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PANINI AND THE VEDA RECONSIDERED
Johannes Bronkhorst
The relationship between Panini and the Veda has been much debated. The presupposition underlying a major part of this debate has been that much or even most of Vedic literature existed in its present form prior to Panini. In this article an attempt will be made to establish, as far as possible, the relationship between Panini and the Veda without taking the correctness of this presupposition for
granted.
1.1 A fundamental question is whether Papini knew the Vedic texts, i.e., the ones with which he was familiar, in the same form as we do. Were the Vedic texts that Pāņini knew identical in all details with the editions we have now? It appears that the answer to this question must be negative.
It is not always possible to decide that a text has not reached us in its original form. In the case of metrical texts this may be possible, however, and to some extent we may be in a position to determine what the original text was like. This is the case regarding the Ṛgveda. In another study (Bronkhorst 1981) it has been shown that certain rules of sandhi of the Aṣṭādhyāyi fit an earlier stage of the text of the Ṛgveda than the one we now have. The conclusion was
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