In search of a sage: Yājñavalkya and ancient Indian literary memory
Abstract
Yajnavalkya is perhaps the most important literary figure in ancient India prior to
the Buddha. He is prominent in early Indian literature (ca. 8th c. BCE onwards),
particularly in late Vedic ritual manuals, philosophical tracts, Epic literature, and Puranic
("legendary") texts. He is credited with writing a major legal treatise, the
Yajnavalkyasmrti, and is considered one of India's earliest and most well-known thinkers.
In ancient India, Yajnavalkya was a bearer of ritual authority, a sage of mystical
knowledge, and a propagator of philosophical ideas and religious law. In modern times,
he has come to personify the hoary past of the Veda and Vedic orthodoxy. In these
various contexts, the figure of Yajnavalkya functions in a variety of ways -- he is a
literary device, a cultural ascription of authority for certain beliefs and practices, and a
representative of particular institutionalized modes of life (the idealized priest, mendicant,
and sage).
This project is an analysis of this literary figure in ancient and classical Sanskrit
literature (the Satapatha Brahmana, the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad, the Mahabharata, the
Yajnavalkyasmrti, and various Puranas). Through a close reading of the literature, I
focus upon how this figure develops across time and across traditions, including, for
example, the use and manipulation of related themes and the deployment of
Yajnavalkya's sarcastic portrayal. Further, I argue that by analyzing both the early and
later literary traditions we can surmise how the figure might have been "read" in the
process of rewriting him into different contexts with different goals.
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