Oldenberg

ĀSVALĀYANA-GRIHYA-SŪTRA.

INTRODUCTION

TO THE

ĀSVALĀYANA-GRIHYA-SŪTRA.

MOST of the questions referring to the Gr̥hya-sūtra of Āśvalāyana will be treated of more conveniently in connection with the different subjects which we shall have to discuss in our General Introduction to the Gr̥hya-sūtras. Here I wish only to call attention to a well-known passage of Shaḍguruśishya, in which that commentator gives some statements on the works composed by Āśvalāyana and by his teacher Saunaka. As an important point in that passage has, as far as I can see, been misunderstood by several eminent scholars, I may perhaps be allowed here to try and correct that misunderstanding, though the point stands in a less direct connection with the Gr̥hya-sūtra than with another side of the literary activity of Āśvalāyana.

Shaḍguruśishya ¹, before speaking of Āśvalāyana, makes the following statements with regard to Āśvalāyana’s teacher, Saunaka. ‘There was,’ he says, ’the Sākala Saṁhitā (of the Rig-veda), and the Bāshkala Saṁhitā; following these two Saṁhitās and the twenty-one Brāhmaṇas, adopting principally the Aitareyaka and supplementing it by the other texts, he who was revered by the whole number of great Rishis composed the first Kalpa-sūtra.’ He then goes on to speak of Āśvalāyana - ‘Saunaka’s pupil was the venerable Āśvalāyana. He who knew everything he had learnt from that teacher, composed a Sūtra and announced (to Saunaka that he had done so) ².’ Saunaka then destroyed his own Sūtra, and

determined that Āśvalāyana’s Sūtra should be adopted by the students of that Vedic Sākhā. Thus, says Shaḍguruśishya, there were twelve works of Saunaka by which a correct knowledge of the Rig-veda was preserved, and three works of Āśvalāyana. Saunaka’s daśa granthās were, the five Anukramaṇīs, the two Vidbānas, the Bārhaddaivata, the Prātiśākhya, and a Smārta work ³. Āśvalāyana, on the other hand, composed the Srauta-sūtra in twelve Adhyāyas, the Gr̥hya in four Adhyāyas, and the fourth Āraṇyaka: this is Āśvalāyana’s great Sūtra composition ⁴.

Here we have an interesting and important statement by which the authorship of a part of the Aitareyāraṇyaka, which would thus be separated from the rest of that text, is ascribed, not to Mahidāsa Aitareya, but to an author of what may be called the historical period of Vedic antiquity, to Āśvalāyana.

But what is the fourth Āraṇyaka to which this passage refers? Is it the text which is now set down, for instance, in Dr. Rājendralāla Mitra’s edition, as the fourth Āraṇyaka of the Aitareyinas?

Before we give an answer to this question, attention must be called to other passages referring, as it could seem, to another part, namely, the fifth part of the Āraṇyaka.

Sāyaṇa, in his great commentary on the Rig-veda, very frequently quotes the pañcamāraṇyaka as belonging to Saunaka. Thus in vol. i, p. 112, ed. Max Müller, he says: pañcamāraṇyaka aushṇihatr̥cāśītir iti khaṇḍe Saunakena sūtritaṁ surūpakr̥tnum ūtaya iti trīṇy endra sānasiṁ rayim iti dve iti. There is indeed in the fifth Āraṇyaka a chapter beginning with the words aushṇihi tr̥cāśītiḥ, in which the words quoted by Sāyaṇa occur ⁵. Similar quotations, in

which the fifth Āraṇyaka is assigned to Saunaka, are found in Sāyaṇa’s commentary on the Āraṇyaka itself; see, for instance, p. 97, line 19, p. 116, line 3.

Thus it seems that the authorship of both the fourth and the fifth Āraṇyaka was ascribed to teachers belonging to the Sūtra period of Vedic literature, viz. to Saunaka and to Āśvalāyana respectively. And so we find the case stated by both Professor Weber, in his ‘Vorlesungen über indische Literaturgeschichte ⁶,’ and Dr. Rājendralāla Mitra, in the Introduction to his edition of the Aitareya Āraṇyaka ⁷.

But we must ask ourselves: Are the two books of the Āraṇyaka collection, ascribed to those two authors, really two different books? It is a surprising fact that Shaḍguruśishya, while speaking of Āśvalāyana’s authorship of the fourth book, and while at the same time intending, as he evidently does, to give a complete list of Saunaka’s compositions, does not mention the fifth Āraṇyaka among the works of that author. In order to account for this omission the conjecture seems to suggest itself that Shaḍguruśishya, when speaking of the fourth Āraṇyaka as belonging to Āśvalāyana, means the same work which Sāyaṇa sets down as the fifth, and which he ascribes to Saunaka. At first sight this conjecture may seem perhaps rather hazardous or unnatural; however I believe that, if we compare the two texts themselves which are concerned, we shall find it very probable and even evident. What do those two Āraṇyaka books contain? The fourth is very short: it does not fill more than one page in the printed edition. Its contents consist exclusively of the text of the Mahānāmnī or Sakvarī verses, which seem to belong to a not less remote

antiquity than the average of the Rig-veda hymns. They can indeed be considered as forming part of the Rig-veda Saṁhitā, and it is only on account of the peculiar mystical holiness ascribed to these verses, that they were not studied in the village but in the forest ⁸, and were consequently received not into the body of the Saṁhitā itself, but into the Āraṇyaka. They are referred to in all Brāhmaṇa texts, and perhaps we can even go so far as to pronounce our opinion that some passages of the Rig-veda hymns themselves allude to the Sakvarī verses:

yac cḥakvarīshu br̥hatā raveṇendre śushmam adadhātā Vasishṭḥāḥ (Rig-veda VII, 33, 4).
r̥kāṁ tvaḥ posham āste pupushvān gāyatraṁ tvo gāyati śakvarīshu (Rig-veda X, 71, 11).

So much for the fourth Āraṇyaka. The fifth contains a description of the Mahāvrata ceremony. To the same subject also the first book is devoted, with the difference that the first book is composed in the Brāhmaṇa style, the fifth in the Sūtra style ⁹.

Now which of these two books can it be that Shaḍguruśishya reckons as belonging to the ‘Āśvalāyanasūtraka?’ It is impossible that it should be the fourth, for the Mahānāmnī verses never were considered by Indian theologians as the work of a human author; they shared in the apaurusheyatva of the Veda, and to say that they have been composed by Āśvalāyana, would be inconsistent with the most firmly established principles of the literary history of the Veda both as conceived by the Indians and by ourselves. And even if we were to admit that the Mahānāmnī verses can have been assigned, by an author like Shaḍguruśishya, to Āśvalāyana, - and we cannot admit

this, - there is no possibility whatever that he can have used the expression ‘Āśvalāyanasūtrakam’ with regard to the Mahānāmnīs; to apply the designation of a Sūtra to the Mahānāmnī hymn would be no less absurd than to apply it to any Sūkta whatever of the Rik-Saṁhitā. On the other hand, the fifth book of the Āraṇyaka is a Sūtra; it is the only part of the whole body of the Āraṇyaka collection which is composed in the Sūtra style. And it treats of a special part of the Rig-veda ritual the rest of which is embodied in its entirety, with the omission only of that very part, in the two great Sūtras of Āśvalāyana. There seems to me, therefore, to be little doubt as to the fifth Āraṇyaka really being the text referred to by Shaḍguruśishya, though I do not know how to explain his setting down this book as the fourth. And I may add that there is a passage, hitherto, as far as I know, unnoticed, in Sāyaṇa’s Sāma-veda commentary, in which that author directly assigns the fifth Āraṇyaka not, as in the Rig-veda commentary, to Saunaka, but to Āśvalāyana. Sāyaṇa there says ¹⁰: yathā bahvr̥kām adhyāpakā mahāvrataprayogapratipādakam Āśvalāyananirmitaṁ kalpasūtram araṇyedhīyamānāḥ pañcamam āraṇyakam iti vedatvena vyavaharanti.

Instead of asserting, therefore, that of the two last Āraṇyakas of the Aitareyinas the one is ascribed to Saunaka, the other to Āśvalāyana, we must state the case otherwise: not two Āraṇyakas were, according to Sāyaṇa and Shaḍguruśishya, composed by those Sūtrakāras, but one, viz. the fifth, which forms a sort of supplement to the great body of the Sūtras of that Karaṇa, and which is ascribed either to Saunaka or to Āśvalāyana. Perhaps further research will enable us to decide whether that Sūtra portion of the Āraṇyaka, or we may say quite as well, that Āraṇyaka portion of the Sūtra, belongs to the author of the Srauta-sūtra, or should be considered as a remnant of a more ancient composition, of which the portion studied in the forest has survived, while the portion

which was taught in the village was superseded by the more recent Āśvalāyana-sūtra.

There would be still many questions with which an Introduction to Āśvalāyana would have to deal; thus the relation between Āśvalāyana and Saunaka, which we had intended to treat of here with reference to a special point, would have to be further discussed with regard to several other of its bearings, and the results which follow therefrom as to the position of Āśvalāyana in the history of Vedic literature would have to be stated. But we prefer to reserve the discussion of these questions for the General Introduction to the Gr̥hya-sūtras.