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The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c20: Chapter IX. The Period of the Sūtras, Epics, and Law-Books

The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c20

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English

Contents

Chapter IX. The Period of the Sūtras, Epics, and Law-Books

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THE later Brāhman literature which, whatever may be the age of its representative works in their present form, undoubtedly had its roots in a period at least as early as the rise of Jainism and Buddhism, may be classified under the four headings—Sūtras, Epic poems, Law-books, and Purāṇas. These belong to two distinct species of literary composition, the Sūtras being broadly distinguished from the others both in form and object.

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The purpose of the Sūtras, so called from the word *sūtra* which means 'a thread,' is to afford a clue through the mazes of Brāhmanical learning contained in the Brāhmaṇas. In the form of a series of short sentences they codify and systematise the various branches of knowledge sacred and secular. They are intended to satisfy the needs of a system of oral instruction, so that each step in the exposition of a subject may be learnt progressively and a convenient analysis of the whole committed to memory by the student. The earliest Sūtras are in the priestly language and represent a phase which is transitional between the language of the Brāhmaṇas and Classical Sanskrit as fixed by the grammarians.

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The Epics supply the model both for language and form which is followed by the Law-books and the Purāṇas. Their source is to be traced to the traditional recitations of bards who were neither priests nor scholars. Their language is thus naturally more popular in character and less regular than Classical Sanskrit¹. In many respects it does not conform to the laws laid down by the grammarians, and is ignored by them. This became the conventional language of epic poetry, which was used also in the Law-books, the subject-matter of which was taken to a great extent from the Sūtras, and in the Purāṇas, which, as they stand at present, belong to a period not earlier than the fourth century A.D. The metres of the Law-books and the Purāṇas are also substantially those of the Epic poems.

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¹ Wackernagel, *Altind. Gram.* vol. I, p. xlv.

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The period of the Sūtras, Epics, and Law-books thus overlaps that of Buddhist India on the one hand, and reaches well into the period of the extant Purāṇas on the other. The earliest known Purāṇa precedes the later law-books probably by centuries, as the Sūtras precede the earliest works of Buddhism. Nevertheless it is not only new matter which is offered by the literature, whether legal or epic, but virtually a new phase, a fresh point of view, the life of India as it shows itself under the dominion of the Brāhmans, who have been the real masters of Indian thought for more than three millenniums. It is in fact the continuation under new conditions of the history depicted above, before Jain and Buddhist had arisen.

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As we read the works of these important sects we receive the impression that the world of India was one in which the ancient priestly caste had lost its authority; that nobles and wealthy merchants were more regarded than Brāhmans. But it must be remembered that, despite the wide reach of Buddhism when in its full power, it influenced at first only that part of the country where it arose, and that the earlier writings depicting the life and teaching of Buddha represent chiefly the circumstances found in a very circumscribed area, in fact just the area where Brāhmanism was weakest. The elements of social life were the same here as elsewhere, but they were not arranged in the same way. The stronghold of Brāhmanism lay to the West, and there the priest had had his say and built up his power among clans boasting direct descent from Vedic heroes and more inclined to bow to the mysterious Vedic word of which the only custodian was the Brāhman priest. In short, as Brāhmanism exaggerates the power of the priest, so Buddhism belittles it unduly, not because it sets out to do so but because each represents a special point of view based more or less upon geographical position. Owing, however, to a still later interpretation of caste, our modern ideas on the subject are apt to be peculiarly confused. To understand the social order into which we enter as we begin the study of the Sūtras, epics, and law-books, we must renounce altogether the notion of caste in its strict modern sense, as on the other hand we must free ourselves from the thought that the whole caste-system is merely a priestly hypothesis disproved by the conditions revealed in Buddhistic writings.

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In point of fact, even the Buddhist writings recognise the formal castes; and it is simply impossible that a social structure so widely pervading as that of the so-called castes, a structure revealed not by didactic works alone but implicitly as well as explicitly presented to us in every body of writings whether orthodox or heterodox, should have been made out of whole cloth. What we loosely call by this name to-day are later refinements; and we do not need to turn to Buddhist works to show that in ancient times the castes were merely orders socially distinct but not very strictly separated or ramified into such sub-divisional castes as obtain at the present time.

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Yet before giving the proof of this in detail, it will be well to consider briefly the chronology of the works to be reviewed in relation to the general character and history of the states in which they arose. The legal literature which begins with the Sūtras and is represented in the epics does not really end at all, as works of this nature continue to be written down to modern times, chiefly by eminent jurists who comment on older works. But, after eliminating the modern jurists and confining ourselves to the law-books which may be called classic, we still find that the terminus falls well into the middle of the first millennium of our era; and as the beginning of this literature in Sūtra style reaches back at least as far as this before the beginning of our era, the whole period is rather more than a thousand years, about the middle of which must be set the time to which the epic poems are to be assigned as works already known and perhaps nearly completed.

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The cycle thus designated as a millennium is one of very varied political fortunes; and the social, political, and religious material of the legal and epical literature must necessarily be explained in accordance with the outward changes. What these changes were is described in detail in other chapters of this work. For our present purpose it is necessary only to recount them in outline. At the end of the sixth century B.C., early in the period to which the Sūtras belong, the Persian Empire held two provinces in N.W. India—Gandhāra, the present districts of Peshāwar and Rāwalpindi, and the ‘Indian’ province, that is to say, the country of the Lower Indus: and the northern part of India generally was dominated by peoples of the Āryan race who had descended from the Punjab and spread eastward for centuries, but not so that the recently acquired territory was thoroughly assimilated to the cults and culture of the invaders, nor so that any one of these invaders had established an empire. Long before the end of this same period, Buddha, Mahāvīra, and other reformers had broken with the cult derived from the Vedic age, and the great empire of Açoka had made a new epoch in political life. This alteration, however, had been introduced, though adventitiously, through outer rather than inner conditions.

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After the short campaign in the Punjab, made by Alexander as the conqueror of the Persian Empire, his Indian dominions were, within a few years, absorbed by the growing power of Magadha (S. Bihār) then under the sway of a usurper, Chandragupta (c. 321–297 B.C.) the low-born son of Murā and the founder of the Maurya empire. This empire extended from Pāṭaliputra (Patna) to Herāt and was maintained by an army of approximately 700,000 men, the first real empire in India. His successors, Bindusāra and Açoka, enlarged the empire, annexing Kaliṅga on the eastern coast and ruling as far south as Madras. This dynasty continued in power till the end of the Sūtra period; and under it, during the reign of Açoka (c. 274–236 B.C.) Buddhism became the court-religion. Açoka’s period is determined by the mention in his edicts of certain Hellenic princes who were his contemporaries, but after his reign there comes a period of less chronological certainty. The different versions of the Purāṇas are not in agreement as to the exact number of his successors; but they are unanimous in asserting that the Maurya dynasty lasted for 137 years; that is to say, it is supposed to have come to an end c. 184 B.C. For over a century after its fall the Çuṅga dynasty, whose founder, Pushyamitra, had slain Bṛihadratha Maurya and usurped his throne, held sway, despite forcible inroads of the Yavanas (Greeks) and the Andhras;

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and we learn that both Pushyamitra and the Andhra king, Çātakarṇi, performed the famous ‘horse-sacrifice,’ in accordance with the ancient Vedic rite, thus challenging all opponents of their authority. The son of this Pushyamitra was Agnimitra, who conquered Vidarbha (Berār), then a province of the Andhra Empire of S. India, and the grandson, who guarded the horse, was Vasumitra. These names, as also the re-establishment of the ‘horse-sacrifice,’ are highly significant in that they show a renascence of the Vedic religion and a consequent decline in Buddhism. The same thing is indicated by the fact that Khāravela, a king of Kaliṅga, who boasts of having invaded the Andhra dominions as well as Northern India, was a Jain. Sumitra, the son of Agnimitra, was, according to Bāṇa’s historical romance, the *Harshacharita*, miserably slain by Mitradeva, who may perhaps have been a Brāhman of the Kaṇva family which eventually gained the chief power in the state. The account given by the Purāṇas states that the minister Vasudeva slew the tenth and last of the Çuṅga kings and inaugurated a new dynasty, called the Kaṇva dynasty, which lasted for about half a century;

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but, since the Kaṇvas are definitely styled 'servants of the Çuṅgas' and for other reasons, it seems more probable that the later Çuṅga kings had been reduced to subjection by their Brāhman ministers, and that the lists of these contemporary rulers nominal and actual were wrongly regarded by some late editor of the Purāṇas as successive. It is further related that one of the Andhra kings¹ slew Suçarman, the last of the Kāṇvas, and thus brought Magadha under the sway of the sovereigns, whose names and titles, as well as their sacrificial inscriptions, show them to have been followers of the ancient Vedic religion. But here again it appears that dynastic lists have been brought together and arranged in an unreal sequence. There can be little doubt that the first of the Andhra kings was earlier in date than the first of the Çuṅgas, and not 157 years later as would appear from the Purāṇas. It is indeed doubtful if the Andhras ever ruled in Magadha: but their sway in Central and Southern India lasted until the middle of the third century A.D.²

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¹ The Purāṇas say the founder of the dynasty, Simuka, but the chronological difficulties which this statement involves seem to be unsurmountable.

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² See Chapters XIII (the Purāṇas); XVIII-XX (the Maurya Empire); XXI (Indian Native States); XXIV (the earlier Andhras).

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In the meantime, on the decline of the Maurya empire which must have set in soon after the death of the Emperor Açoka (c. 236 B.C.), the Punjab passed into the hands of foreign invaders—first, Greeks from the kingdom of Bactria to the north, and subsequently Scythians (Çakas) and Parthians (Pahlavas) from the kingdom of Parthia to the west. The kingdoms established by these new-comers in the Punjab were overwhelmed by still another wave of invasion from the north. The Kushāṇas, a people from the region of China who had driven the Çakas out of Bactria, began their Indian conquests with the overthrow of the kingdom of Kābul about the middle of the first century A.D., and extended their power until, in the reign of Kanishka (probably 78 A.D.), the patron of that branch of the Buddhist Church which is called the Mahāyāna, the Kushāṇa empire was paramount in N. India³.

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³ For these foreign invaders of India see Chapters XXII, XXIII.

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In Western India we can to some extent trace from inscriptions and coins the varying fortunes in the conflict between the Andhras and the invaders of N. India, and the establishment in Kāthiāwār and Cutch of a dynasty of Çaka satraps, originally no doubt feudatories of the Kushāṇas, which lasted till c. 390 A.D. when it was overthrown by the Guptas.

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The period of the Gupta empire which dates from 319 A.D. is a most important epoch in the history of Sanskrit literature. It is the golden age of Classical Sanskrit; and in it most of the Purāṇas and the works belonging to the later legal literature appear to have assumed their present form.

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This brief conspectus of the conditions obtaining in India during the time to which we have to assign the Sūtras, epics, and legal works will show that other influences than those with which we have been dealing hitherto are to be expected; and these are indeed found, but not to such an extent as might have been anticipated. These influences are indeed to be traced rather in the general enlargement of vision of the writers than in specific details. The simple village life with which for the most part the Sūtras are concerned, the government of a circumscribed district by a local rāja, are gradually exchanged for the life reflected from large towns and imperial power. Though this is more noticeable in the epics, it may be detected in the later Sūtras and again in the still later law-books. During this period the power of Buddhism increased and then, reaching its culmination, began to wane. The world of India by the second century before Christ was already becoming indifferent to the teaching of Buddhism and was being reabsorbed into the great permanent cults of Vishṇu and Çiva, with which in spirit Buddhism itself began to be amalgamated. The Brāhman priests reasserted themselves; animal sacrifices, forbidden by Açoka, were no longer under the royal ban; and with this open expression of the older cult the whole system of Brāhmanism revived, fostered alike by the temple priests and their ritualism and by the philosophers, who regarded Buddhism as both a detestable heresy and a false interpretation of life.

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But there is little apparent influence from outside, despite the wider political outlook; and where such influence might be looked for with greatest certainty, namely in the effect of Greek domination, it is practically nil. Only the Yavanas, literally ‘Ionians,’ a people or peoples of Greek descent who may be traced in Indian literature and inscriptions from the third century B.C. to the second century A.D., and who were manifestly a factor of no small importance in the political history of Northern and Western India—they are celebrated as great fighters in the Mahābhārata and other literature—remain to show that the conquest of Alexander and the Greek invasion from Bactria had any result. Other indications point rather to Persia than to Hellas. Thus the title Satrap, which was continued in use by Alexander, still remains under Çakas and Kushāṇas to testify to the long Persian dominion in N.W. India. Apart from this, political and social relations do not appear to be affected at all either by Hellenic or by Persian influence. The native army remains of the same sort, though greatly enlarged. The social theory remains practically the same, save that a place among degraded 'outcastes' is given to Yavanas as to other barbarians. Architecture and the arts of sculpture, gem-engraving and coinage do indeed bear witness, especially in the N.W. region of India to the influence of Persia and Greece during this period, just as, at a later date, native astronomy was affected, and indeed practically superseded by the system of Alexandria. But the period with which we are dealing at present does not make it necessary to inquire into the relation between India and the outer world in respect to science. The idea that Indian epic poetry itself is due to Hellenic influence has indeed been suggested; but as a theory this idea depends on so nebulous a parallel of plot that it has received no support.

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