Two Recensions, Many Schools

The distinction between the Black and White Yajurveda is only the top level of a texture of local schools, called shakhas, each maintaining its own version of the sacrificial formulas and its own manner of reciting them. Among the Black (Krishna) recension, which mixes formula and explanatory prose together, the surviving schools include the Taittiriya, dominant in South India, the Maitrayani, the Katha, and the smaller Kapisthala-Katha, each with its own regional stronghold and priestly families who still train reciters in its particular pronunciation and accent.

The White (Shukla) recension survives in two schools, the Kanva and the Madhyandina, which differ mainly in the ordering and minor wording of chapters within the Vajasaneyi Samhita, the White Yajurveda's core collection. One of Hinduism's most quoted philosophical texts sits inside this structure rather than beside it: the Isha Upanishad is not a separate composition appended to the Yajurveda but its final chapter, meaning that a text prized by later Vedantic philosophy for its teaching on the unity of the self and the whole survives because it was copied as the closing section of a priestly ritual manual. That a meditation on renunciation and knowledge should close a collection devoted to the mechanics of sacrifice is a fact the tradition preserved rather than resolved, and later commentators read it as the ritual pointing beyond itself toward the knowledge that completes it.