Talk:Muktikā

Latest comment: 16 years ago by Rudrasharman in topic classification of Muktika canon

classification of Muktika canon

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I have found the following sources for the Mukhya/Samanya/Sannyasa/Yoga/Shakta/Shaiva/Vaishna classification of the canon: [1][2][3]. Of these, the first seems to be our source, while the others appear to be ripoffs off Wikipedia. They give the count of how many are associated with which Veda, but they do not give our

"The first 10 are grouped as mukhya "principal", and are identical to those listed above. 24 are grouped as Sāmānya Vedānta "common Vedanta", 17 as Sannyāsa, 8 as Shākta, 14 as Vaishnava, 15 as Shaiva and 20 as Yoga Upanishads."

what is our source for this? It is not in accord with the classification as given by the list. Which is accurate? I will assume that somebody just did a lousy job of counting the list entries, and adapt the numbers to correspond to the list. dab () 14:00, 23 December 2005 (UTC)Reply

I see that here I introduced these counts myself, but I cannot for the life of me remember where I got them from. I certainly didn't do the count myself. Strange. Let's just ignore these numbers for now then. dab () 14:07, 23 December 2005 (UTC)Reply

It seems that the enumeration is a modern one, traceable to the Adyar Library (Theosophical Society) of Chennai (Madras) -- which has published editions of all 108 upanishads -- and thence to some anonymous researcher. The idea of the classification itself is not much older. Bloomfield in his book The Atharvaveda (p.19) say that it was proposed by Albrecht Weber for Atharvanic upanishads only, and developed by Paul Deussen (Sechzig Upanishads des Veda). Weber's original classification (cf. History of Indian Literature, p.156) was three-fold: vedanta, yoga, and sectarian (Saiva or Vaishnava). Deussen made it five: vedanta, yoga, samnyasa, saiva and vaishnava. I'm guessing the researchers at Adyar are responsible for the generalization out of the Atharvanic class and the "integration" with the Muktika, and thus the additional mukhya and shakta categories. So it boils down to identifying the specific Adyar Library publication that has the actual data. rudra (talk) 14:28, 9 March 2008 (UTC)Reply

Of the three links above, [4] is dead; [5] claims WP as its source(!) and [6] has an identical list, spelling peculiarities included, so presumably copied. However, this third one offers a link at the bottom to this, which, besides a link to this interesting PDF, at the bottom links to this, which has a link to this, whence this and finally, this, which I think is our "original source" of the article's information. Here we find a reference to the Adyar Library and a name: Sri Ramachandrendra of the Kanchi mutt. So it looks like the tabulation is the work of someone at SAKSI-VC, with only a PDF as the relevant "publication". In short, we do not have a mainstream source for these numbers, or more basically, for the assignment of the Muktika list (108 - mukhya) to the various categories. rudra (talk) 16:39, 9 March 2008 (UTC)Reply
(thread copied over from Talk:Upanishad. rudra (talk) 16:50, 9 March 2008 (UTC))Reply