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A History of Sanskrit Literature c30.s2: 2. The Smṛti of Manu

A History of Sanskrit Literature c30.s2

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English

2. The Smṛti of Manu

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This is the point of view from which we can best understand the origin of the *Mānava Dharmaçāstra* or *Manu Smṛti*, and the later Smṛtis. These works have the common characteristic that they claim to be generally applicable to all orthodox Hindus and cover the duties of all the castes; though they differ from the Dharmasūtras proper by the much greater development which they accord to the duties of the king and the distinctly more advanced treatment of what we style civil and criminal law. Their compilers, it is clear, drew largely on the floating mass of popular principles, and they adopted the verse form in which this was couched, while they were under the influence of the epic with its practical illustration of principles of polity and its easy versification which presented comparative simplicity of imitation. Even later law-books acknowledge beside the Çruti, holy writ, and the Smṛtis themselves the usage of experts (*çiṣṭācāra*) and the customs of places, castes, and families as sources of law, and these naturally were exploited by the makers of the Smṛtis. Further, in order to secure acceptance for their works, they were only too anxious to ascribe them divine provenance and to pass them off as the utterances of old sages.

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That one of these sages was Manu followed naturally from the fact that as the man who escaped the deluge,¹ accepted by some authorities at least, he was the renewer of sacrificial ordinances and the dispenser of maxims of justice. The *Taittirīya Saṃhitā*² declares that all he said was medicine, Yāska³ cites him—not our text—for the law of succession, the Gṛhyasūtras, the Dharmasūtras, the epic repeatedly assert that Manu said so and so. Only in part do these assertions agree with the *Manu Smṛti*; even Açvaghoṣa's⁴ citations of a *Mānava Dharma* agree only twice with that text. An investigation of the epic⁵ reveals that, without any citation of Manu, there are especially in books iii, xii, and xvi, 260 verses, say a tenth of the Smṛti, in substance and largely even in form identical with verses of the Smṛti. As in some cases the epic, in others the Smṛti, shows the more original form, the priority of either may be excluded, and the verses be referred to a common source; this is supported by the recurrence of similar phenomena in other cases, the *Vāsiṣṭha Dharmaçāstra* having 39, the text of Viṣṇu 160 verses in common. On the other hand, especially in book xiii of the epic, we find real knowledge in the form of citations with Manu as the authority of the *Manu Smṛti*; the Nārāyaṇīya episode of xii undoubtedly used the Dharmaçāstra of Manu and texts ascribed to Uçanas and Bṛhaspati. Manu again recognizes the heroes and legends of the epic, so that it is clear that, while the older parts of the epic were composed before the *Manu Smṛti* and the didactic parts of the text often merely draw from the same sources as the Smṛti, yet the Smṛti was in existence much as it now is before the epic was finally redacted as we have it. Unluckily this gives us little help towards a genuine date, and the wide limits of 200 B. C. to A. D. 200 are still all that can be legitimately asserted. The former limit arises from the mention of Yavanas, Çakas, Kāmbojas, and Pahlavas, showing that the work was written when the frontiers were no longer safe from invasion, the latter by general probability, and priority to the other Smṛtis.

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¹ *Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa*, i. 5. 1. 7.

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² ii. 2. 10. 2.

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³ iii. 4.

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⁴ In the *Vajrasūcī*, if that be his.

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⁵ See Bühler, SBE. xxv, whose trans. is most valuable.

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While we may readily believe that the kernel in some degree of the Smṛti was formed by an older Dharmasūtra, and, while it is natural to see in this the *Mānava Dharmasūtra* of a branch of the Maitrāyaṇīya school of the Black Yajurveda, it must be admitted that no strict proof is possible. The *Vāsiṣṭha Dharmaçāstra*¹ cites from the Mānava a long passage in prose and verse which agrees in part with the Smṛti, and some minor detailed similarities can be traced between the Smṛti and the fortunately extant Gṛhyasūtra of the Mānavas.² The difficulties in the text which here and there occur, and occasional incongruities, may best be accounted for by use of an old Sūtra. The Smṛti itself ascribes its origin to Brahman, whence it came to men via Manu and Bhṛgu; while the *Nārada Smṛti* tells of a Smṛti in 100,000 verses by Manu reduced to 12,000 by Nārada, 8,000 by Mārkaṇḍeya and 4,000 by Sumati, son of Bhṛgu. This might suggest that there was a successive series of redactions of the original Sūtra, and the inconsistencies in the Smṛti, as well as later allusions to a *Vṛddha-Manu* and *Bṛhan-Manu*,³ have been adduced in support of this view. It seems, however, much more probable that the Smṛti is an early attempt at composition, whence its defects, while the larger texts were writings up of a popular original. Unfortunately we cannot find any historical event to explain precisely why the new effort became specially appropriate; there was a Brahmanical revival in the first century B.C.,¹ though on a small scale and no great duration, and the Gupta revival of the fourth century is probably rather late for the composition of the work. In what sense it was an individual production or the work of a group we cannot say.

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¹ iv. 5–8.

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² P. von Bradke, ZDMG. xxxvi. 417 ff., 433 ff.; G. B. Beaman, *On the Sources of the Dharma-Śāstras of Manu und Yājñavalkya* (1895).

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³ G. Herberich, *Zitate aus Vṛddhamanu und Bṛhanmanu* (1893).

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¹ Cf. the Vikramāditya epoch; in the second century B. C. Puṣyamitra's rule was decidedly Brahmanical, and Wema Kadphises was a Māheçvara, devotee of Çiva; Bhandarkar (*Early History of India*, pp. 63 ff.) would put *Manu* in the Gupta era.

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Book i contains an interesting semi-philosophical account of creation in the popular Paurānic type of a realistic Vedānta combined with Sāṁkhya terms, including the essential doctrine of the three constituents of nature, which, however, is not independent but a creation, as also are the souls. In ii the sources of law are declared, and the duties of the student; in iii–v the householder occupies attention; his marriage, daily rites, funeral offerings (iii), occupation and general rules of life (iv), lawful and forbidden food, impurity and purification, and rules as to women. Book vi deals with the two further stages of life, the hermit in the forest and the ascetic. In vii we come to the duties of the king, including general political maxims. In viii and ix we have civil and criminal law, including procedure and evidence, especially ordeals; the topics are given as eighteen, a precision without any parallel in the Sūtras; recovery of debts; deposit and pledge; sale without ownership; partnership concerns; subtraction of gifts; non-payment of wages; non-performance of agreement; rescission of sale and purchase; masters and herdsmen; disputes as to boundaries; defamation; assault and hurt; theft; violence; adultery; duties of husband and wife; inheritance and partition; gambling and wagers. Book ix adds an account of the duties of kings and of those of Vaiçyas and Çūdras. In x are dealt with the mixed castes, the rules as to occupation affecting the castes, and occupation in time of distress when normal rules must yield. In xi we find rules for gifts, sacrifices and penances, while xii follows the sinner to his retribution in the next life by the rules of transmigration, and adds counsel regarding the means of attaining release. In this as in i we have the popular Vedānta with strong Sāṁkhya and Yoga influences.

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The *Manu Smṛti*, however, is not merely important as a law-book; it is unquestionably rather to be compared with the great poem of Lucretius, beside which it ranks as the expression of a philosophy of life; in that case, however, the views presented were merely those of a school of wide but not commanding influence; in Manu we have the soul of a great section of a people. Characteristic also is the lack of individuality in the work, which causes so deep a contrast with the passionate utterances of Lucretius against the tyranny of superstition: *tantum religio potuit suadere malorum*. To the author instead all is perfectly ordered in a world created by the divine power, regulated according to the principle of absolute justice by that power. Heretics existed, but they are passed over with severe condemnation; the life of cities and affairs is little in the thoughts of the writer, who instead envisages a simple kingdom in which the Brahmins take the first place, and in close accord with them, enforcing their discipline, abides the king; Vaiçyas and Çūdras, the vast bulk of the people, are recognized, but disposed of with a curious brevity, and nothing better than the doctrine of mixed castes, into which even the Yavana and Çaka are pressed, is adduced to account for the vast numbers who had no claim to be even Vaiçyas or Çūdras. The hand of a narrow religion lies heavily over the work, and its pedantry is seen in the treatment of infinitely small transgressions of etiquette as crimes requiring grave penalties hereafter, if not in this world, but remediable by penances to be ordered by the Brahmins—a source of profitable employment. The failure to evolve any clear plan is obvious, but in complete agreement with Indian modes of thought. Some advance, too, is visible—doubtless derived from the law schools in the classification of the topics of law, for the five which are concerned with criminal law are grouped together even if they appear between sections on civil law; moreover, beside the old relentless cruelty of primitive law, there does appear recognition of the necessity of considering not the mere act, but also the motive of the doer. Law, however, appears not as the possession of the people, but as the privilege of the king, and the king has a sanctity only inferior to the Brahmin; he is a divine creation, doubtless a deliberate attack on the Buddhist doctrine of a social contract which made the king a mere wage-receiver, a doctrine which the more realistic *Arthaçāstra* actually enunciates. The king rewards his supporters by obeying their claims to exemption from punishment for all save the gravest crimes, and the work insists throughout on preferring the high to the low, in lieu of exacting from those in high place a nobler standard of conduct. In these demands for the Brahmins, and in a certain vagueness throughout in the legal sections, it is easy to recognize the hand of the theorist rather than of the practical lawyer. We are seeing law, indeed, but through a somewhat distorting medium in which ethical considerations obscure our vision; thus the use of torture which the *Arthaçāstra* urges is ignored in favour of the ordeal, which the Brahmins preferred both on ideal grounds and as involving their aid in administration. Rationalism, of course, is utterly foreign to the spirit of the writer, but his command of language, his earnestness, his happy similes, his carefully handled metre which almost approaches the standard of correctness of the classical poets, while it preserves some tinge of epic variety, combine to render the work a striking one, however ludicrous may seem to us Nietzsche's¹ preference of it to the Bible.

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¹ *Antichrist*, § 56; *Wille zur Macht*, § 194, cited by Winternitz, GIL. iii. 492, n. 1. On the metre see Oldenberg, ZDMG. xxxv. 181 ff.

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The work is rich in happy expressions of principle; the time for retirement to the forest is given as:

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*gṛhasthas tu yadā paçyed valīpalitam ātmanaḥ*
*āpatyasyaiva cāpatyaṁ tadāraṇyaṁ samāçrayet.*

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'When he sees wrinkles on his face and gray in his hair, and a son born to his son, then should the householder fare to the forest.' The king's divinity is absolute:

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*bālo 'pi nāvamantavyo manuṣya iti bhūmipaḥ*
*mahatī devatā hy eṣā nararūpeṇa tiṣṭhati.*

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'Though a child, a king must not be despised on the score of mere humanity; in him a great deity is embodied in human shape.' The claims of righteousness to respect are effectively depicted:

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*ekaḥ prajāyate jantur eka eva pralīyate*
*eko 'nubhuṅkte sukṛtam eka eva ca duṣkṛtam.*
*mṛtaçarīram utsṛjya kāṣṭhaloṣṭasamam bhuvi*
*vimukhā bāndhavā yānti dharmas tam anugacchati.*

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'Alone man is born, alone he dies, alone he reaps the fruit of good and of evil done by him. Laying down on the ground the body of the dead as if it were a clod or a log, the kin depart with face averted; righteousness alone is his companion.' In the philosophical parts the tone often rises to a grave dignity, reminiscent of the *Bhagavadgītā*.

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Comments on the Smṛti are many; that of Medhātithi is not later than the ninth century, Govindarāja belongs to the twelfth and the popular Kullūka, who follows him, to the fifteenth. The influence of the text is attested by its acceptance in Burma, Siam, and Java as authoritative, and the production of works based on it.

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