Indian Palaeography from about B.C. 350 to about A.D. 1300 c6.s2.t1.2

c6.s2.t1.2

Among Vedic works, the Vāsiṣṭha Dharmasūtra, which according to Kumārila (about A. D. 750) originally belonged to a school of the Ṛgveda, and which is younger than the lost Mānava Dharmasūtra but older than the existing Manusaṃhitā,³ offers clear evidence for the widely spread use of writing during the "Vedic" period. Vasiṣṭha in XVI, 10, 14—15, mentions written documents as legal evidence, and the first of these sūtras is a quotation from an older work or from the traditional lore. Further, Pāṇini's grammar, which belongs to the Vedāṅgas, contains, besides the term *yavanānī* mentioned above, the compounds *lipikara* and *libikara*, "writer" (III, 2, 21), which sometimes have been rendered errroneously, against the authority of the Koṣas, by "maker of inscriptions."⁴ In addition to these few certain passages, the later Vedic works contain some technical terms, such as *akṣara*, *kāṇḍa*, *paṭala*, *grantha*, &c., which some scholars have quoted as evidence for writing. But others have explained them differently, and it is indeed not necessary to consider them as referring to written letters and MSS.⁵ Similarly, opinions are much divided with respect to the force of some other general arguments for the early use of written documents and MSS., drawn from the advanced state of Vedic civilisation, especially from the high development of trade and the complicated monetary transactions mentioned in Vedic works, from the use of prose in the Brāhmaṇas from the collection, the methodical arrangement, the numeration, and the analysis of the Vedic texts, and from the grammatical, phonetic, and lexicographic researches in the Vedāṅgas.⁶ Though some of these points, especially the first and the last, undeniably possess considerable weight, they have yet not gained general recognition, as will always happen if an *argumentum ex impossibili* is used, even if it should be supported by fuller special enquiries than Sanskrit scholars have hitherto devoted to these subjects.