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A History of Sanskrit Literature c27.s1: 1. The Origin of the Çāstras

A History of Sanskrit Literature c27.s1

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English

1. The Origin of the Çāstras

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IN India, at any rate, science, Çāstra or Vidyā, arises in very close connexion with religion. The Vedic period saw the development of definite sacrificial schools, which preserved the tradition of one or other of the four Vedas, sometimes developing a special recension of that Veda, sometimes showing their individuality by producing a Brāhmaṇa, or, much more often, a Sūtra of their own. These Vedic schools, however, gradually passed away, though we have evidence that in an attenuated form they persisted for many centuries after their importance had greatly diminished. What happened was the inevitable rise of specialization. As life went on, more and more topics arose which the schools could not adequately master, and special schools arose which cut across the old divisions, though we may conjecture that in their origin they were formed within the Vedic schools as specialists in one branch of the work of the school itself. If so, it was inevitable that they should tend to expand and to take into consideration the similar issues arising in regard to the work of other schools. If, for instance, in a Ṛgvedic school the need for grammatical study produced a special school of Vaiyākaraṇas, grammarians, they would tend to amalgamate with any grammarians who studied the *Yajurveda* and to extend their interest to the Vedas in general. At any rate Yāska, perhaps *c.* 500 B.C., knows of schools of Vaiyākaraṇas, of Nairuktas, etymologists, and of Yājñikas, persons who concerned themselves with the sacrifice, and the grammar of Pāṇini is sufficient proof that there existed a grammatical school which was willing to include in its work usages of different Vedas and different schools of the same Veda. The Vaiyākaraṇas are, of course, the direct ancestors of the science of Grammar in classical times; the Nairuktas, though they give an impulse to lexicographical studies, can hardly be said to be the direct cause of the existence of the Koças, which were largely influenced by the necessity of the writers of Kāvya, who required to have collections of words for aid in composing their poetry.

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Yet another early development within the Vedic period was the building up of schools of Law in the wide sense of that term which includes religious and civil and criminal law. This must have been done together with the development of society and the necessity for having some standards to guide the Brahmins who acted as advisers and judges to the ruling class. The Smṛti of Manu presupposes a considerable period of development during which there arose professional schools, to one of which is due the production of a work such as that Smṛti which claims not to guide the life of any single community, but to be a general guide for all the classes of the state. Only slowly and imperfectly within these schools was there developed a separation, never complete, of religious and secular law.

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In another field of learning we can clearly see the development of expertise. The Vedic sacrifice demanded a rudimentary knowledge of the calendar and elementary conceptions of mensuration. Definite ideas of these subjects were slow of development, and were at first handed down merely in close connexion with each Veda; we still have different recensions of the Jyotiṣa on astronomy and the Çulbasūtras on the making of altars and kindred matters. But inevitably from these beginnings developed a wider geometrical, astronomical, and astrological science, which we find under the comprehensive title of Jyotiṣa and which is studied in distinct schools. Medicine, again, appears first in the spells of the *Atharvaveda*, and was fostered by the schools of magic practices which produced such a work as the *Kauçika Sūtra* of that Veda; but its Vedic connexion is less close than in the case of most of the sciences we have mentioned, and it is dubious conjecture that what surgery and anatomical knowledge it possessed was furthered by the practice of dissecting animals for the sacrifice and less often even man in the human sacrifice.

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The Vedic schools developed also a tendency to mysticism which is seen in the Āraṇyakas and the Upaniṣads, which are attached more or less closely to the great Brāhmaṇas. We may see in these works a tendency to fissure within the Vedic schools themselves: some preferred the sacrifice and the ritual, others sought to go behind it to the significance of the sacrifice, of the gods to whom it was offered, of life and man, and of the universe. The Upaniṣads are clearly in origin closely connected with Vedic schools, but their ideas inevitably transcend the school limit and prepare the way for that period of intellectual exchange which issues in the systems of philosophy, which, we may be sure, were not the outcome of any Vedic school as such. Theology and theosophy naturally, with the gradual transformation of the Vedic system, passed beyond the sphere of the old schools and were handed down in new forms of organization.

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Nor is it certain that we can divorce the Kāmaçāstra, the science of love, from Vedic beginnings. We may, indeed, conclude from hints¹ in the Vedic texts that genetics occupied the attention of sages of these schools, though little of their wisdom has been preserved for us. Naturally the subject would tend to spread beyond any individual school, and become, as it remained, the object of special study, treated with precisely the same care and detail as any other scientific subject.

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¹ *Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad*, vi. 4.

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The study of metre was doubtless encouraged by the mystic importance attached in Vedic times to the metre of the sacred texts, and Chandas, metrics, is reckoned one of the six Vedāṅgas, but its importance and character were early affected by the need of affording guidance to writers of Kāvya and other forms of literature, so that even the Vedāṅga presents itself as largely connected with secular metres. Poetics, on the other hand, was hardly in any sense Vedic, and represents an independent secular science. Largely the same remark may be applied to the Arthaçāstra or Nītiçāstra, but there is some connexion between it and the Dharmaçāstra, even when both were distinctly developed, and we may quite legitimately suppose that the original schools of Dharmaçāstra included in their scope the matters which later became specifically the objects of Arthaçāstra, politics, practical knowledge, technique in matters not primarily sacrificial. It is less certain that the Kāmaçāstra was taught in the same schools along with the primitive Arthaçāstra under the aegis of the Dharmaçāstra, though this may well have been the case. But at least there is no doubt of the dominant influence of religion on the growth of Sanskrit scientific literature.

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