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 200 THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY. [July, 1873. CORRESPONDENCE, &c. PROFESSOR WEBER ON PATANJALI, Ac. See,—Let me offer you my thanks for having given to your readers a translation of my lucubra¬ tions on the date of Patanjali.* True, I should have liked to see it given in fully with all the copious annotations, and also with my treatment of that important passage from the Vdkyapadiyam about the melancholy fate that befell the Mahd- bhdshya for some time. But as your space is limited, I easily conceive that you could not well afford to devote more of it to this discussion. Doing it, you have, diqhlyd, elicited from Prof. Bhand&rkar some very able and pertinent re¬ marks, and I am glad to acknowledge the scho¬ larly skill displayed by him in handling the sub¬ ject. He begins by saying that he “ hardly shares in the regret” I had expressed with regard to his not having been aware of the fact that I had ten years ago treated tho same subject, as his “facts were new, and his conclusions not affected by anything” I had said formerly, and I beg therefore to inquire first somewhat deeper into the merits of this rather blunt rebuff. The example: “iha Pushpamitraiii y&ja- yamah” is no doubt new, as it was neither noticed by Goidstucker nor by myself, but the question is, does it really conveys that meaning which Prof. Bhandarkar gives to it—“ that at the time PataS- jali wrote there lived a person Pushpamitra, and a great sacrifice was being performed for him and under his orders” P The whole passage, rendered by him somewhat obscurely, is to be translated as follows. Pdnini (III. 2, 123): lat (the present tense) is used when something is going on;— Kdtydyana: they should be taught with regard to the not-being-finished (i. e. continuation) of an action going forward (i.e. to use lat also when an action going forward is not yet finished, merely stopped), as it is not going on;—Patanjali: “ they should .... action” (i.e. to use it also in the following cases): here we study—ihd *dhimahe, here we stay—iha vasdmah; here we sacrifice for Push- pamitra—iha Pushpamitram ydjaydmah. What is the reason P It is not clear (wants to be Btated expressly), “ as it is not going on; ”—Kaiyata: “here we study,” so (one is to say as long as) the • There is one passage in which the translator, who has done his work in other respects to my full satisfaction, has missed my meaning: I refer to the passage on page 63o about Kaiyyata, whom I do not call contemporary of the author of tho Trik&ndasesha and of Hemachandra,’* but “ supported by the author of the Trikdpdasesha and by Hemachandra ” (dem sich noch der Verfasser des Tn- k&adaiesha und Hemachandra zugesellen). f As I am informed hy Prof. Biihler that the Jainas spell the name as Pupphamitta, I join now too in reading study is going forward, begun, not yet finished; for when they are not studying, being engaged in eating and other like things, the use of the word “ we study ” seems not proper,—therefore an ex¬ press statement is required. The meaning of this is : the present tense may be used as well of short actions which are really going on at the very moment of speaking, as of prolonged actions which are for a certain time in the course of going on and not yet finished, though they may be inter¬ rupted for a time by other business, such as studying a certain system, staying at a given place, tacrificing for Pushpamitra. Are we now really ob¬ liged to draw from this last example Prof. Bh&nd&r- kar’s conclusion that this sacrificing for Pushpa¬ mitra was “ not yet finished”—at the time Patanjali wrote, was “ still going on ”P If we did not know anything of an individual of the name of Pushpa¬ mitra, we should no doubt take the word simply as a common proper name in the sense of Gajus, Calpumius, Sempronius, like Vishnumitra (see Mahdhhdshya, p. 233, ed. Ballantyne). It is there¬ fore of the highest importance that we get from another passage PataSjali’s precise notion (and this fact was adduced first by myBelf), that the Push¬ pamitra Bpoken of by him was really a king, and a noted king too, as it seems, as distinguish¬ ed as Chandragupta, no doubt the lavtipo- kotttos of the Greeks, along with whom he is mentioned,—distinguished, as this example, “iha Pushpamitram ydjaydmah,” as well as a similar one happily brought forward by Prof. Bh&nd&rkar (p. 69), shows, especially also for his sacrifices. And this agrees well with what we know from other sources of a king of that name.f as the tradition of the Buddhists affirms,J that he was a staunch friend of the Brahmans ; and of his aAvamedha even K&li- d&sa takes notice in one of his dramas. This dynasty is called in the Puranas that of the feungas, a name which recurs under the Brahmanic fa¬ milies and teachers of the fi^ra-period, in the fadtydyana, Ahaldydna, and Niddna Sdtras, as well as in P&nini (IV. 1,117), and which has probably acorued to Pushpamitra, its founder, from his spi¬ ritual affiliation by one of his gurus (just as kyamuni is called Gautama for a similar reason, see Ind. Stud. X. 73), or from the sacrificial cus- it thus, though the other form given by the northern Bud¬ dhists, Pushyamitra, as a nAkshatra name, would seem to merit the preference in a royal name. J According to the Asoka-Avadana (Bumouf, Introduc¬ tion d VHistoire ,du Buddhism, I. 431, 432), he offered for each head of a Sramana a hundred dlnfiraa, and got for this his persecution from the Buddhists the nickname— munihata, “ celui qui a mis d mort les solitaires.” He is considered there os the last of the race of the Mauryas (!).