Books by Patrick Olivelle

In this first critical edition of the legal treatise of Viṣṇu (Viṣṇu Smṛti), Olivelle locates the text geographically in Kashmir and dates it to around the seventh century CE based, among other factors, on the iconographic description of Viṣṇu. The text was composed by a scholar who belonged to the Kāṭhaka Branch of the Yajur Veda and who was also an adherent of the Vaiṣṇava Pañcarātra tradition. This is the only legal text that shows a deep influence of the bhakti tradition. Although the Viṣṇu Smṛti did not have as illustrious a life as the treatises of Manu and Yājñavalkya, we find it cited frequently in medieval legal digests. Indeed, unlike citations from other Dharmaśāstras, medieval authors regularly cite entire sections of this treatise, indicating that they were familiar with a text more or less identical to the one that has come down to us. Consisting of 100 chapters, the text is framed as a conversation between Goddess Earth and Viṣṇu, with Earth requesting the dharma that should govern the lives of those belonging to the four varṇas. Originally published in the Harvard Oriental Series, this Indian edition will hopefully make this important text available to a wider Indian audience of scholars and students.

This volume brings together a variety of Patrick Olivelles papers on Indian ascetical institutions and ideologies that have been published over the past thirty or so years. Asceticism represents a major strand in the religious and cultural history of India, providing some of the most creative elements within Indian religions and philosophies. Most of the major religions, such as Buddhism, Jainism, and the religious philosophies both within these new religions and in the Brahmanical tradition, were created by world-renouncing ascetics. Ascetical institutions and ideologies developed in a creative tension with other religious institutions that stressed the centrality of family, procreation and society, and it is this tension that has articulated many of the central features of Indian religion and culture. The papers collected in this volume seek to locate Indian ascetical traditions within their historical, political and ideological contexts.

This collection brings together the research papers of Patrick Olivelle, published over a period of about ten years. The unifying theme of these studies is the search for historical context and developments hidden within words and texts. Words and the cultural history represented by words that scholars often take for granted as having a continuous and long history are often new and even neologisms, and thus provide important clues to cultural and religious innovations. Olivelles book on the Asramas, as well as the short pieces included in this volume, such as those on ananda and dharma, seek to see cultural innovation and historical changes within the changing semantic fields of key terms. Closer examination of numerous Sanskrit terms taken for granted as central to Hinduism provide similar results. Indian texts have often been studied in the past as disincarnate realities providing information on an ahistorical and unchanging culture. This volume is a small contribution towards correcting that method of textual study.