History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v1.c6.s21.14.3

v1.c6.s21.14.3

Besides no predicate (like jñeyā or kāryā) is expressly mentioned in the verse if we take the reading of Viś. and the ‘ka’ in ‘kṣetraka’ is a redundancy. We find that the tendency of the readings of the Mit. is to smooth down harsh or involved constructions and that the Agnipurāṇa presents most of the changes in the text found in the Mit. but not found in Viś. In the same direction points the fact that Agni (256. 35) reads ‘na dattam strīdhanam yasyai’ with the Mit. (148) and not ‘yasyā’ as Viś. (152) does, as ‘yasyai’ is grammatically more regular than ‘yasyāḥ’ with the form ‘dattam’. But as against this we may note that both Viś. and Agni read ‘aprajāyāmatītāyām’, while the Mit. reads ‘atītāyāmaprajasi’. The reading ‘aprajasi’ is correct according to Pāṇini (V. 4. 122) and not ‘aprajāyām’. Therefore the conclusion that follows is that the text of Yāj. preserved in the Agnipurāṇa is intermediate between the text of Viśvarūpa and that of the Mitākṣarā. As Viśvarūpa flourished about 800-825 A. D., the Agnipurāṇa represents a text of Yājñavalkya current somewhat later i. e. about 900 A. D. In my ‘History of Sanskrit Poetics’ (pp. III-V) I established, from the fact that the extant Agnipurāṇa quotes Daṇḍin and Bhāmaha and knew the theory of *dhvani*, that it was composed about 900 A. D. That date is strikingly corroborated by the evidence derived from the chapters on vyavahāra discussed above.