SANNE DOKTER-MERSCH
Leiden University s.mersch@hum.leidenuniv.nl
EXTREME BORROWING: THE BHAVIṢYAPURĀṆA AND THE VIṢṆUDHARMA
The Bhaviṣyapurāṇa is notorious for its borrowing from other sources. Whereas other Purāṇas paraphrased the Manusmṛti, for instance, the Bhaviṣyapurāṇa rather directly copied large parts of the text. The same goes for borrowing from the Śivadharma corpus. Although several Purāṇas have borrowed from Śivadharmaśāstra chapter 10, the Bhaviṣyapurāṇa is the only one to include almost the entire chapter. The Viṣṇudharma is another text that has been re-used more by the Bhaviṣyapurāṇa composers than by other Purāṇa composers. In fact, according to Reinhold Grünendahl, no less than 1200 verses of the Viṣṇudharma were copied into the Bhaviṣyapurāṇa. Unfortunately, Grünendahl’s wish to discuss these parallels never came to fruition. In this paper, I will celebrate Grünendahl’s work on this material by taking up exactly this task. After collecting the parallels between the two texts, I will identify various modes of adaption by focusing on the extent to which an entire chapter is borrowed into the Bhaviṣyapurāṇa; the embedding of the borrowing/borrowed chapter within the two texts; and the content of the parallel in the Bhaviṣyapurāṇa compared to the Viṣṇudharma (changes, additions and omissions). I will finish by addressing the question why the Bhaviṣyapurāṇa borrowed so heavily from the Viṣṇudharma.