What does it mean for a text to have an identity when change is one of the conditions of its existence?Purāṇic literature challenges the familiar assumption that a text first exists in a stable form and is subsequently altered through transmission. Expansion, abbreviation, interpolation, rearrangement, and theological reorientation may instead belong to the historical life of the tradition itself. A text may survive not despite transformation, but partly through its capacity to undergo it.Taking the Skandapurāṇa as its principal field of inquiry, this book examines how textual continuity can be understood when manuscripts preserve substantially different forms of a work. Early witnesses permit the reconstruction of textual states with unusual precision, while later recensions reveal extensive processes of revision and recomposition. Yet even the earliest recoverable form emerged through acts of selection, appropriation, and the redirection of inherited narrative authority.The book reconsiders some of the fundamental categories of philology: text, recension, version, interpolation, authorship, transmission, and critical reconstruction. A critical edition makes textual change historically intelligible, but it can do so only by bringing a moving tradition into moments of relative stability. An interpolation may be secondary when reconstructing an earlier textual state, yet primary evidence for another religious and intellectual history.The changing text thus emerges not as the imperfect survival of an original work, but as a historical form of cultural and religious endurance.
Peter C. Bisschop
Peter C. Bisschop is Professor of Sanskrit and Ancient Cultures of South Asia at Leiden University. An internationally recognized Sanskritist and historian of ancient India, his research focuses on the historical development of Hindu traditions through the philological study of Sanskrit texts, inscriptions, temples, and sacred landscapes. His work has made significant contributions to the study of Purāṇic literature, early Śaivism, and the intellectual and religious history of South Asia.
Professor Bisschop is a member of the international team preparing the critical edition of the Skandapurāṇa, one of the most important collaborative projects in Purāṇic studies. He is also Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant project PURANA: Mythical Discourse and Religious Agency in the Puranic Ecumene, which explores the formation, transmission, and cultural significance of the Purāṇas across South Asia.
His publications include Early Śaivism and the Skandapurāṇa: Sects and Centres and Universal Śaivism, as well as critical editions of the Skandapurāṇa and numerous books and articles on Sanskrit literature, Purāṇic mythology, and the history of Hindu religious traditions. He serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Indo-Iranian Journal and Editor-in-Chief of Gonda Indological Studies.
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