Prof. Weber on the same subject, and on the relation of the Rig and Sama Vedas to each other, together with some other texts, adduced and illustrated by that scholar, on the hostility of the Atharvanas towards the other Vedas, and of the Chandogas towards the Rig-veda.

Section vii. (pp. 57-70) contains extracts from the works of Sayana and Madhava, the commentators on the Rig and Taittiriya Yajur Vedas, in which they both define the characteristics of the Veda, and state certain arguments in support of its authority. Sayana (pp. 58-66), after noticing the objections urged against his views by persons of a different school, and defining the Veda as a work consisting of Mantra and Brahmana, asserts that it is not derived from any personal, or at least not from any hunan, author (compare the further extract from him in p. 105); and rests its authority on its own declarations, on its self-proving power, on the Smriti (i.e. non-vedic writings of eminent saints), and on common notoriety. He then encounters some other objections raised against the Veda on the score of its containing passages which are unintelligible, dubious, absurd, contradictory, or superfluous. Madhava (pp. 6670) defines the Veda as the work which alone reveals the supernatural means of attaining future felicity; explains that males only, belonging to the three superior castes, are competent to study its contents; and asserts that, inasmuch as it is eternal, it is a primary and infallible authority. This eternity of the Veda, however, he appears to interpret as not being absolute, but as dating from the first creation, when it was produced from Brahmā,

though, as he is free from defects, the Veda, as his work, is self-proved.

Section viii. (pp. 70–108) contains the views of Jaimini and Bādarāyaṇa, the (alleged) authors of the Mīmānsā and Brahma (or Vedānta) Sūtras on the eternity of the Veda. Jaimini asserts that sound, or words, are eternal, that the connection between words and the objects they represent also, is not arbitrary or conventional, but eternal, and that consequently the Vedas convey unerring information in regard to unseen objects. This view he defends against the Naiyayikas, answering their other objections, and insisting that the names, derived from those of certain sages, by which particular parts of the Vedas are designated, do not prove those sages to have been their authors, but merely the teachers who studied and handed them down; while none of the names occurring in the Veda are those of temporal beings, but all denote some objects which have existed eternally. Two quotations in support of the supernatural origin of the Veda are next introduced from the Nyaya-mala-vistara (a condensed account of the Mīmānsā system) and from the Vedartha-prakāśa (the commentary on the Taittiriya Yajur-veda). The arguments in both passages (pp. 86-89) are to the same effect, and contain nothing that has not been already in substance anticipated in preceding summaries of the Mimānsă doctrine. In reference to their argument that no author of the Veda is remembered, I have noticed here that the supposition which an objector might urge, that the rishis, the acknowledged utterers of the hymns,

might also have been their authors, is guarded against by the tenet, elsewhere maintained by Indian writers, that the rishis were merely seers of the pre-existing sacred texts. Some of the opinions quoted from the Sūtras of Jaimini are further enforced in a passage from the summary of the Mīmānsa doctrine, which I have quoted from the Sarva-darśana-sangraha. The writer first notices the Naiyayika objections to the Mīmānsaka tenet that the Veda had no personal author, viz. (1) that any tradition to this effect must have been interrupted at the past dissolution of the universe; (2) that it would be impossible to prove that no one had ever recollected any such author; (3) that the sentences of the Veda have the same character as all other sentences; (4) that the inference, drawn from the present mode of transmitting the Vedas from teacher to pupil,-that the same mode of transmission must have gone on from eternity, breaks down by being equally applicable to any other book; (5) that the Veda is in fact ascribed to a personal author in a passage of the book itself; (6) that sound is not eternal, and that when we recognize letters as the same we have heard before, this does not prove their identity or eternity, but is merely a recognition of them as belonging to the same species as other letters we have heard before; (7) that though Parameśvara (God) is naturally incorporeal, he may have assumed a body in order to reveal the Veda, etc. The writer then states the Mimānsaka answers to these arguments thus: What does this alleged 'production by a personal author' (paurusheyatva) mean? The Veda, if supposed to be so pro

duced, cannot derive its authority (a) from inference (or reasoning), as fallible books employ the same process. Nor will it suffice to say (b) that it derives its authority from its truth: for the Veda is defined to be a book which proves that which can be proved in no other way. And even if Parameśvara (God) were to assume a body, he would not, in that state of limitation, have any access to supernatural knowledge. Further, the fact that dif ferent śākhās or recensions of the Vedas are called after the names of particular sages, proves no more than that these recensions were studied by those sages, and affords no ground for questioning the eternity of the Vedas,an eternity which is proved by the fact of our recognizing letters when we meet with them. These letters are the very identical letters we had heard before, for there is no evidence to show either that letters of the same sort (G's, for instance,) are numerically different from each other, or that they are generic terms, denoting a species. The apparent differences which are observable in the same letter, result merely from the particular characteristics of the persons who utter it, and do not affect its identity. This is followed by further reasoning in support of the same general view; and the writer then arrives at the conclusion, which he seems to himself to have triumphantly established, that the Veda is underived and authoritative.

The question of the effect produced on the Vedas by the dissolutions of the world is noticed in some extracts from Patanjali's Mahābhāshya and its commentators, which have been adduced by Prof. Goldstücker

in the Preface to his Manava-kalpa Sutra, and which I have partly reprinted in pp. 95 ff. It is admitted by Patanjali, that, though the sense of the Vedas is permanent, the order of their letters has not always remained the same, and that this difference is exhibited in the different recensions of the Kaṭhakas and other schools. Patanjali himself does not say what is the cause of this alteration in the order of the letters; but his commentator, Kaiyyața, states that the order was disturbed during the great mundane dissolutions, etc., and had to be restored (though with variations) by the eminent science of the rishis. Kullūka, the commentator on Manu (see p. 6), maintains that the Veda was preserved in the memory of Brahma during the period of dissolution; and promulgated again at the beginning of the Kalpa, but whether in an altered form, or not, he does not tell us. The latter point is also left unsolved in Sankara's commentary on Brahma Sūtra i. 3, 30, which I quote in the Appendix, pp. 300 ff. Pages 93 ff. contain some remarks (by way of parenthesis) on the question whether or not the Pūrva Mīmāmsā admits the existence of a Deity.

In the extract given in pp. 98-105 from his commentary on the Brahma Sutras,' Sankara, who follows the author of those Sūtras, and Jaimini, in basing the authority of the Vedas on the eternity of sound, finds it necessary to meet an objection that, as the gods mentioned in the Veda had confessedly an origin in time, the

1 My attention was originally drawn to this passage by a treatise, then unpublished, by the Rev. Prof. Banerjea, formerly of Bishop's College, Calcutta.