India as Known to Panini: A Study of the Cultural Material in the Ashtadhyayi c13.3

c13.3

PREVIOUS VIEWS—The question of Pāṇini's date has been discussed by many previous writers with different conclusions. We may profitably consider them. Goldstücker in his well-known work held that Pāṇini must have lived in the seventh century before the Christian era at the latest. He rightly observed: '*The investigation of the relative position which Pāṇini holds in ancient Sanskrit literature is more likely to lead to a solid result, than speculations as to the real date of his life.*' (*Pāṇini, His Place in Sanskrit Literature*, p. 67). His position was that Pāṇini lived after Yāska and before the Buddha. Sir R. G. Bhandarkar held the same view mainly on the ground that Pāṇini does not show acquaintance with South India. Pathak assigns him to the last quarter of the seventh century B.C., just before the appearance of Mahāvīra, the junior contemporary of Gautama Buddha. (*A.B.O.R.I.*, XI., p. 83). D. R. Bhandarkar proposed seventh century B.C. in his 1918 Carmichael Lectures (p. 141), which he later changed to about the middle of sixth century B.C. (*A.I.N.*, 1921, p. 46). Charpentier thinks that the date should be 550 B.C. (*J.R.A.S.*, 1913, p. 672-74). His revised view was: 'As for the date of Pāṇini I have suggested, sometime ago, that it should be placed somewhere about 500 B.C. and I feel more and more convinced that such a suggestion is mainly correct.' (*J.R.A.S.*, 1928, p. 345). H. C. Raychaudhry holds: 'In all probability Pāṇini lived after the Persian conquest of Gandhāra in the latter half of the sixth century B.C., but before the fourth century B.C. With a date in the fifth century B.C. all the evidence accommodates itself.' (*Early History of the Vaishṇava Sect*, 1936, p. 30). Grierson believed that a century or 150 years at the most elapsed between Pāṇini and the Aśokan inscriptions, which represent the spoken dialect of the day. This would place Pāṇini about 400 B.C. Macdonell's latest view (*India's Past*) was that Pāṇini did not live later than 500 B.C. Bohtlingk, however, makes Pāṇini more modern by dating him to about 350 B.C. Weber placed him subsequent to Alexander's invasion. It is unfortunate that a scholar of his depth and mastery over grammatical intricacies should through a grievous misunderstanding of the *kārikā* on sūtra IV.2.45 about Āpiśali and Kshudraka-Mālavas, have advocated a specious argument about the relative dates of Āpiśali, Pāṇini and Alexander (*H.I.L.*, p. 222; see V. S. Agrawala, Patañjali on the Kshudraka-Mālavas, *Poona Orientalist*, Vol. I, No. 4, Jan. 1937, pp. 1-7). Liebich's opinion on this point is that we have not yet sufficient ground to come to a definite conclusion, but that in all probability Pāṇini came after the Buddha and before the commencement of the Christian era, and that he was nearer the earlier than the later unit. It would thus appear that the range of Pāṇini's date is in the opinion of scholars limited to a period of three centuries between the seventh and the fourth century B.C. We may now try to examine this question more closely within these two limits on the basis of the data set forth above.