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264
PÂRASKARA-GRIHYA-SOTRA.
I believe, in many cases also the last step is to ask how Gayarâma and Ramakrishna understand the passage in question, while I hold that we ought rather to make ourselves independent from those commentators in the sense in which Prof. Max Müller once expressed himself 1, 'not that I ever despise the traditional interpretation which the commentators have preserved to us, but because I think that, after having examined it, we have a right to judge for ourselves.' There exists a commentary on the ParaskaraGrihya which far surpasses in trustworthiness Gayarâma's Sagganavallabha and Ramakrishna's Samskâraganapati, and which is not composed by an author who, as says Goethe,
– im Auslegen ist munter ;
Legt er nicht aus, so legt er unter. But the leaves of that commentary are scattered through a good many volumes. Here we find a few lines of it in the Satapatha Brâhmana or in Kâtyâyana's Srauta-satra; there Sankhâyana or Åsvalâyana has preserved a word or a sentence that belongs to it; or the law-books of Manu or Yagiavalkya help us to understand a difficult or doubtful aphorism of our text. In one word : the only true commentary on a work like Pâraskara's Grihya is that which the ancient literature itself furnishes. No one will say that in Prof. Stenzler's translation and notes this commentary has not been consulted. But it has been consulted perhaps not quite as much as it ought to have been, and Râmakrishna and Gayarâma have been consulted too much. They have been consulted and followed in many instances, where a continued consideration of what can be the meaning of a word and what can not, and of what the parallel texts say with regard to the subject in question, would have shown that those commentators, instead of interpreting Pâraskara's meaning, father on him vague opinions of their own.
Perhaps it will not be out of place here to point our
i Sacred Books of the East, vol. xv, p. 2, note 2.
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