Vinaya Texts

SR No.: 007684
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: T W Rhys Davids, Hermann Oldenberg
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1881
Total Pages: 2523
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 47 MB

Page 1833

1xxii
LAWS OF MANU.
attained in successive generations, as well as regarding the manner in which men of low descent may be detected. Our Manu-smriti, on the other hand, is much more minute in its details, and introduces a good many new names of which the Satras know nothing. These additions have probably expanded the section to three times its original extent. The immediately following rules, v. 75-100, on the occupations of the castes and their manner of subsisting in times of distress, agree, in the main, with the Satras, and seem to have been changed very little. But the supplementary notes on the same subject, w. 101-131, are probably additions made on the revision of the work. The few ancient rules which they contain are partly repetitions of matters already discussed (e. g. v. 113–114) and partly misplaced (e. g. vv. 111, 115-117, 119).
The eleventh chapter is again, like chapters II-VI, in all probability a faithful representative of the corresponding portion of the Manava Dharma-stra. We find here again that the great majority of the rules corresponds to those of the Dharma-sútras and of the Vishnu-smriti. The agreement with the latter is particularly close, and appears especially in the classification of crimes, the enumeration of the diseases caused by offences committed in a former life, and in many details referring to penances. Curious and against the practice of the older works is the combination of the rules on gifts and the performance of sacrifices, v. 1-43, with the section on penances. The excuses which the commentators offer for this anomalyo are, I fear, insufficient to explain it. It seems more probable that here, as in the preceding chapter, two separate sections of the original work have been welded together into one Adhyâya. In favour of this view it may be pointed out that in Gautama's Dharma-stra, XVIII, 28–32, a number of rules, corresponding to Manu XI, 11-23, stand just before the Prayaskittakanda. A passage of the Mahabharata, which will be
1 A characteristic sign of the great changes which chapters VII-X have undergone consists in the allusions to legends famous in the Puranas and the Mahabharata; see also below, p. lxxix.
* See note on Manu XI, 1.
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