A History of Sanskrit Literature c30.s2.2

c30.s2.2

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.