A History of Sanskrit Literature c27.s1.7

c27.s1.7

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.