The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c10.7

v1.c10.7

Of the two sets of Sūtras the Çrauta deal with the elaborate forms of the ritual in which the presence of a priest, and usually of several, was necessary, while the Gṛhya Sūtras deal with the household ritual, most of which could be performed by the householder for himself without extrinsic aid of any kind. In all probability the literary development of the household ritual was later than that of the Çrauta ritual. It is, of course, perfectly obvious that domestic rites must be as old as any form of religion, but there is a clear difference between this fact and the question of the date of the application to the simpler rites of literary forms, and the verses which are associated with the Gṛhya ritual show clear traces in language and metre of not belonging to the earliest stage of Vedic poetry. On the other hand, in the case of the existing Sūtras, they are compositions emanating from schools which were interested no less in the Gṛhya than in the Çrauta ritual, and the normal school manual seems to have embraced both topics. If the portions dealing with the two different topics were of different dates, the fact can hardly now be detected.²