Zend Avesta Part 03

SR No.: 007673
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: L H Mills
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1887
Total Pages: 2618
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 49 MB

Page 1181

xii
NARADA.
to have been known to such an early author as Medhâtithi, who quotes it, rather loosely it is true, in his Commentary on the Code of Manu, where he says that 'this work, consisting of one hundred thousand (slokas), was composed by Pragapati and abridged successively by Manu and the rest 1' This goes far to prove that the Preface to the Nârada-smriti had attained notoriety as early as the ninth century A. D., and must be nearly or quite as old as the remainder of the work. The antiquity of the account given by Nârada of the origin and history of the principal code of ancient India is supported to some extent by the Paurânik statement regarding four successive remodellings of the original composition of Svâyambhuva (Manu), by Bhrigu, Nârada, Brihaspati, and Aǹgiras2, and by a curious tradition preserved in the Mahâbhârata, to the effect that the original Dharmasâstra, produced by Brahman in 100,000 chapters, was successively reduced to 10,000, 5,000, 3,000, and 1,000 chapters by Samkara, Indra, Brihaspati, and Kâvya3. What is more, in a colophon of the ancient Nepalese MS. of the Nârada-smriti, that work is actually designed as the Mânava Dharmasâstra in the recension of Nârada (mânave dharmasâstre nâradaproktâyâm samhitâyâm), just as the Code of Manu in the colophons is usually called the Mânava Dharmasâstra in the recension of Bhrigu (mânave dharmasâstre bhriguproktâyâm samhitâyâm, or mânave dharmasâstre bhriguprokte). Again, the chapter on theft (kaurapratishedha), which has come to light in Mr. Bendall's Nepalese Palm-leaf MS. of Nârada, and in a Nepalese paper MS. recently discovered by the same scholar, forms an appendix to the body of the Nâradasmriti, exactly in the same way as an analogous chapter on robbery and other criminal offences is tacked on at the close of the eighteen titles of law in the Code of Manu, IX, 252-293. It also deserves to be noted, perhaps, that the Dhamathats of Burma, while professing to be founded
1 Manukâsangraha, p. 39, gloss on Manu I, 58; Bühler, Sacred Books of the East, vol. xxv, p. xv.
2 Mandlik's Hindu Law, p. xlvii.
3 Mahabharata XII, 59, 22, and 80 foll.; Bühler, ibid. p. xcvi.
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