Materials for the Study of the Early History of the Vaishnava Sect c8.101

c8.101

Pāṇini lived not only before Patañjali, but also before Kātyāyana who wrote the Vārttikas (explanatory and supplementary rules) on his grammar, and who was himself a predecessor of Patañjali. This fact forbids the acceptance of the theory of Hopkins that Pāṇini lived in the third century B.C.; for that would leave an interval of considerably less than a century between Kātyāyana and Patañjali. The actual interval between these two grammarians cannot be so short because Sir R. G. Bhandarkar points out that Patañjali notices variant readings of Kātyāyana’s Vārttikas as found in the texts used by the schools of the Bhāradvājiyas, Saunāgas and others.