A Vedic Concordance

by Maurice Bloomfield

"A Vedic Concordance is a monumental work by the famous American Sanskritist Maurice Bloomfield planned, prepared and published during the years 1892-1906. It affords primarily, an easy and ready means of ascertaining the following things: first, where a given mantra occurs if it occurs but once; second, whether it occurs elsewhere, either with or without variants, and in what places, and third, if it occurs with variants, what those variants are.

"One hundred and nineteen texts in all have been drawn upon for contributions to the concordance comprising the following ten classes:

1. Samhitas;
2. Brahmanas;
3. Aranyakas;
4. Upanisads;
5. Srautasutras;
6. Grhya-sutras, Mantra Pathas and related texts;
7. Dharma-sutras, Dharma-sastras and Smrtis;
8. Vidhana texts;
9. Ancillary texts of the Veda;
10. Four miscellaneous texts.

"The author has endeavoured to embody in the Concordance with absolute completeness the following: all the stanzas and all the prose passages of foumulaic character contained in the Samhitas, Brahmanas, Aranyakas, older Upanisads, Srauta-sutras, and Grhya-sutras. In the case of later Upanisads or of the metrical Dharma-sastras and Smrtis, or of such a text as Rg-vidhana he has adopted a selective method. From the latter texts he has culled whatever appeared to have Vedic form or Vedic flavour. The Concordance also includes a very considerable amount of material not yet published.

"The Concordance may also be readily put to certain indirect or secondary uses, which are scarcely less important for the systematic progress of Vedic study. Since the Concordance gives not only the places of actual occurrence-of a given mantra in the Samhitas but also the places where it is cited in the subsidiary works on ritual and household custom and the like, it furnishes the key to the liturgical or ritual employment of every mantra as prescribed by the ceremonial books."

About the Author:

Bloomfield, Maurice (1855 ), American. Sanskrit scholar, was born on the 23rd of February 1855, in Bielitz, Austrian Silesia. He went to the United States in 1867, and ten years later graduated from Furman University, Greenville, South Carolina. He then studied Sanskrit at Yale, under W. D. Whitney, and at Johns Hopkins, to which university he returned as associate professor in 1881 after a stay of two years in Berlin and Leipzig, and soon afterwards was promoted professor of Sanskrit and comparative philology. His papers in the American Journal of Philology number a few in comparative linguistics, such as those on assimilation and adaptation in congeneric classes of words, and many valuable Contributions to the Interpretation of the Vedas, and he is best known as a student of the Vedas. He translated, for Max-Mullers Sacred Books of the East, the Hymns of the Atharva-Veda (1897); contributed to the Buhler-Kielhorn Grundriss der indo-arischen Philologie und Altertumskunde the section The Atharva-Veda and the Gopatha Brhmana (1899); was first to edit the Kauika-Sutra (1890), and in 1907 published, in the Harvard Oriental series, A Vedic Concordance. In 1905 he published Cerberus, the Dog of Hades, a study in comparative mythology.