Baudhayana Shrauta Sutra

The Baudhayana Shrauta Sutra (Baudhāyana Śrautasūtra or Baudhāyanaśrautasūtram) is a Late Vedic text dealing with the solemn rituals of the Taittiriya Shakha school of the Black Yajurveda that was composed in eastern Uttar Pradesh during the late Brahmana period. It was first published in 1904-23 by The Asiatic Society, as edited by Willem Caland and translated by C.G. Kashikar, in part in his "Srautakosa", and as a whole later on.

Baudhayana, the traditional author of the Sutra, originally belonged to the Kanva school of the White Yajurveda. W. Caland has adduced materials that indicate Baudhayana's shift from this tradition to that of the Taittiriya school. This agrees with the geographical position of the text between the eastern (Bihar) territory of the White Yajurveda and the western ones the Taittiriyas (Uttar Pradesh). However, Baudhayana is quoted many times in the text as speaking; the work thus is clearly the work of his students and his school, the Baudhayanas.

The text is important as it is one of the earliest Srautasutras, next to that of the Vadhula sub-school of the Taittiriyas, which was situated a little further west than the Baudhayanas. Both belong to the late Brahmana period and share late Vedic "southeastern" grammatical peculiarities with the Madhyandinas, Kanvas and Jaiminiyas. Both schools (as well as some other early Sutras) agree in incorporating a number of Brahmana passages in their text. They also have some unusual similarities in quoting Mantras. However, the BSS is most important in that it clearly shows the first steps taken by late Vedic ritualists towards the Sutra style, with ever increasing degree of conciseness, culminating in the minimal style of the Katyayana Srautasutra and the short formulas of Pāṇini. This feature has been overlooked until Makoto Fushimi showed, in his recent Harvard thesis (2007), the many separate devices that were used by the Baudhayanas in creating a Sutra. They include, among others, certain 'headwords' that indicate and thus abbreviate the description of a certain ritual action or rite, and they also include a new classification of all Shrauta rituals. The result is uneven: the BSS is still a Shrautasutra in progress. In an appendix section it also discusses the opinions of ritual specialists other than Baudhayana, who is then quoted as well. It has been argued that the composition of the BSS was due to the desire of 'eastern' Vedic kings, such as those of strongly emerging Kosala and Videha, to establish proper Vedic rituals in their non-Vedic territory The same orthoprax development is seen in the redaction in Kosala or Videha of the Vajasaneyi Samhita with its western three-tone recitation, as compared to its source, the two-tone Shatapatha Brahmana.

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