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CATTLE, FIELD AND BARLEY
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taking recourse to the doctrine of a group which forms but a small and rather peripherical minority among those speaking Sanskrit. At the latest it is at this point of our deliberations that it becomes evident that Kaiyața's first interpretation has for this very reason to be accepted as the only correct one, i.e. as that which alone meets Patañjali's intention. Kaiyața's main weakness is that he lacks sensibility to historical changes. Not even the suspicion could thus have arisen in him that at the time of Patañjali himself the situation might have been still a different one! This is why he was unable to arrive at the conclusion we on our part cannot but finally draw, viz. that at the time when the distinction between the two constructions of the causative verb bhakşayati actually developed in Sanskrit it was still common belief that plants and seeds are living beings, perhaps even that 'the whole world is animate?.
Whether Kātyāyana and Patañjali were still familiar with this view as such cannot be decided with absolute certainty,72 but for all we know about their respective dates and about the origin and historical development of the ahimsā doctrine, there is every likelihood that at their time the consumption not only of seeds, capable of germination, but also of plants was widely considered as himsā, 'injury to living beings'. . . ... The highly interesting material which Schmithausen has recently collected from Buddhist texts and discussed in some detail,73 cannot be used as a comparison in the present article. Yet there is one point to which attention has nevertheless to be drawn in this connection, and it
