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INTRODUCTION.
xix
accepts him as his pupil. It is the telling of this story and the decisive words upayani and u paniny e which furnish the occasion for introducing the following section on the Upanayana'. The subject is there treated in the peculiar style of the Brâhmana texts, a style which we need not characterize here. I shall only mention one point, viz. that into the description and explanation of the Upanayana ceremony has been inserted one of those Slokas, such as we often find in the Grihya-sđtras also, as a sort of ornamental amplification of the prose exposition. Here a Sloka is also sung,' says the Brâhmana 8 :
---- - vuul - - - v - uu akaryo garbhî bhavati "hastam adhầya dakshinam
v-- - u -u-||-- - v- - u u
tritiyasyâm sa gayate " savitryâ saha brahmanah“. From this passage we see, on the one hand, that the composition of such isolated Slokas explaining certain points of the Grihya ritual goes back to quite an early period; on the other hand, we are compelled to assume that the Slokas of this kind which are quoted in the Grihyasâtras differ nevertheless from the analogous Slokas of the early period, or at any rate that the old Slokas must have undergone a change which modernized their structure, so as to be received into the Grihya-stras; for the metre of the Sloka just quoted, which has the antispast before the caesura in neither of its two halves, and which has even a double iambus before the caesura in one half, is decidedly of an older type than the one peculiar to the Slokas quoted in the Grihya-stras
* This is also the way in which Sayana understands the matter; he makes the following remark: tam hopaninya ity upanayanasya prastutatvát taddharma asmin brâhmane nirūpyante.
• Cf. above, p. xiv; below, p. xxxv. * Sect. 12 of the chapter quoted.
# The teacher becomes pregnant by laying his right hand on the pupil for the Upanayana); on the third day he (i.e. the pupil) is born as a Brahmana along with the Savitrt (which is repeated to him on that day).'
* It is not likely that verses of this kind are taken from more comprehensive and connected metrical texts.
. Cf. on this point below, p. XXXV.
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