When a tatpuruṣa turns into a dvandva in order to meet the “Brāhmaṇical Reform”. The case-study of iṣṭāpūrtám

Tiziana Pontillo

2019-01-01

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Abstract

The Vedic sources contain dozens of occurrences of the compound iṣṭāpūrtá-, whose context deals with the goal of gaining a destiny in the afterworld to possibly match one’s own sacrificial merits. The present paper aims at explaining why the Vedic compound iṣṭāpūrtá- is interpreted as a dvandva, while its original meaning seems to be that of an earlier tatpuruṣa, denoting the new body made by means of sacrifices and stored in heaven until the sacrificer’s death. The hypothesis advanced here consists in assuming that the semantic shift of iṣṭāpūrtám might have intentionally been determined within the complex framework of the exigences of the Brahmanical Reform that stemmed from the crucial meeting between two different kinds of Indo-Aryan language speakers or better from their culturally momentous clash. The present reconstruction will concentrate on the survey of the Vedic occurrences of iṣṭāpūrtá-, and on the indigenous Vyākaraṇa rules, to finally postulate that iṣṭāpūrtá- might have been a so-called aluk tatpuruṣa denoting “something granted by a sacrifice”.