used for that edition, one was in the Library of the East-India Company [8], the other one was a manuscript of the padapāṭha in the possession of the widow of Sir Robert Chambers (1737-1803) – that time the huge collection of precious manuscripts collected by the judge wasn’t even sold to the Königliche Bibliothek in Berlin but later in 1842 [9]. Of course Rosen’s edition was widely used in the following years before the more complete editions of Müller and Aufrecht appeared [10]. Given also the limited resources Rosen could use his work nowadays only plays a role for research history [11]. The text of the first adhyāya (- 1,19) appeared later in Böhtlingk’s Chrestomathie of 1845 next to notes in accented form while the accents have been added by Albert Hoefer again from manuscripts of the Chambers Collection which has got to Berlin in the meanwhile [12].

By the way, in the time after Rosen’s edition editions of the other Vedic collections also appeared: Theodor Benfey’s edition of the Sāmaveda appeared 1848 [13] and Albrecht Weber’s epochal edition of the Black Yajurveda in three parts in the years 1852-59 [15]. Rudolf von Roth – who was appointed as Extraordinarius in Tübingen in 1848 and promoted to Ordinarius later in 1856 [15] edited together with his pupil William Dwight Whitney the Śaunaka Atharvaveda in 1856. Die Hymnensammlungen of 1845, the first Abhandlung of his Habilitation Zur Litteratur und Geschichte des Veda could be seen as a successor of Colebrooke’s essay on the Vedic literature and Windisch points out that this it was a kind of a manifest for the whole subsequent research [16]. Since there weren’t much printed text available this time Roth – who has been stimulated to work on the Veda in Paris by Eugène Burnouf – has gained his knowledge mainly from the manuscripts [17]. By the way, Weber did the same for his Akademische Vorlesungen über indische Literaturgeschichte of the Wintersemester 1851/52 at the University of Berlin, which he had seen as a kind appendix to his first manuscript catalogue of 1853 which covers mainly the Chambers Collection. Roth also started the seek for proper understanding of the content of the Ṛgveda. A special role for that plays the Wortforschung (lexical semantics) including the method of etymology – as a broadly educated Orientalist he was able to take into account also the linguistically related texts from the neighbouring culture of the Old Iran. Roth – who also contributed to the Petersburger Wörterbuch towards the Ṛgveda and who has dealt with Yāska’s Nirukta – has set up theoretical bases here. He also had taken a position towards the role of the native commentators – the question how to evaluate them, among them foremost Sāyaṇa, has been an issue also for the later generations of Western scholars – and he positioned himself independent from them [18] (for me this is the fact from which I believe the Western involvement with these texts gets its reason). Roth has also established the understanding of the Ṛgveda as a historical document. To have a more comprehensive edition of the Ṛgveda was one of the major issues of these days and this task was first approached by Horace Hayman Wilson (1786-1860) who was assay master of the Calcutta mint and later in 1832 became first Boden Professor in Oxford [19]. Roth was also involved in this endeavour like he has announced on the constitutional meeting of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft in 1845 [20].

A plan for editing a complete edition of the Ṛgveda including Sāyaṇas commentary, the Mādhavīyavedārthaprakāśa, was also pursued by Friedrich Max Müller, who was also a student of Eugène Burnouf, who has teached the Ṛgveda in Paris from Rosen’s edition of the first aṣṭaka and who also pointed out that a complete edition of the text would be the next important task. For that Müller first got into contact with Böhtlingk in St. Petersburg who managed it to got the huge Wörterbuch (published 1852-71) – somewhat comparable in its extension – financed by the Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, but this collaboration never took place [21]. The was a strong aversion between Roth and Müller [22] which somehow lead to the fact that Roth got out of this project, and Müller moved to London in 1846 to work on this edition. The first volume, the awesome monument of German diligence and British liberalism [23], finally appeared already in the year 1849, and up to 1874 the other five followed [24]. The book was first financed by the East-India Company and from the 4th volume on published on the behalf of the Secretary of State for India. A notable promoter of this project was the Prussian ambassador in London Chevalier Christian K.J. von Bunsen (1791-1860) [25]. By the way, the sharp Christian Lassen, wo looked through Rosen’s transcripts from the bequest, already noted that in the Ṛgveda manuscripts – a quite remarkable fact – there are solely orthographic and phonetic differences to be found but no factual textual variants at all [26], and that phenomenon is again described by Müller in the preface of his edition. For that the hymns of the Ṛgveda deserve a special status in manuscriptology, a theory for explaining that phenomenon it could be assumed that Ṛgvedic manuscripts have not been copied but have been repeatedly written new out of the oral tradition, in which the text was given special protection through its sub-versions like the padapāṭha. Anyway, the first edition of 500 copies was sold out quickly and the book became also very popular in India where Müller got great fame and the paṇḍits gave him the title “Mokṣamūla“, the „root of salvation“ – though some have seen the printed text as a degeneration. A second edition of Müller edition in four volumes – much better to work with – appeared in the years 1890 and 92 [27]. That edition contains an improved text of Sāyaṇa’s commentary which has been printed in a much smaller type and offers critical additions. The publication was financed by the Mahārāja of Vijayanagara, Pasupati Ananda Gajapati Raz.

Among the various people who have worked under Müller on the project over the years there was Theodor Aufrecht [28], who later became Lassens successor in Bonn in 1875 and was one of the most outstanding manuscriptologists in Indology. He came to London 1852 and worked as a cataloguer of the Bodleian Library in Oxford and together with Müller on the edition. Also that time he begun to work on his own edition of the saṃhitā text of the Ṛgveda in which the text is typed in transliteration [29]. This edition, which appeared in 1861 and 63 as part 6 and 7 of Weber’s Indische Studien, became much popular especially among comparative linguists which don’t have to deal with the Devanāgarī accents here, and Hermann Grassmann’s (1809-1877) ingenious dictionary of 1873-75 refers to the enumeration of this issue. Müller has particularly not liked that Aufrecht’s edition was completed before his one. The second edition of Aufrecht’s text appeared in 1877 and has replaced the forerunner completely also because the modified transliteration is more similar to today’s convention, though Aufrecht has given up the continuous enumeration of the hymns which brings difficulties in applying Grassmann’s dictionary, which is still is use.

[1] Reprinted next to valuable notes by Whitney (p. 103 sq.) in the first volume (the second one if the biography volume is counted into a three-volume set) of the Miscellaneous Essays, p. 8-102.

[2] 3,4,10 & 11 (Visvamitrae hymnus in solem), 4,1,1 (Atreyae hymnus in agnim) 5,1,5 (Bharadvajae hymnus in auroram), 5,2,17 (Ad agnim), 18 & 19 (Vasishthae hymnus in agnim), 21 (Vasisthae hymnus in agnim), and 5,7,2 (Vasisthae hymnus in deum pluvium).

[3] „Seit meiner Rückkehr nach London habe ich mein Hauptaugenmerk auf die Vedas, zunächst auf den Rig Veda gerichtet. Ich suchte meine bereits früher gemachten Auszüge aus den Hymnen desselben hervor, und bemühte mich, in der Verständniß derselben einzudringen. An der Polier’schen Handschrift in dem mir benachbarten Britischen Museum hatte ich Gelegenheit, solche Versuche weiter auszudehnen“ (Letter from London of the 26.2.1830, cf. Lefmann 1895, II, p. *191).

[4] Bendall’s catalogue, cf. p. 1 (Add. 5151).

[5] Cf. p. 97-102 and 130-48 (Notae in Hymnos Vêdicos).

[6] Original Sanskrit title: Trividyā triguṇātmikā bhāga 1, cf. Gildemeister’s Bibliothecae Sanskritae, p. 21 (no. 61).

[7] Sanskrit-Chrestomathie, p. VII sq.: „Stevenson mag ein sehr guter Missionär sein, wie er denn auch nicht ermangelt das Werk mit einigen in’s Sanskrit übersetzten Sprüchen aus der heiligen Schrift zu beschliessen, aber ein großer Meister im Sanskrit ist er nicht.“

[8] I would have guesses that „2,133“ – in that form not to be found nowhere else – relates to the early catalogue by Burnell (cf. Janert no. 162 – only hardly available), and probably to a piece of Colebrooke’s manuscripts (probably denoting “no. 133 of the stock’s 2nd layer”) which has been given to the India Office in 1819, cf. Sutton, Guide to the India Office Library, p. 39. But Burkhard Quessel at the British Library (great support there!) was so nice to point me to the fact that there is a shelfmark “2133″ in Eggeling’s catalogue of the Vedic manuscripts in the India Office Library from 1887 (e.g. no. 27).

[9] „the other, from which the text printed in Roman characters is transcribed, belongs to the private collection of Lady Chambers, and is marked in her Catalogue D: it is in octavo“. Lassen tells that the preface was written by Louis Poley and that Lassen was entrusted with several items from Rosen’s bequest incl. transcripts (which gives evidence that Rosen has considered even moren than the two mentioned manuscripts) and more of the annotations next to indexes, cf. Lassen’s recension in the Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 3 (1840), p. 467-89.

[10] See Hoefer’s Notizen über die Geschichte des bisherigen Studium der Vêda’s, p. 436 sq.

[11] Windisch, Geschichte der Sanskrit-Philologie, p. 94: „Verglichen mit Max Müllers und Th. Aufrechts vollendeten Ausgaben des Ṛgveda muß Rosens Ausgabe des I. Aṣṭaka allerdings als mir unzulänglichen Mitteln unternommen erscheinen. Er hat nur zwei Handschriften benutzt […] Die Akzentbezeichnung fehlt. Mancherlei Ungenauigkeiten und Fehler lassen sich nachweisen.“

[12] Nos. 60 & 42 of the Chambers Collection (but both are also padapāṭha manuscripts, see Weber’s catalogue, p. 4 sq. [nos. 9 & 17]). Böhtlingk, op.cit, p. VIII: „Bei zwei zusammengeflossenen Vokalen hat Hoefer auch zwei Pada-Handschriften zu Rathe gezogen.“ The notes in the Chrestomathie are to be found on p. 353-441.

[13] This was preceded by an edition of Stevenson.

[14] Of the Vājasaneyisaṃhitā in 1852, the Śatapathabrāhmaṇa in 1852, the Kātyāyana-Śrautasūtra in 1859. An edition of the 9th adhyāya of the VS appeared before as dissertation in 1845 (cf. that posting here).

[15] Cf. Stietencron, Attraktion und Ausstrahlung: das Wirken Rudolf von Roths, p. 79.

[16] „Indem Roth auf wenigen Seiten in seiner knappen Art, ohne Dialektik und Polemik, die Ergebnisse seiner Studien mitteilte, hat er zugleich ein Programm für die ganze weitere Forschung auf dem Gebiet des Veda aufgestellt“ (Geschichte der Sanskritphilologie, p. 257).

[17] There is a list of regarded manuscripts to be found at the beginning of the first essay, cf. Kleine Schriften, p. 39 sq. It seems that Roth established the method of citing related to the maṇḍalas.

[18] Roth in a letter to his teacher Heinrich Ewald from Paris on the 13.11.1844: „Meine Liebe zu den Weden wächst beständig. Man muß über den glatten, systematisch steiffen Sinn der Eklärer hinauskommen, um in diesen Gesängen eine Fülle poetischer und religiöser Anschauungen zu finden“ (Zeller, R.v.Roth als Schüler, Lehrer und Gelehrter im Spiegel von Briefdokumeten, p. 93). There is a harsh critique of Roth’s methods by Goldstücker in his Páņini of 1861.

[19] Towards Wilson’s Indian years see Kejariwal, The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the discovery of India’s past (1784-1838), p. 118 sq. (4. H.H. Wilson and the expanding frontiers of historical scholarship 1815-32).

[20] Roth presented Die Hymnensammlungen there (cf. the Jahresbericht der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft für 1845-46, p. 35 sq. [Protokoll der dritten ordentlichen Sitzung]). It is said: „Es gereicht mir zu besonderem Vergnügen, mit der Ankündigung schliessen zu dürfen, dass ein solches Werk in England vorbereitet wird. Die Wissenschaft wird dafür Wilson verpflichtet seyn […] Jüngeren Kräften, unter welchen Dr. Trithen in London und Dr. Rieu aus Genf ich mich zählen darf, soll es unter seiner Leitung möglich gemacht werden, dieses ausgedehnte Material zur Erklärung des Weda dem Studium zugänglich zu machen“ (p. 65).

[21] Müller in My autobiography wrote that he has been invited by Böhtlingk to St.Petersburg, but couldn’t overcome his doubts – enforced by warnings of Burnouf – after he never got an official invitation from the academy: „All this, I confess, began to frighten me. For me, a poor scholar, to go to St. Petersburg without any official invitation, without any appointment, seemed reckless“ (p. 182). Müller’s refuse led to a lifelong struggle between the two researchers, e.g. Böhtlingk wrote a harsh Zur Charakteristik Max Müller’s in the Anzeiger der Jenaer Literaturzeitung of 1876 (p. 14: „Auch lerne er endlich sich bescheiden, da es ihm doch nicht gelingen wird, das zu werden und bei competenten Richtern für das zu gelten, was er zu sein scheinen möchte“), and later in 1891 published the harsh lampoon Max Müller als Mythendichter.

[22] Müller puts it: „Roth was my senior by several years, and engaged in much the same work as myself. But we never got well together […] and later on he offered to join me in editing the Rig-veda, I declined, perhaps incluenced by that early impression which I could not get rid of“ (op.cit., p. 171 sq.).

[23] „Sie ist ein großartiges Monument deutschen Fleifses und englischer Liberalität“ (Review of Weber in ZDMG 4 [1850], p. 265-68 = Indische Streifen 2 [1869], p. 8 sq.).

[24] See Windisch’s Geschichte der Sanskritphilologie, p. 272 sq. (270-76: 37. Max Müller. Ausgabe des Ṛgveda).

[25] „The same Bunsen, His Excellency Baron Bunsen, the Prussian Minister in London, on his own accord went afterwards to see the Chairman and the Directors of the East India Company, and explained to them what the Rig-Veda was, and that it would be a real disgrace if such a work were published in Germany; and they agreed to vote a sum of money such as they never voted before for any literary undertaking“ (autobiography, p. 13. sq.). Peter Wyzlic pointed to me before Bunsen as a somewhat obscure person.

[26] „Es kommen nämlich kaum wirkliche Varianten vor; ich meine solche, die in verschiedenen Worten oder Wortformen bestehen und schließe zweierlei aus. Erstens solche, wo die geschriebenen Laute diesselben sind […] Zweitens, was ich orthographische Varianten nennen möchte“ (op.cit., p. 472).

[27] The text of the saṃhitā with the padapāṭha of the editio princeps without the commentary appeared in two volumes before that in 1873.

[28] Something comprehensive on Aufrecht going beyond the anecdotes which are traditioned in Bonn is still missing. Must do it so far: Kirfel’s little piece in the Bonner Gelehrte – Beiträge zur Geschichte der Wissenschaften in Bonn, Sprachwissenschaften (Bonn 1970), p. 315-18.

[29] His early transliteration scheme follows mainly the system of Brockhaus (Über den Druck sanskritscher Werke mit lateinischen Buchstaben from 1841) which follows Franz Bopp.