Lectures on Ancient Indian Numismatics (Carmichael Lectures, 1921) c7.42

c7.42

The fourteenth or concluding Kāṇḍa of the Śatapatha-Brāhmaṇa³ gives us a story about Janaka, King of Videha. He had celebrated a sacrifice in which he bestowed huge largesses upon the Brāhmaṇs of the Kuru-Pañchāla country. A curiosity sprung up in his mind as to who was the best-read of these Brāhmaṇs. He collected a thousand kine, and we are told that to every single horn of each cow were tied ten *pādas*, and it was proclaimed that they should be taken away by him alone who is best cognisant with *brahman*. The story further goes, as some of you here probably know, that Yājñavalkya alone had the indomitable courage of claiming them. But we are not concerned with that part of the story. What we are here concerned with is to know what those *pādas* were, ten of which were fastened to each horn of the cows. It has been suggested by Böhtlingk and Roth, and accepted by Prof. Rhys Davids¹ that the word *pāda* here denotes the fourth part of a certain gold weight but not a coin. Are we then to suppose that as the cows that were brought were one thousand in number, as each cow has two horns and as each horn carried ten Pādas, King Janaka ordered 20,000 pieces of gold to be hammered out, each again weighing just one-fourth of a certain weight,—all this just on the spur of the moment when the idea of testing the erudition of the Brāhmaṇs occurred to him²? I am afraid this idea would be too ridiculous for any scholar to entertain seriously in his mind. On the other hand, Pāda is known to be the name of a coin and has been referred to in one of Pāṇini’s sūtras¹ and also in an inscription of the tenth century A.D.² Of course, it must have denoted a coin which in value was one-fourth of that coin which was the standard money, just as the modern denomination pāvlā or pāvlī which is derived from the word pāda denotes four annas, i.e. exactly one-fourth of the standard coin, viz. the rupee. Only if pāda is taken to stand for a coin, it is easy to understand that Janaka could at any moment get hold of 20,000 such coins from his treasury for being tied to the horns of the cows.