The Yājñavalkya Dharmaśāstra or Yājñavalkya Smṛti (YDh) is second in fame only to the Mānava Dharmaśāstra or Manu Smṛti (MDh, c. 150 ce) as a classical authority on Brahmanical Hindu law. Indeed, the Mitākṣarā commentary on YDh by Vijñāneśvara, a minister of the Cālukya king Vikramāditya VI (1076–1126), carried such weight in later centuries that the YDh may have exercised more influence on medieval scholastic Dharmaśāstra jurisprudence than far-famed Manu. The YDh, like the MDh, is a metrical work, composed in part of older verse maxims, redacted by an anonymous author, and ascribed to a legendary sage. Yājñavalkya is otherwise remembered by tradition as the original teacher and star philosopher of the Śukla Yajurveda, featured in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa and the Bṛhad Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad, and as an exponent of yoga.

This beautifully produced volume contains the Sanskrit text in Devanāgarī print with a new translation on facing pages. As explained in a “Note on the text” (pp. xxxix–xl), the text provided is the one constituted in a new critical edition by Olivelle. Due to the limitations of the general editorial policy of the Murty series, we are in the odd position of being given the critically edited text shorn of its critical apparatus: the full critical edition has been published separately (Yājñavalkya Dharmaśāstra: The Textual History of a Hindu Legal Code, Delhi: Primus Books, 2020). In lieu of the full apparatus, however, Olivelle includes “Notes to the text” at the end of the book (pp. 305–14), which include all significant deviations from “the Vulgate” text (the version represented in earlier editions and reflected in Vijñāneśvara's Mitākṣarā), and mention parallels in other texts. This is followed by “Notes to the translation” (pp. 315–60), a glossary, a bibliography, a concordance of verse numbers across various editions of the text, and an index.

Olivelle begins by introducing the work and its history (pp. vii–xxxvii): “As a legal text, Yajnavalkya's work is far superior to Manu's in terms of precision and organizational skill” (p. viii). The ascription of the work to Yājñavalkya is consistent with its thoroughgoing alignment with the Śukla Yajurvedic canon, including mantras, ritual prescriptions, and allusions to narrative tropes from the works of that tradition. Olivelle hypothesizes that the decision to ascribe the work to Yājñavalkya, whom YDh 1.2 locates in Mithilā, the capital of Videha, may have been intended to flatter the Gupta imperial power in nearby Magadha, during a period, moreover, when yoga teachings were in vogue: “composed during the Gupta period, perhaps under imperial patronage, to support Gupta legitimacy” through an association with a regional hero, King Janaka of Videha “celebrated both in the Vedas and in the Sanskrit epics” (p. xii).

Olivelle also notes the YDh's more developed “technical legal vocabulary”, which would be expected in “a period of bureaucratic complexity when literacy, at least among the elite, was on the ascendency” (p. xiii). Symptoms of the latter factor are the first appearance in a dharma text of the word lekhya for “document”, the expectation that contracts will be recorded in documents, and the first mention of the professional scribe, the kāyastha, whom the text at one point treats as a potential nuisance to the king's subjects (YDh 1.332). YDh (2.98–117) is also the first law book to use the technical term divya as the general term for a forensic ordeal.

Other notable innovations of the YDh are that it has moved the topic of cleansing birth and death impurity, as well as the discussion of ascetic modes of life, into the chapter dealing with expiation (prāyaścitta), a term originally designating acts intended to correct errors in ritual practice, then extended to cover penances for sin and impurity (as in MDh), and here further understood as including supererogatory austerities performed for spiritual benefit as well – complete with references to yoga (e.g. 3.110).

In the course of preparing the edition, Olivelle found that the manuscripts fell neatly into two distinct recensions, each lacking major variants: more than 30 manuscripts in a variety of scripts, and seven in Malayalam script. Though reliance on a stemma to constitute the text looked infeasible, consideration of external textual evidence brought him to an unexpected conclusion: that the version that has become standard (the “Vulgate”) because of the fame and wide influence of the early twelfth-century commentary by Vijñāneśvara, substantially diverges from what he concludes must be an older, more original recension. Between the early fifth century ce (the likely time of the YDh's composition) and the early ninth century (the date of the first surviving commentary, by Viśvarūpa) is what Olivelle calls a “dark period in the textual history of the work” (p. xxix). The readings of the latter commentary, however, turned out regularly to reflect readings closer to those of Kauṭilya's Arthaśāstra and the MDh, which were major sources for the YDh; the testimony of two c. tenth-century purāṇas (the Agnipurāṇa and the Garuḍapurāṇa) also provides further external criteria in support of the Malayalam tradition's readings, many of which have also been preserved in testimonia and in another twelfth-century commentary by Aparārka.

Perhaps some irascible forest ascetic once pronounced a curse that otherwise beautiful facing-page edition-translations of Indian texts brought out in emulation of the Loeb Classical Series must always be disfigured by a maverick scheme of transliteration. The now-defunct Clay series suffered from a severe case. The Murty series is afflicted only with a minor blemish: names printed in Roman are stripped of their diacritical marks, and supplied with aitches beside s and c as needed, while the surrounding terms in italics bear the standard diacritics. The resulting disparity is a little strange. (In the table of abbreviations (p. 303), a single “ṭ” has been smuggled in by devious Kauṭilya.) A more serious formatting complaint is that in the long endnote sections, the running header does not indicate the corresponding pages of text to which the notes below refer, or even the chapter number. This makes navigating more cumbersome than necessary, since one must flip back and forth trying to determine whether one is looking at note 27 to Adhyāya 1, 2, or 3.

Apart from these minor quibbles, however, this book is elegantly written and laid out, and constitutes a major advance in knowledge of the history of this landmark religious lawbook and its place in the Dharmaśāstra canon.