Grihya Sutras

Author(s): Hermann Oldenberg
Publisher: Oxford

Page 17

INTRODUCTION.
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teachers enumerated in the description of the Tarpana ceremony, neither in Sânkhâyana IV, 10, nor in Asvalayana III, 4; but in the list of the Sâmbavya-Grihya itself it is found (see above, p. 4); and besides it seems to me also to be mentioned in Åsvalâyana-Grihya IV, 8, 24, in which passage it will scarcely be considered too bold to conjecture Sâmbavya instead of Samvatya.
Though the MS. of the Sâmbavya-Grihya is very confused, and full of blunders of all sorts, yet it deserves to be attentively studied by all scholars who are accustomed to look, if not in theory yet in practice, on the agreement of a few Vedic text MSS., or of a few Indian commentaries, as if it had a claim to an unassailable authority to which European Orientalists would have no right to deny their faith. In the Sankhâyana-Grihya a number of passages are found in which corrupt readings or perverse explanations are supported by all the Sâñkhâyana MSS. and by all the Sânkhâyana commentaries, and if, by a rare and fortunate chance, the Sâmbavya Grantha MS., which is unaffected by the blunders of the Devanâgarî MSS., had not been discovered in the south of the peninsula, these readings and explanations would seem to rest on the unanimous agreement of tradition. Perhaps it seems unnecessary to dwell on this point, for very few Orientalists, if any, would be prepared to assert that Indian tradition is infallible. But when looking over many of the editions and translations of the Vedic texts, even such as have been published in the last years, one finds plentiful occasion to observe that in hundreds of passages tradition has been practically treated, by scholars of very high merit, as if it had an authority not very far removed from infallibility. A case like that of which we have to speak here, in which a whole set of MSS., and occasionally also of commentaries, can be tested by a MS. of a nearly related text, written in a different character and in a distant part of India, will strengthen our belief that we are right in judging for ourselves, even if that judgment should oppose itself to such authorities as Nârâyana or Râmakandra or Gayarâma.
Perhaps it will not be out of place to add here, as an
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