| Applied to codifications of Vedic ritual perhaps as early as the 8 C. BCE and to scriptures chanted in the monasteries of Mediaeval Japan, 'sutra' ('sūtra') is one of the world's most widespread genre terms. Yet a systematic examination of the genre itself in the late Vedic Brahmanical literature where it first appears has never been undertaken, despite universal notice of its importance and of the uniqueness of its style. A lack of firm chronologies, historical contextualization and an overweening interest in portraying Vedic literature as the product of caste rigidity and mystical speculation has left ancient India without an account as to the origins of its intellectual culture and of its first non-scriptural prose. Concentrating on the earliest Sūtras, this work uses a variety of sources and methods to determine the principles of this technical literature and the intellectual context at is nexus. Two basic features of Sūtras are analyzed in order to understand the genre's basis and to ascertain how these principles developed across several disciples. The first is the extraordinary manner in which many Sūtras are organized as a development of the taxonomy of earlier ritual texts. The second is formation of individual aphorisms ('sūtras') that move from temporal units in ritual to discrete extensional domains. One must then account for the scientific imperative behind such principles, even with this paucity of literary history. Analysis of India's debate culture and even comparisons with the Jewish legal tradition, where similar communities of study and exchange produced similar texts, suggest the nature of the 'speech genre' of the sūtra. It is concluded that the sūtra genre's form and aim emerged from a vibrant and endowed culture of tutelage and contest where the most perfect account of a subject was rewarded and preserved within a lineage and among a circle of experts. Such an environment is the best account of how a culture that left behind almost no physical monuments developed the Ancient World's most sophisticated models of linguistic and ritual investigation. |
