“The Making is a Remaking”: Purāṇic Textual Variation as a Way of Worldmaking

Abstract

The significance of textual variation in the Purāṇas remains undervalued and understudied, yet it is a major feature of Purāṇa transmission. Drawing on recent work on the critical edition of chapter 10 of the Śivadharmaśāstra and its appropriation by several Purāṇas (the Liṅgapurāṇa, Devīpurāṇa, Bhaviṣyapurāṇa, Saurapurāṇa and Nāradapurāṇa) as well as the Bṛhatkālottaratantra, I will take a fresh look at textual variation through the lens of Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking (1978), in particular his identification of five procedures: composition and decomposition, weighting, ordering, deletion and supplementation, and deformation. I will discuss examples of both text-internal and text-external variation within the Śivadharmaśāstra itself and in the Purāṇas that have made use of it. Critical editions allow us to uncover the processes of worldmaking built up from different composites in which the tradents of the Purāṇas are engaged. In Goodman’s words, as in worldmaking in general, in Purāṇic text composition “the making is a remaking.”