1847.] On the History and Literature of the Veda. 825 



the MSS., as it has come down to us, and as it is fixed in the Prati- 

 sakhya, even to the minutest particulars, is principally that of that 

 teacher, and the Anukramani of the Rik ascribed to Katyayana, calls 

 the Sanhita, of which it is the index, i. e. the Rik Sanhita such as we 

 now have it, Sakalaka Rig Vedamnaya, i. e. the redaction of the Rig 

 Veda which has come down to us from Sakalya's school. Further 

 researches may without doubt add more materials on this subject, and 

 place yet more fully in the light the remarkable circumstance of the 

 various redactions of the Veda in remote antiquity. Only we must, 

 in this matter, beware of giving too much credence to the statements 

 of the Puranas, which give us accounts of all possible Sakhas (schools 

 or divisions) of this and that Veda. The numerous citations in older 

 writings, even in the books which pertain to the liturgy of the Veda, 

 will instruct us far more surely on these points. 



In regard to the third mode of writing the Veda, the Krama-patha, 

 we know at least by a statement in the first Pratisakhya, that the 

 word krama, in its simplest form, derives its origin from Panchala, the 

 son of Babhru, (whom I have found named in no other place.) 



It is easily seen that these different ways of writing the Veda, can 

 have no other foundation than the securest possible preservation of the 

 text, in a certain degree they also already aim at its explanation. The 

 last named krama is nothing else than the introduction of the pada- 

 patha into the Sanhita-patha itself ; each word appears first in its pada- 

 form, and then in its connexion with the whole sentence. 



But it will now be conceded that measures, thus carefully sought 

 out, for the fixation of a text could not have been hit upon by its 

 author, or even by a compiler, but must belong to a period for which 

 this text was already something completely fixed, to which it was an 

 object of study, and indeed the most careful, yea, minute study, and 

 had even become a subject of controversy in the schools, (all of which 

 can be established from the Pratisakhya,) — in a word, to a period 

 which was no longer certain of the sense of the Veda, and had to guard 

 it, at least externally, by exact regulation of reading and writing, against 

 the alterations of misunderstandins;. 



a 



Supposing that we have found above that the teachers who arc 

 named in the Pratisakhya as compilers of the Veda, Sakalya and others, 

 must at least fall at the beginning of the 5th or the close of the 6th 



