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JOHANNES BRONKHORST
Madhyāntavibhāga Šāstra are used side by side, as we have seen. A Šāstra is in these cases a work which combines sūtras (or kārikās) and Bhāsya, a work which brings a number of elements together and unites them into one. This is exactly what Visnugupta's Artha Šāstra says in its first line:
... yāvanty arthaśāstrāni pārvācāryaih prasthāpitāni prāyaśas tāni saṁhrtyaikam idam arthaśāstraṁ krtam This single (eka) [work called] Artha Šāstra has mainly been made by compiling all the Artha Sastras produced by earlier teachers.
This is not the place to study how many authors have contributed to the Artha Sāstra as we now know it. It is clear that the prose sections may contain parts which derive from various commentators preceding Visnugupta. The statistical investigations of Th.R. Trautmann (1971) do indeed support multiple authorship.12
These four examples - the Yoga Šāstra, the Tattvārthādhigama Bhāsya, the Madhyāntavibhāga Sastra and the Artha Šāstra - must suffice to show that there was a tendency in the period which we consider to unite sūtras and Bhāsya into one indivisible whole, which retained no traces of the original separateness, and authorship, of the enclosed sūtras.
INT
Besides this tendency - perhaps we should say literary convention - there is a second one to which I would like to draw your attention. It finds expression in what I will call the Vārttika style. In order to understand this style and its probable origin we must turn to the grammatical literature of ancient India.
I do not need to remind you that among the sciences of India grammar is one of the oldest and most important. Its influence on other fields of knowledge was consequently great. It has even been claimed that the grammar of Pāṇini played in India a role similar to that of Euclid's geometry in Europe. Both were, in their respective contexts, methodological guidelines for science and philosophy13
One of the most important texts of Pāninian grammar is the Vyākarana-Mahābhāsya, or simply Mahābhāsya, attributed to Patañjali
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12 See also Falk, 1986, esp. p. 69. 13 Staal, 1965.
