Page:A history of Sanskrit literature (1900), Macdonell, Arthur Anthony.djvu/261

 and significance. Thus the altar is gradually built up, as its bricks are placed in position, to the accompaniment of appropriate rites and verses, by a formidable array of priests. These are but some of the main points in the ceremony; but they will probably give some faint idea of the enormous complexity and the vast mass of detail, where the smallest of minutiæ are of importance, in the Brahman ritual. No other religion has ever known its like.

As the domestic ritual is almost entirely excluded from the Brāhmaṇas, the authors of the Gṛihya Sūtras had only the authority of popular tradition to rely on when they systematised the observances of daily life. As a type, the Gṛihya manuals must be somewhat later than the Çrauta, for they regularly presuppose a knowledge of the latter.

To the Rigveda belongs in the first place the Çānkhāyana Gṛihya Sūtra. It consists of six books, but only the first four form the original portion of the work, and even these contain interpolations. Closely connected with this work is the Çāmbavya Gṛihya, which also belongs to the school of the Kaushītakins, and is as yet known only in manuscript. Though borrowing largely from Çānkhāyana, it is not identical with that work. It knows nothing of the last two books, nor even a number of ceremonies described in the third and fourth, while having a book of its own concerning the sacrifice to the Manes. Connected with the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa is the Gṛihya Sūtra of Āçvalāyana, which its author in the first aphorism gives us to understand is a continuation of his Çrauta Sūtra. It consists of four books, and, like the latter work, ends with the words "adoration to Çaunaka."