India as Known to Panini: A Study of the Cultural Material in the Ashtadhyayi c13.4

c13.4

*LITERARY ARGUMENT*—As Liebich has summed up, the literary argument of Goldstücker leads to the following result: the *Āraṇyakas*, *Upanishads*, *Prātiśākhyas*, *Vājasaneyī Saṁhitā*, *Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa*, *Atharvaveda*, and the six philosophical systems were unknown to Pāṇini, but he knew the *Ṛigveda*, *Sāmaveda* and *Kṛishṇa Yajurveda*. He holds that Pāṇini lived after Yāska. This argument does not bear scrutiny. Thieme from his critical study of Pāṇini's Vedic material has shown that the Vedic texts undoubtedly used by Pāṇini included the *RV*, MS., KS., TS., AV., and most probably the SV. (*Pāṇini and the Veda*, 1935, p. 63); he further opines that Śākalya's Padapāṭha of the *Ṛigveda* and the *Paippalāda Śākhā* of the *Atharvaveda* were also known to him. To take another significant example, Goldstücker had come to the conclusion that Pāṇini did not know the *Upanishad* literature, and hence his time should be antedated to the Upanishadic period. This position cannot be maintained since Pāṇini knew the word *Upanishad* in a pejorative sense (I.4.79) which must have taken considerable time to develop after the close of the Upanishadic age. On the basis of this *sūtra* Keith also accepted Pāṇini's knowledge of the Upanishads (*Tait. S.*, Eng. Trans., p. clxvii). But Pāṇini's literary horizon is not confined to Vedic texts only; it goes much further to include those several stages of literary and linguistic evolution at the end of which his own work came into existence. The Chapter on Literary Data has set forth this evidence exhaustively, and in that light we may vouchsafe that the process of literary evolution inside the Vedic *Charaṇas* had already brought into existence such literary types as the *Kalpa Sūtras* and the *Dharma Sūtras*. Outside the *Charaṇas* much of the Vedāṅga literature as *Vyākaraṇa*, with its special commentaries on Nouns and Verbs (*Nāmika* and *Ākhyātika*, IV.3.72) and a vast body of Yājñika literature and its commentaries had been compiled. Pāṇini also knows of the *Mahābhārata* (referred to for the first time in the *Āśvalāyana Gṛihya Sūtra*), the text of which must have taken shape by his time (Utgikar, *Bhandarkar Commemoration Volume*, p. 340). Further, he refers to later literary types, as *śloka* and their authors the *ślokakāra*, to secular subjects like *Naṭasūtras*, and even to classical Sanskrit works, such as *Śiśukrandīya*, *Yamasabhīya*, and *Indrajananīya*, which were the earliest examples of classical poetry and are mentioned for the first time by Pāṇini. Pāṇini thus witnessed the rise of classical Sanskrit poety and the *sūtra* and *śloka* forms of literature flourishing together in his time. Moreover, the style of his *sūtras* is much more finished, as he himself would call it (*pratishṇātaṁ sūtraṁ*), than that of some of the *Dharma-* and *Gṛihya-sūtras*. We must therefore abandon Goldstücker's estimate of Pāṇini's time.