Ancient Sanskrit Literature - The Sutras

from Hinduism, Ancient and Modern

The Sutras are short aphorisms, compiled to serve as aids to memory in following the teacher's explanations. Each of the Veda has a Sutra literature of its own. To the Rig Veda belong the Sankhayana and the Aswalayana, to the Samaveda the Latyayna and the Drahyayana, to the Sukla Yajur Veda the Katyayana, to the Krishna Yajur Veda the Apastambha, the Hiranykeshni, the Baudhayana and the Bharadwaja Sutras, connected with the Maitrayani Samhita is the Manava Srauta Sutra upon which is based the present Manu Smriti. To the Atharva Veda no particular system of Sutras can be traced. There are, however, the Srauta Sutras. Besides these we have the Grihya and the Dharma Sutras connected with the observances of daily life and the entire course of duty.

The most important of these are the Gobhila, the Paraskara and the Apastamba. They are extremely interesting as showing the groundwork of the Aryan society of those days, and that in spite of so many changes our due social fabric is much the same as before. They deal with the various samskaras or sacraments of the Hindus, both ordinary and otherwise. Among the Sutras those best known are the Apastamba, Gautama and Vasistha. The treatise of Sankha and Likhita deals with the administration of justice. They are not the work of an idle priesthood, but of a class of people who systematized the rules of social and religious polity in a manner unknown in any other country in the world and but for their labors in reducing the vast mass of religious literature to a system which could be preserved in memory, their work would have long perished in the many revolutions through which the country has passed.

Not only the Vedas have a Sutra literature of their own, but we have also in grammar the well-known Sutras of Panini, known as the Ashtadhyayi; in philosophy the Nyaya Sutras of Gautama, the Vaisheshika Sutras of Kanada, the Sankhya Sutras ascribed to Kapila, the Purva Mimamsa Sutras of Jaimini and the Uttara Mimamsa Sutras (known as the Brahma Sutras) of Vyasa. Each of these has one or more recognized commentators and a number of others who have succeeded them. The Sutras of Panini, Gautama, Kapila, and Vyasa are largely read even now-a-days, and Panini's Ashtadhyayi is committed to memory by everyone who aspires to know anything of Sanskrit grammar. The art of writing, though known, was not, as already stated, popular in India, and teachers, in giving their explanations to pupils, gave them sentences or bits of sentences to be committed to memory to recall their expositions.

In fact, a Sutra cannot be too concise. It is often a word, or a number of words, with the subject or the predicate of the sentence left out. For instance, we have in Brahma Sutras "a thato Brahma Jigyasa, Janmadyasyayatah" (Then, therefore, inquiry into Brahman. From him is the birth, etc, of this). These are intelligible enough, but we have others like, "and like a cloth" (Patvachcha) The meaning is, that just as a piece of a very fine cloth when immersed in water is not seen, though it is there, even so is the world when abiding its causal condition in Brahma, though not visible, is yet there. In former times when books were the property of the few, whole commentaries were committed to memory, and what we now have of the Sutras and their commentaries, is less from written than from oral record.

Source: Nath, Rai Bahadur. Hinduism, Ancient and Modern.

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