Taittiriya Aranyaka

The forest book of the Taittiriya school, and one of the more confusing texts in the Vedic corpus to cite, because its most quoted section exists in two different divisions with two different numbering schemes and a third name.

What it is

An aranyaka, the layer of Vedic literature that sits between the ritual manuals and the Upanishads, associated with the Taittiriya recension of the Black Yajur Veda. Aranyaka means belonging to the forest, and the layer takes its name from the tradition that this material was to be studied away from the settlement.

It runs to ten prapathakas. The first six deal with the pravargya and other rites; the seventh, eighth and ninth are the Taittiriya Upanishad; the tenth stands apart.

The tenth book, which has its own name

Prapathaka ten circulates independently as the Mahanarayana Upanishad, and it is where a great deal of the liturgical material most used in South Indian practice lives, including the Aghora mantra and much of the material recited at the daily rites.

Here is the trap. That tenth book exists in two divisions. The Andhra division prints it in eighty anuvakas. The Dravida division, which is the one Sayana comments on, prints it in sixty-four. The same mantra therefore carries different numbers depending on the edition in hand: the Aghora mantra is 10.45 in the Dravida reckoning that this site follows, and 19.1 where the Andhra division is printed as the Mahanarayana Upanishad.

A citation of this text that gives only a number, without saying which division, is not fully checkable. That is not pedantry. It is the difference between a reader finding your verse and concluding you invented it.

Editions

Rajendralal Mitra edited it for the Bibliotheca Indica at Calcutta in 1872. Babasastri Phadke edited it with Sayana’s bhashya as number 36 of the Anandashrama Sanskrit Series at Poona in 1898. For the tenth book as the Mahanarayana Upanishad, Swami Vimalananda’s edition from the Sri Ramakrishna Math at Madras, second edition 1968, is the accessible modern one.

What is not in it

A settled text. Variant readings are real and substantive in places, not merely orthographic, and the divisions differ in content as well as numbering. Anyone quoting the Aranyaka should name the edition, and ideally read the page image, because the transliterated texts in circulation carry silent errors that the printed editions do not.