Sacred Laws of Aryas

SR No.: 007687
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Gorge Buhler
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1897
Total Pages: 1979
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 36 MB

Page 50

INTRODUCTION
ΤΟ
GAUTAM A.
COMPARED with the information collected above regarding the origin and the history of Åpastamba's Dharmasûtra, the facts which can be brought to bear on Gautama's Institutes are scanty and the conclusions deducible from them somewhat vague. There are only two points, which, it seems to me, can be proved satisfactorily, viz. the connection of the work with the Sâma-veda and a Gautama Karana, and its priority to the other four Dharma-sûtras which we still possess. To go further appears for the present impossible, because very little is known regarding the history of the schools studying the Sâma-veda, and because the Dharmasâstra not only furnishes very few data regarding the works on which it is based, but seems also, though not to any great extent, to have been tampered with by interpolators.
As regards its origin, it was again Professor Max Müller, who, in the place of the fantastic statements of a fabricated tradition, according to which the author of the Dharmasastra is the son or grandson of the sage Utathya, and the grandson or great-grandson of Usanas or Sukra, the regent of the planet Venus, and the book possessed generally binding force in the second or Tretâ Yuga 1, first put forward a rational explanation which, since, has been adopted by all other writers on Sanskrit literature. He says, Hist. Anc. Sansk. Lit., p. 134, 'Another collection of Dharmasûtras, which, however, is liable to critical doubts, belongs
1 Manu III, 19; Colebrooke, Digest of Hindu Law, Preface, p. xvii Madras ed.); Anantayagvan in Dr. Burnell's Catalogue of Sanskrit MSS., (p. 57; Pârâsara, Dharmasâstra I, 22 (Calcutta ed.)
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