Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 2.djvu/27

xxiv more probable that Baudhâyana and Bhâradvâga, as well as the latter and Âpastamba, were separated by several intervening generations of teachers, who contented themselves with explaining the works of their predecessors. The distance in years between the first and the last of the three Sûtrakâras must, therefore, I think, be measured rather by centuries than by decades.

As regards the priority of Âpastamba to the school of Satyâshâdha Hiranyakesin, there can be no doubt about the correctness of this statement. For either Hiranyakesin himself, or, at least, his immediate successors have appropriated Âpastamba's Dharma-sûtra and have inserted it with slight modifications in their own collection. The alterations consist chiefly in some not very important additions, and in the substitution of more intelligible and more modern expressions for difficult and antiquated words. But they do not extend so far as to make the language of the Dharma-sûtra fully agree with that of the other sections of the collection, especially with the Grihya-sûtra. Numerous discrepancies between these two parts are observable. Thus we read in the Hiranyakesi