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[Full title: History and Structure of Svacchanda Tantra; (5) Redaction Criticism]

After enumerating the results of tradition and source criticism, redaction criticism must next attempt to dissipate the anonymity cloaking the identity of the groups of compilers and redactors who shaped the text of Svacchandatantram. Once again, in the absence of external evidence, redaction criticism can only reexamine the internal techniques, concerns, and values displayed in their handling of strata and traditions. Only these exist as clues to their if not individual, at least collective identities and dates, that in turn may further indicate the age and provenance of Svacchandatantram. - The preceding discussion of the rules for dating, and the number of strata and sources, has indirectly touched on many of these techniques. In general, any textual discontinuity signals a another textual layer just as fault lines in geology indicate the intersection and overlapping of different plates. Naturally, this procedure risks fabricating a fallacious compositional history from mere lapses and inadvertancies possibly stemming from a single hand. And the superimposition of alien ideals of textual unity can distort less "logical" but traditional patterns of organization. Nevertheless, the recurrence of strands of similar material in different texts externally corroborates, in most cases, the results of internal criticism in unraveling the work woven by anonymous generations. Moreover, for a tradition where innovation must masquerade as original revelation, the strands representing different sources or traditions become obscured in convincing compilations. Among these textual discontinuities, differences in style, such as metre, vocabulary, and degree of standardness in usage, more

64 easily and overtly signal compositional layers. 1 In contrast to these surface indicators, signs of differences in content may lie more recessed in the structure of the text. Their loss of transparency increases with the patina of familarity which covers over once glaring contrasts, now accepted as normative in later transmission. And successive redactors promote this habituation by their techniques of editorial integration. The dialogue frame was used as the basic tool for this integration. Even where the nature and scope of the added material limits successful incorporation, and relegates it to an appendix or separate book, the frame furnishes a nominal transition. 2 Similarly, when redactors interpolated material, they often added a dialogue verse as a transition. 3 When they embedded a segment in a larger topic, a dialogue verse often signals the return to the main subject through a Wiederaufnahme or resumptive repetition. 4 Of course, since the first compilers used not a logical construction but the dialogue frame as their principal compositional structure, corroborating evidence, which indicates that the content likely derives from different milieus or traditions, must reinforce any supposition of interpolation. p. 95 ff. 1 V., for example, the metrically distinct section of bk 13, 2 V., for example, the opening dialogue of bk.14, p. 109, which nominally links the gestures (mudrah) not described elsewhere, to the rest of the text: "mudranam laksanam vaksye asmimstantre yathasthitam. " 3 V., for example, bk.4, p.256, where dialogue introduces an abbreviated initation procedure, which belongs, as Kshemaraja notes, with related procedures in the following book. 4 Thus, for example, in bk.6, after a digression on the nature of the Pranavah that begins (p. 123) with the words, "pancapranavasamyogah, "the main discussion recontinues (p.144) with the Wiederaufnahme, "pancapranavasamyuktam. 鈽慒

65 Besides this evidence furnished by the repetition, redundancy, and incongruity produced by interpolation, the interpolated material often retains parts of its own original frame structure. These pieces, commonly in the form of panegyric codas to the preceding ritual or meditation, clearly point back to a different original source. 1 Extensions of the frame along these same lines in the form of panegryics of parts of the text, or praise and description of the promulgators of the text, often signal differing redactors. 2 Self-references, and cross-references to other texts and traditions function as clues in the same way, allowing for a moment the hand of the actual authors to reach from behind the screen into the shadow play of revelation. 3 In sum, the very technique, which the redactors used positively in constructing a unified composition, internal criticism uses negatively in decomposing their work. Thus the techniques utilized by the initial compilers and later redactors of Svacchandatantram favored the growth of the text by assimilation, accumulation, and incorporation. These techniques, in turn, plausibly reflect the concerns of the redactors, and permit inferring their motives. In particular, their references to other schools encapsulate their interest in integrating through adaptation or absorption in an inclusive hierarchy of sects symbolized by the successive pervasion of inferior planes by higher planes in their 1 Note, for example, the panegryic closing line that follows the discussion of the Bahurupa formula, "smaranannasayeddevi, tamah both in bk.1, p.39, and bk.6, p.148, with notably, the syntactically expected second half missing in bk.6. " 2 V., for example, the editorial adjustment in the cosmology (Bk. 10, p.422) which has the narrating Bhairavah acknowledge his identity with Umapati, and which praises his multiple manifestations, although the book otherwise shows no evidence of containing specific Bhairava material. 3 Cf. supra the discussion of the Saiva stratum.

66 cosmology. 1 Combined with their rejection of caste, this tendency towards inclusion rather than exclusion, characteristic of many Indian traditions, must have strongly dominated in order to produce and accommodate the diversity of material found in Svacchandatantram.2 Accordingly, when asserting the superiority of its own practices, the text, especially in the Bhairava sections, praises these practices not as the only means, but rather as the best means since they include the benefits that derive from any other text or tradition. 3 The social underpinnings of this vigorous integrating point to a fluid sect, peripheral and developing with respect to other older traditions, and not yet entrenched enough to engage in a polemical defense of its own established practice and dogma. In the milieu of the text compilers, interest centered more on collecting and domesticating, as it were, popular and effective practices of meditation, more than theoretically justifying or elaborating the primacy of their beliefs. The theological scheme of partial or aspectual incarnation, and the division into superior and inferior manifestations, found in many sectarian traditions, furnished the 1 V. supra for a discussion of this hierarchical integration. On the cosmological model, the "Akkumulationstheorie," in which higher elements or planes include the properties of the lower, v. Erich Frauwallner, Geschichte der indischen Philosophie 1 (Salzburg: Otto Muller Verlag, 1953): 122 ff, 356. 2 Cf. Paul Hacker, "Religiose Toleranz und Intoleranz im Hinduismus," in Paul Hacker Kleine Schriften, hrsg. Lambert Schmithausen, Glasenapp-Stiftung 15 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1978), pp.376-388, and esp., pp. 386 ff. 3 V., for example, the praise of the Bahurupa formula in bk.6 (p. 163, vs. 94): "evam satasahasrani anyakalpothitani ca prayoganam karotyesa mantrarajesvaresvarah. " And as Kshemaraja explains: "evam karotyavisamvadini sampadayati."

67 text compilers and redactors with their basic tools for adaptation and incorporation. 1 The kind of hortatory and doctrinal material that the text compilers and redactors used reflects their practical rather than theoretical and polemical interest. The declarations extolling the efficacy of their rituals and teaching indicate an ongoing concern to expand their sectarian base. In addition, these declarations contain images and similes in order to illustrate their doctrinal teaching. Some of these images recorded by redactors probably came embedded in wholesale borrowings directly from literary sources. 2 Others, however, may reflect the custom of Saiva teachers and ascetics who illustrated their teachings with apt images in the course of the transmission of their tradition. Interwoven with full scale panegryics, whose parts, as noted, still lie throughout the text of Svacchandatantram, these metaphors may have formed the rhetorical web for the proselytizing or merchandizing discourse of these Saiva masters. 3 The images effectively convey and embody the magical and mystical principles at the base of their repertoire of rituals and meditations, which for later Saiva systematic commentators like Kshemaraja became theorized in monistic or 1 V., for example, the incarnations of Umah described according to the Puranic soteriological model, in bk.10, pp.408 ff. 2 Cf., for example, the imagery of the macrocosmic chariot used to express similarity to isvarah in bk. 12, p. 76 ff, based on Kathopanisad, 1.3.3. 3 V. bk. 10, pp. 148-156 ff, where a Saiva teaching discourse has been inserted into an early purification initation, which in turn has been placed as a parenthetical section within the extended cosmological description of the egg of Brahma. Here several extended similes are used to illustrate the Saiva theology of bondage and liberation. Among others, the liberating of the soul by the master acting as Shiva though formula is compared to the production of the fire latent in wood by the action of the rubbing stick, or the removal of the maculation of copper with a solvent to reveal gold.

68 dualistic theologies of union, grace, and control. 1 While the use of metaphors does not preclude philosophical argument, its absence in the text of Svacchandatantram argues that throughout its transmission this imagistic representation adequately served the needs of its redactors, who thus largely preceded or stood outside the sub-sects of the later systematic Saiva schools. Thus the use of imagery in teaching does not rule out its containing systematic 1 For example, the text (Bk.4, p.276) compares the relationship of the soul and Shiva after initiation to that of a river, which once dissolved into the sea, does not return. For Kshemaraja this image and its accompanying assertions of unity offer a natural scriptural support for his non-dual and idealistic-emanational philosophy (abhasavadah). The compilers of the text, in contrast, may be expressing a simpler non-idealistic notion, which simply asserts that when liberated the soul is literally or materially dissolved in the supreme lord (layavadah). The actual metaphysical status and philosphical implications of this ambiguous union would then have been open to several later interpretations. Accordingly, the following verse (Bk.4, p.277, vs. 443) restates the literal equivalent of this metaphor by saying that self becomes Shiva (sivibhavati) through having the same essence, or participation (samarasatvena). In Svacchandatantram this samarasa- or samarasyam is used to characterize one of the many procedures in which the master extracts the soul of the initiate and moves it up the planes of existence to dissolve it in the consciousness of Shiva. Although apparently tending to support the later non-dual exegesis, this practice and the term (samarasyam) also occurs in the commentaries of dualistic Siddhantins, and in the scriptures of other non-Saiva traditions. (V. Ksemaraja's Pratyabhijnahrdayam Singh, Pratyabhijnahrdayam, p.49 for a definition of dissolution as non-dual fusion (samarasyam): "paradvayasamarasyapadanatmani ca samhare %; for the Siddhantins, v. Brunner-Lachaux, Somasambhupaddhati, troisieme partie, pp. 348 ff, n.405; on layaand samarasya in the Pancaratrah, v. Sanjukta Gupta, Laksmi Tantra, p.xxxiv, pp. 127-134, esp., vs. 41, p. 131; for an example of the debate among later sectarian Saivas over the nature of liberation, taking these images and related images as its point of departure v. Schomerus, Arunantis Sivajnanasiddhiyar 1:.372 ff.) ".

69 positions, but these positions can not be determined only on the basis of this ambivalent imagery. 1

1 For a study of a single image used with multiple interpretations by many traditions, among them non-dual Saivism, v. Erik af Edholm, "The Crystal and the Hibiscus Flower," in Kalyanamitraraganam. Essays in Honour of Nils Simonsson, ed. Eivind Kahrs, (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1986), pp. 57-77. As he notes (p.57): "Some of the recurrent example-similes may be considered to belong to particular philosophical traditions, since they are especially well suited to their specific lines of arguments and regularly occur in their texts. A larger number of similes, however, cannot be connected in this way with particular philosophical schools, but are the common property of all darsanas and form an organic part of the technique of Indian philosophical discourse.' "