Page:The history of caste in India.pdf/83

 ship of the text to documents whose dates are more or less known.

Determining the position of our text in the legal literature, he has shown that the text could not have been written earlier than 200 B. C. and this of course is quite reasonable. The other terminus he thinks to be 200 A. D. and gives the following reasons:

(1) Nārada's work on law has been referred to in Harsha-charita by Bāna who lived at the beginning of the seventh century (A. D.). Thus Nārada must have lived before Bāna, while it is well known that the latter is himself much later than our text.

(2) Medhātithi, the writer of the oldest available commentary, lived probably in the ninth century, knew of commentaries to which he was compelled to assign remote antiquity. Bühler thinks it only a moderate estimate if we assume that the earliest among them was about three or four hundred years old, and the glosses which existed in the fifth and sixth centuries show that even the earliest of them were separated by a considerable interval from the compilers of Manu-smriti, an interval so great that the real meaning of the text seems to have been forgotten.

(3) The smriti of Brihaspati which existed in 600 A. D., is found to be a Vārtika on Manu.

Besides these three principal arguments Dr. Bühler has given four others which, as he admitted, have a flaw of one kind or another.

Even a superficial examination of the evidence would