History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v2.c26.102

v2.c26.102

particles of the same body either directly or mediately.¹⁰⁷² On the word ‘asapiṇḍām’ it was explained that sapiṇḍa relationship arises immediately or mediately by reason of the connection with particles of the same body; this may prove to be too wide a statement, since in this beginningless *saṁsāra*, such a relationship might exist in some way or other between all men;¹⁰⁷³ therefore (the sage Yājñavalkya) states ‘after the fifth on the mother's side and after the 7th on the father's side’. After the fifth on the mother's side i. e. in the mother's line and after the 7th on the father's side i. e. in the father's line sapiṇḍa relationship ceases. These words (viz. sapiṇḍa......ceases) are to be taken as understood (in the text of Yāj.). Therefore the word ‘sapiṇḍa’ though it applies everywhere (i. e. to a very wide circle of persons) by the expressive (i. e. literal) power of its component parts, is restricted to a certain definite sphere, like the words ‘nirmanthya’¹⁰⁷⁴ and ‘paṅkaja’. And so the six (ascendants) beginning with the father and the six descendants beginning with the son and the man himself as the seventh (in each case) are sapiṇḍas; wherever there is a divergence of the line, the counting shall be made until the seventh in descent is reached including him (i. e. the ancestor) from whom the line diverges; in this way the computation is to be made everywhere. And so the fifth (if a girl), who stands in the fifth generation when a computation is made beginning with the mother and going up to her (mother's) father, mother's paternal grandfather &c., is styled in an indirect way ‘fifth from the mother's side' (by Yāj.). In the same way 'the seventh from the father's side' (in Yāj.) is she who is the seventh in degree (from an ancestor) when computation is made beginning from the father and proceeding up to the father's father and so on".