A History of Sanskrit Literature c29.s2.9

c29.s2.9

Kātyāyana probably lived in the third century B. C.,¹ though no strict proof is possible, and this date really depends on the fact that he apparently did not long precede Patañjali; the impression left by Kātyāyana's Vārttikas is certainly that sometimes, not by any means always, he is attacking or correcting Pāṇini on the score of differences in usage which had arisen between the time of the two, while with Patañjali it seems as if he and Kātyāyana were parted by no great interval of time. Kātyāyana was not a captious critic of Pāṇini; he was not the first to call in question his rules; what he did was to examine criticisms, rejecting some, accepting others, and therefore supplementing and limiting Pāṇini's rules. But, while we need not treat him as hostile, he seems not to have been sorry to find Pāṇini in error. Patañjali, whose *Mahābhāṣya* has preserved us Kātyāyana's Vārttikas of some 1,245 Sūtras, takes up Kātyāyana's criticisms, and in many cases defends Pāṇini, but by no means as a matter of course. Moreover, he carries out in great measure his predecessor's work by examining other Sūtras of Pāṇini and correcting or explaining them. It is clear that Patañjali had many criticisms and works before him beside that of Kātyāyana; there are Vārttikas in verse which need not all have been Kātyāyana's, and Kārikās, memorial verses which probably are by various hands, including Patañjali himself; the variety of metres used in these verses is remarkable, including some later quite rare, but complex, metres. Among others Patañjali mentions Vyāḍi, of whose work—the *Saṁgraha*—much has been conjectured but very little is known, Vājapyāyana, Pauṣkarasādi, Goṇikāputra, and Gonardīya, with whom he was formerly erroneously held to be identical.¹