Political History of Ancient India, from the Accession of Parikshit to the Extinction of the Gupta Dynasty c9.s3.129

c9.s3.129

An attempt has been made in recent times to support the Purāṇic date for Parikshit and the Bhārata War which is taken to correspond to c. 1400 B.C.², by calculations based on the *Vaṁśa* lists of teachers and pupils preserved in the Vedic literature. The importance of these lists was emphasized in these very pages as early as 1923. But the data they yield have been made to square with the chronological scheme adumbrated in some of the Purāṇic Mss with the help of a number of assumptions for which no cogent proofs have been adduced. It has, for instance, been taken for granted that the *Vaṁśa* list given at the end of the *Bṛihadāraṇyaka Upanishad* is virtually contemporaneous with those found in the *Vaṁśa Brāhmaṇa* and the *Jaiminīya Upanishad Brāhmaṇa*, and that all the lists "must be" dated "*not later than c.* 550 B.C." (*op. cit.* p. 70). A few pages further on (p. 77) the date of the *Vaṁśa Brāhmaṇa* is stated to be "*c.* 550 B.C. (the words "not later than" being omitted). The mere fact that the *Bṛihadāraṇyaka Upanishad* and other works of the *Śruti* literature are generally regarded as Pre-Buddhist cannot be taken to prove that the entire lists of teachers and pupils appended to or inserted in all of them can claim equal antiquity. Scholars in assigning the period before 500 B.C. to the Vedic literature expressly exclude "its latest excrescences."³ Pāṇini⁴ draws a distinction between Vedic works which, to him, are *Purāṇaprokta* and those that he does not obviously regard as equally old. The date "c. 550 B.C." has even less justification than the vague words "not later than c. 550 B.C."