Satapatha Bramhana Part 02

SR No.: 007678
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Julius Eggeling
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1885
Total Pages: 2521
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 44 MB

Page 2113

INTRODUCTION.
xvii
be performed is described by means of an expression, upaghatam !, which often occurs in the Grihya literature in a technical sense.
We thus see that the Brahmana books are acquainted with the Grihya fire, and know about the Grihya offerings and their permanent technical peculiarities; and it is not merely the later portions of the Brahmana works such as the fourteenth book of the Satapatha Brahmana, in which we meet with evidence of this kind; we find it also in portions against the antiquity of which no objections can be raised.
hile therefore on the one hand the Brâhmana texts prove the existence of the Grihya ceremonial, we see on the other hand, and first of all by means of the Brâhmana texts themselves, that a literary treatment of this ritualistic subject-matter, as we find it in the Brahmanas themselves with regard to the Srauta offerings, cannot then have existed. If there had existed texts, similar to the Brahmana texts preserved to us, which treated of the Grihya ritual, then, even supposing the texts themselves had disappeared, we should still necessarily find traces of them in the Brahmanas and Satras. He who will take the trouble to collect in the Brahmana texts the scattered references to the then existing literature, will be astonished at the great mass of notices of this kind that are preserved : but nowhere do we find traces of Grihya Brahmanas. And besides, if such works had ever existed, we should be at a loss to understand the difference which the Hindus make between the Srauta-sútras based on Sruti (revelation), and the Grihya-sútras resting on Smriti (tradition) alone. The sacred Grihya acts are regarded as 'smarta, and when the question is raised with what right they can be considered as a duty resting on the sacrificer alongside of the Srauta acts, the answer is given that they too are based on a Sakha of the Veda, but that this Sakha is
· See Grihya-samgraha I, 111. 112.
• The Gribya-sútra of Baudhayana is called Smarta-sätra in the best known MS. of this work (Sacred Books of the East, vol. xiv, p. xxx).
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