A History of Sanskrit Literature c33.s1.1

c33.s1.1

THE religious and philosophical spirit of India which appears already in marked development in the *Ṛgveda* found its most brilliant literary exposition in the Upaniṣads, but with them we are still distinctly before the time of formal systematization. On the other hand, we find at an unknown date Indian philosophy, so far as it is orthodox, framed in a number of Sūtras for which great antiquity is asserted by the schools, while the Jains and Buddhists alike assert the same of their texts, and even the materialists ascribe their doctrines to a mythical Bṛhaspati. These claims to antiquity we may justly dismiss, and assume that after the period of the Upaniṣads dates the time when ideas of earlier thinkers were gradually taken up and made into a definite system, Darçana,¹ taught in a philosophic school in the sense of a series of teachers who developed or at least expounded one definite body of doctrine. After this development had been in existence for some time, there ultimately came the desire to fix in definitive form the doctrines of the school, and this led to the composition of the Sūtras. These texts are based on the principle of short catchwords which must from the first have been accompanied by verbal expositions. These are naturally lost, and it appears clear that it was only in each case at some considerable distance after the Sūtra had been produced that the need of writing down a comment was devised. Our oldest surviving commentaries contain abundant signs that they do not represent an unbroken tradition, sure of itself, from the first teacher. Later we find independent works of the several schools, but these recognize the authority of the Sūtras, and make it clear that it was held that in them lay the essential doctrines of the school, which might be expanded and expounded but were not to be contradicted.