There is no shortage of subjects to research in the rich culture of India. One can even find 2500–3000-year-old texts previously unknown to science! As the topic of my doctoral dissertation, my teacher Pentti Aalto suggested the Drāhyāyaṇa-Śrautasūtra, which the Finnish scholar Julio Reuter began publishing in 1904. It is part of the Sāmaveda (SV), the ‘storehouse of knowledge of sacrificial chants,’ which describes Vedic rituals, and is a later version of the Lāṭyāyana-Śrautasūtra (500 BC). I studied the relationship between the two texts and their relationship to all other SV texts

Unpublished texts are described in libraries’ manuscript catalogues, and from some Thanjavur Library extracts claiming to be the Maśaka-Kalpasūtra, I noticed that what I was actually viewing were previously unknown parts of the Jaimini-Śrautasūtra, which is part of the SV. In the same year, 1966, an extensive commentary was published on the very text I had discovered; the edition was based on just one manuscript and was full of mistakes. Moreover, Bhavatrāta, who lived in 700 AD, does not include the explicated text in his commentary.

The critical edition of those important texts is now nearing completion. But first we needed to find additional manuscripts and the Jaiminīya-Uttaragāna (JUG), a large collection of songs dating from 900 BC, which was only known through references. Since 1985, I have collaborated with Masato Fujii (who completed his PhD at the University of Helsinki in 2004 and is now a professor at Kyoto University) in our 25 trips to India to photograph rare Jaiminīya texts. The Thanjavur manuscript is still the only one of its kind, but several manuscripts containing the Bhavatrāta commentary, the JUG, and many other Jaiminīya texts have been found. From the songs it has even been possible to record a now-extinct 1000-year-old oral tradition.