A History of Sanskrit Literature c6.28

c6.28

The *Charaṇa-vyūha*, or "Exposition of Schools," a supplementary work of the Sūtra period, mentions as the five *çākhās* or "branches" of the *Rigveda*, the Çākalas, the Vāshkalas, the Āçvalāyanas, the Çāṅkhāyanas, and the Māṇḍūkeyas. The third and fourth of these schools, however, do not represent different recensions of the text, the sole distinction between them and the Çākalas having been that the Āçvalāyanas recognised as canonical the group of the eleven *Vālakhilya* or supplementary hymns, and the Çāṅkhāyanas admitted the same group, diminished only by a few verses. Hence the tradition of the Purāṇas, or later legendary works, mentions only the three schools of Çākalas, Vāshkalas, and Māṇḍūkas. If the latter ever possessed a recension of an independent character, all traces of it were lost at an early period in ancient India, for no information of any kind about it has been preserved. Thus only the two schools of the Çākalas and the Vāshkalas come into consideration. The subsidiary Vedic writings contain sufficient evidence to show that the text of the Vāshkalas differed from that of the Çākalas only in admitting eight additional hymns, and in assigning another position to a group of the first book. But in these respects it compares unfavourably with the extant text. Thus it is evident that the Çākalas not only possessed the best tradition of the text of the *Rigveda*, but handed down the only recension, in the true sense, which, as far as we can tell, ever existed.