Grihya Sutras

SR No.: 007685
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Hermann Oldenberg
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1886
Total Pages: 2642
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 49 MB

Page 531

INTRODUCTION.
xxxiii
a character as not to be easily ascribable to mistakes and carelessness such as even a careful author may be guilty of in the course of a large work. It seems to me then that until the discovery of further circumstances throwing light on the question of the identity of the authors of the Srautas and of the Grihyas, it would be premature if we were to venture on a decision of this question in one direction or the other.
Prof. Bühler's investigations have made perfectly clear the relation in which the Grihya-sútras and the Dharmasatras stand to each other in those cases, where we have texts of both kinds by the same school. In the case of the Grihya-sútra and the Dharma-sútra of the Apastambiyas he has proved that both texts were the work of the same author according to a common plan, so that the Grihya-sūtra is as short and terse as possible, because Apastamba had reserved for the Dharma-sätra a portion of the subject-matter generally treated of in the Grihya. sätras. Besides there are references in each of the two texts to the other which strengthen the proof of their being written by the same author. In the Satra collection of Hiranyakesin the state of things is different. Here, as Prof. Bühler has also shown , we find numerous discrepancies between the Grihya and the Dharma-sútra, which are owing to the fact, that while this teacher took as Dharma-sâtra that of Apastamba with some unessential changes, he composed a Grihya-sútra of his own. Of the two Satras of Baudhayana, the same distinguished scholar, to whom we owe the remarks we have just mentioned, has treated in the Sacred Books of the East, vol. xiv, p. xxxi.
I believe that every reader who compares the two kinds of texts will notice that the frame within which the exposition of the Dharma-sútras is inclosed, is an essentially
1 Cf. my remarks in the introduction to the Sankhayana-Grhya, vol. xxix, PP. 5, 6. . Sacred Books of the East, vol. ii, p. xiii seq. Sacred Books of the East, vol. ii, p. xxiii seq.
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