| pāṇini | the illustrious ancient grammarian of India who is wellknown by his magnum opus, the Astaka or Astaadhyaayi which has maintained its position as a unique work on Sanskrit grammar unparalleled upto the present day by any other work on grammar, not only of the Sanskrit language, but ofany other language, classical as well as spoken. His mighty intelligence grasped, studied and digested not only the niceties of accentuation and formation of Vedic words, scattered in the vast Vedic Literature of his time, but those of classical words in the classical literature and the spoken Sanskrit language of his time in all its different aspects and shades, noticeable in the various provinces and districts of the vast country. The result of his careful study of the Vedic Literature and close observation ofeminine.the classical Sanskrit, which was a spoken language in his days, was the production of the wonderful and monumental work, the Astaadhyaayi,which gives an authoritative description of the Sanskrit language, to have a complete exposition of which,several life times have to be spent,in spite of several commentaries upon it, written from time to time by several distinguished scholars. The work is a linguist's and not a language teacher's. Some Western scholars have described it as a wonderful specimen of human intelligence,or as a notable manifestation of human intelligence. Very little is known unfortunately about his native place,parentage or personal history. The account given about these in the Kathaasaritsaagara and other books is only legendary and hence, it has very little historical value. The internal evidence, supplied by his work shows that he lived in the sixth or the seventh century B. C., if not earlier, in the north western province of India of those days. Jinendrabuddhi, the author of the Kaasikavivaranapanjikaa or Nyasa, has stated that the word शलातुर् mentioned by him in his sUtra ( IV. 3.94 ) refers to his native place and the word शालातुरीय derived by him from the word शलातुर by that sUtra was, in fact his own name, based upon the name of the town which formed his native placcusative case. Paanini has shown in his work his close knowledge of, and familiarity with, the names of towns, villages, districts, rivers and mountains in and near Vaahika, the north-western Punjab of the present day, and it is very likely that he was educated at the ancient University of Taksasilaa. Apart from the authors of the Pratisaakhya works, which in a way could be styled as grammar works, there were scholars of grammar as such, who preceded him and out of whom he has mentioned ten viz., Apisali, Saakataayana, Gaargya, Saakalya, Kaasyapa, Bharadwaja, Gaalava, Caakravarmana Senaka and Sphotaayana. The grammarian Indra has not been mentioned by Paanini, although tradition says that he was the first grammarian of the Sanskrit language. It is very likely that Paanini had no grammar work of Indra before him, but at the same time it can be said that the works of some grammarians , mentioned by Panini such as Saakaatyana, Apisali, Gaargya and others had been based on the work of Indra. The mention of several ganas as also the exhaustive enumeration of all the two thousand and two hundred roots in the Dhaatupaatha can very well testify to the existence of systematic grammatical works before Paarnini of which he has made a thorough study and a careful use in the composition of his Ganapaatha and Dhaatupatha. His exhaustive grammar of a rich language like Sanskrit has not only remained superb in spite of several other grammars of the language written subsequently, but its careful study is felt as a supreme necessity by scholars of philology and linguistics of the present day for doing any real work in the vast field of linguistic research. For details see pp.151154 Vol. VII of Paatanjala Mahaabhsya, D. E. Society's Edition. |
 |
| mahābhāṣya | literally the great commentary. The word is uniformly used by commentators and classical Sanskrit writers for the reputed commentary on Pāṇini's Sūtras and the Vārttikas thereon by Patañjali in the 2nd century B. C. The commentary is very scholarly yet very simple in style, and exhaustive although omitting a number of Pāṇini's rules. It is the first and oldest existing commentary on the Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī. of Pāṇini, and, in spite of some other commentaries and glosses and other compendia, written later on to explain the Sutras of Panini, it has remained supremely authoritative and furnishes the last and final word in all places of doubt: confer, compare the remarks इति भाष्ये स्थितम्, इत्युक्तं भाष्ये, इत्युक्तमाकरे et cetera, and others scattered here and there in several Vyaakarana treatises forming in fact, the patent words used by commentators when they finish any chain of arguments. Besides commenting on the Sutras of Paanini, Patanjali, the author, has raised many other grammatical issues and after discussing them fully and thoroughly, given his conclusions which have become the final dicta in those matters. The work, in short, has become an encyclopedic one and hence aptly called खनि or अकर. The work is spread over such a wide field of grammatical studies that not a single grammatical issue appears to have been left out. The author appears to have made a close study of the method and explanations of the SUtras of Paanini given at various academies all over the country and incorporated the gist of those studies given in the form of Varttikas at the various places, in his great work He has thoroughly scrutinized and commented upon the Vaarttikas many of which he has approved, some of which he has rejected, and a few of which he has supplementedition Besides the Vaarttikas which are referred to a reference to some preceding word, not necessarily on the same page., he has quoted stanzas which verily sum up the arguments in explanation of the difficult sUtras, composed by his predecessors. There is a good reason to believe that there were small glosses or commentaries on the SUtras of Paanini, written by learned teachers at the various academies, and the Vaarttikas formed in a way, a short pithy summary of those glosses or Vrttis. . The explanation of the word वृत्तौ साधु वार्तिकम् given by Kaiyata may be quoted in support of this point. Kaiyata has at one place even stated that the argument of the Bhaasyakaara is in consonance with that of Kuni, his predecessor. The work is divided into eighty five sections which are given the name of lesson or आह्लिक by the author, probably because they form the subject matter of one day's study each, if the student has already made a thorough study of the subject and is very sharp in intelligence. confer, compare अह्ला निर्वृत्तम् आह्लिकम्, (the explanation given by the commentatiors).Many commentary works were written on this magnum opus of Patanjali during the long period of twenty centuries upto this time under the names टीका, टिप्पणी, दीपिका, प्रकाशिका, व्याख्या, रत्नावली, स्पूर्ति, वृत्ति, प्रदीप, व्याख्यानं and the like, but only one of them the 'Pradipa' of कैयटीपाध्याय, is found complete. The learned commentary by Bhartrhari, written a few centuries before the Pradipa, is available only in a fragment and that too, in a manuscript form copied down from the original one from time to time by the scribes very carelessly. Two other commentaries which are comparatively modern, written by Naarayanasesa and Nilakantha are available but they are also incomplete and in a manuscript form. Possibly Kaiyatabhatta's Pradipa threw into the background the commentaries of his predecessors and no grammarian after Kaiyata dared write a commentary superior to Kaiyata's Pradipa or, if he began, he had to abandon his work in the middle. The commentary of Kaiyata is such a scholarly one and so written to the point that later commentators have almost identified the original Bhasya with the commentary Pradipa and many a time expressed the two words Bhasya and Kaiyata in the same breath as भाष्यकैयटयोः ( एतदुक्तम् or स्पष्टमेतत् ). |
|
| vāsudeva( शास्त्री) | surnamed Abhyankar, who lived from 1863 to l942 and did vigorous and active work of teaching pupils and writing essays, articles, commentary works and original works on various Shastras with the same scholarship, zeal and acumen for fifty years in Poona. He wrote गूढार्थप्रकाश a commentary on the LaghuSabdendusekhara and तत्त्वादर्श a commentary on the Paribhasendusekhara in 1889. His edition of the Patanjala Mahabhasya with full translation and notes in Marathi can be called his magnum opus. See अभ्यंकर. |
|
) 
Feedback
icon to enable a popup keybord and you can toggle between देवनागरी and IAST characters. If you want a system software for typing easily in देवनागरी or IAST you can download our software called SanskritWriter