Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c12.s6.71

c12.s6.71

**Dharma-Sūtras included longer in the studies of Veda and Brāhmaṇa ‘Charaṇas’.** As regards *sacred law*, however, there is no doubt that it formed part of the curriculum of the Vedic Schools for a much longer time. At first each Vedic Charaṇa or School developed its own Dharmasūtra or body of rules for the guidance of its own pupils. All the Dharmasūtras were originally the property of particular Vedic Schools, were held to be authoritative in restricted circles, and were later on acknowledged as sources of the sacred law applicable to all Āryas. It is also to be noted in this connection that the rise of Sūtra literature (under circumstances already explained in detail) meant the rise of Sūtra-Charaṇas which supplanted the earlier Vedic and Brāhmaṇa Charaṇas based on the texts of the Saṁhitās and Brāhmaṇas. The founder¹ of a Sūtra-Charaṇa did not claim to have received a revelation of Vedic Mantras or of a Brāhmaṇa text but merely gave a new systematic arrangement of the precepts regarding sacrifices and the sacred law. The members of these new Sūtra-Charaṇas would preserve the text of the Saṁhitā and Brāhmaṇa of an earlier Charaṇa from which they originally branched off. It is also clear that the ground of distinction among these Sūtra-Charaṇas being in the Sūtras, they would naturally make light of the minor differences between the texts of the Saṁhitās and Brāhmaṇas which, in previous times, were deemed to be all-important and there was even a tendency to reunite different Vedic Śākhās into one, as a result of which many old Śākhās have been actually lost. It was these Sūtra-Charaṇas that first commenced the systematic cultivation of the sacred sciences; they first collected the fragmentary doctrines, scattered in the older Vedic works, and arranged them for the convenience of oral instruction in Sūtras or strings of aphorisms. Among the subjects which these Schools chiefly cultivated were included the several Vedāṅgas like ritual, grammar, phonetics, to which was added the sacred law too. Thus each Vedic School or Charaṇa possessed a peculiar work on Dharma and this view is also supported by the tradition of the Mīmāṁsā school. The Mānava Sūtra-Charaṇa, for instance, which was a subdivision of the Maitrāyaṇīya School connected with a redaction of the Black Yajur-veda, developed a Dharma-Sūtra of its own, of which the extant *Mānava Dharma-śāstra* is considered to be a recast and versification. Similarly, the *Gautamīya Dharmaśāstra* is believed to have been originally the exclusive property of a school of Sāmavedins. Further, the *Āpastambīya Dharma-Sūtra*, as Bühler points out, forms part of an enormous Kalpa literature or body of aphorisms, which digests the teaching of the Veda and of the ancient Ṛishis regarding the performance of sacrifices and the duties of twice-born men, Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaiśyas, and which, being chiefly based on the second of the four Vedas, the Yajurveda in the Taittirīya recension, is primarily intended for the benefit of the Adhvaryu priests in whose families the study of the Yajurveda is hereditary. Thus Hindu sacred law has its source in the teaching of the Vedic Schools, the Sūtra-Charaṇas, of which the teachers composed prose works or manuals that were meant to be committed to memory by the young Āryan students and to teach them their duties. Every School had its own code of manners and morals, so to speak. Sometimes the same code or Dharma-Sūtra might be adopted by several Sūtra-Charaṇas [e.g. the Dharma-Sūtra which both the Āpastambīyas and Hiraṇyakeśas study or the Chayana-Sūtra which the Bhāradvājas and Hiraṇyakeśas have in common (Bühler, *S.B.E.*, 14, xiv)] and in such cases we must assume that the later School did not care to compose a treatise of its own on a certain subject but preferred to adopt the work of an earlier teacher.