History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v5.c72.304

v5.c72.304

In view of the above-mentioned circumstances no useful purpose would be served by setting out in detail the varying dicta of the smṛtis, Purāṇas⁶¹² and the digests upon the several matters that fall to be treated under āśauca. Digests on this subject are too numerous to mention. The following printed ones and a few mss have been made use of in preparing the following account. In the first place, there are several works that deal with this subject in verse. The Aśaucāṣṭaka attributed to Vararuci (published in the Trivandrum series) with a commentary by an anonymous writer that names the bhāṣya of Maskarin on Gautama-dharmasūtra (on p. 35) deals with the subject in eight *sragdharā* verses. The Aśaucadaśaka or Daśaślokī attributed to Vijñāneśvara seems to have been a very popular work. There are several commentaries on it. The one by Harihara is the earliest of them. In the Deccan College collection of Mss (now at the Bhandarkar Oriental Institute, Poona) there are several Mss of it, two of which were copied in *saṁvat* 1539 (D. C. No. 216 of 1879-80) and *saṁvat* 1579 (D. C. No 196 of 1884-87) and which expressly state that the work was composed by Vijñāneśvara-yogīndra. The ten Śārdūlavikrīḍita verses of the Aśaucadaśaka are set out in the appendix. The Kalpataru of Lakṣmīdhara has a section on śuddhi which has been recently published in the G. O. S. The Hāralatā of Aniruddha is very useful (B. I. Series). The Āśaucakāṇḍa of the Smṛticandrikā has been edited by the late Dr. Shamsastry and published as No. 56 of the Mysore University Sanskrit publications. The Trimśacchlokī with the commentary of Raghunātha composed in *śake* 1645 has been published at the Poona Ānandāśrama press and contains 30 Sragdharā verses on āśauca. The Ṣaḍaśīti (86 verses in the Anuṣṭubh metre) of Kauśikāditya with the commentary Śuddhicandrikā by Vināyaka *alias* Nandapaṇḍita (composed about 1600 A. D.) has been published in the Chowkhamba Sanskrit series. The Śuddhikaumudī of Govindānanda (B. I. Series); the Śuddhitattva of Raghunandana (ed. by Jivananda pp. 233-412), the Śuddhiprakāśa (part of the Vīramitrodaya of Mitramiśra) published in the Chowkhamba Sanskrit series, the Śuddhimayūkha of Nīlakaṇṭha (edited by Mr. J. R. Gharpure) and the Smṛtimuktāphala of Vaidyanātha (edited by Mr. J. R. Gharpure) are compilations that are useful in their own way. These exhaustive treatises on āśauca show one thing unmistakably that brāhmaṇas of the medieval ages attached an extremely exaggerated importance to ceremonial purity of the body on birth and death.