Hindu Law and Custom (Recht und Sitte) c7.38

c7.38

§ 3. The revised Dharmasūtras. Those Dharmasūtras may be called revised Dharmasūtras which are not actually handed down in the manuscripts as part of a collection of Vedic Sūtras but in form and contents are like the proper Dharmasūtras and are quoted in the law-books of the mediaeval age or even earlier. The best preserved of these works, so far as it is yet known, is the Dharmasūtra of Gautama (ed. Stenzler) wholly written in prose. The Gautamas are mentioned in literature as a sub-division of the school of Rāṇāyaṇīyas belonging to the Sāmaveda, and from Kumārila we learn about Gautama’s Dharmasūtra that it is fundamentally a work belonging only to the Chandogas, i. e. the followers of the Sāmaveda.³ The Rāṇāyaṇīyas had their principal seat in Mahārāṣṭra and Telinga-sāmavedīs are still said to exist in eastern Hyderabad who are considered as Rāṇāyaṇīyas and are divided into 7 gotras one of which is called Gautama.⁴ Of course the occurrence of the name of the Gautama school here may be accidental, as is the case with the Gautam-Brahmans in Bombay and other places⁵ for Gautama is a well-known gotra name. That our Gautamīya Dharmaśāstra belongs to the Sāmaveda, is confirmed by an examination of its sources, for the whole of the 26. Adhy. is taken word for word from a Brāhmaṇa of the Sāmaveda, the Sāmavidhāna; the five Vyāhṛtis(1, 51) are wholly derived from this Veda and the expiatory prayers (19, 12) are partly taken from it.¹