The credit —or the blame— for this collection of essays goes to Federico Squarcini. It is he who suggested the publication of some collected papers of mine during my visit to Bologna for the defense of his doctoral dissertation.

The papers collected in this volume span about a decade from 1995 to 2004. During the previous two decades the focus of my scholarly work was the ascetic traditions of India, principally those associated with the Brahmanical tradition. My papers from that period are being published in a separate volume. The last decade, coinciding broadly with my move from Indiana University, Bloomington, to the University of Texas at Austin, saw a shift in my focus. The invitation to translate the Upaniṣads from the Oxford University Press spurred me to work more closely with the late Vedic literature, resulting in several articles of this volume (I-IV, XIII). My long-standing interest, however, has been the Indian legal tradition represented by the Dharmaśāstras, an interest that goes back to my teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Ludo Rocher, and sustained by my close association with my friend and colleague, Professor Richard Lariviere. In the late 1990s I undertook the edition and translation of the earliest extant legal texts, the four Dharmasūtras (Oxford, 1999; and Motilal Banarsidass, 2000), and then the critical edition of the Mānava Dharmaśāstra (Oxford, 2004 and 2005). Work on the Dharmaśāstric material resulted in several articles included in this volume (V-XII, XIV).