Page:A history of Sanskrit literature (1900), Macdonell, Arthur Anthony.djvu/441

Yajurveda; its third section resembles the Pāraskara Gṛihya Sūtra, but it is unmistakably connected with the Mānava Grihya Sūtra of the Black Yajurveda. Its approximate date seems to be about 350 A.D. Its author probably belonged to Mithilā, capital of Videha (Tirhut). Yājnavalkya, ed. and trans. by Stenzler, Berlin, 1849; with comm. Mitāksharā, 3rd ed., Bombay, 1892. The Nārada Smṛiti is the first to limit dharma to law in the strict sense. It contains more than 12,000 çlokas, and appears to have been founded chiefly on Manu. Bāṇa mentions a Nāradīya Dharma Çāstra, and Nārada was annotated by one of the earliest legal commentators in the eighth century. His date is probably about 500 A.D. Nārada, ed. by Jolly, Calcutta, 1885, trans. by him in Sacred Books, vol. xxxiii. 1889. A late lawbook is the Parāçara Smṛiti (anterior to 1300 A.D.), ed. in Bombay Sansk. Series, 1893; trans. Bibl. Ind., 1887. The second stage of post-Vedic legal literature is formed by the commentaries. The oldest one preserved is that of Medhātithi on Manu; he dates from about 900 A.D. The most famous comm. on Manu is that of Kullūka-bhaṭṭa, composed at Benares in the fifteenth century, but it is nothing more than a plagiarism of Govindarāja, a commentator of the twelfth century. The most celebrated comm. on Yājnavalkya is the Mitāksharā of Vijnāneçvara, composed about 1100 A.D. It early attained to the position of a standard work, not only in the Dekhan, but even in Benares and a great part of Northern India. In the present century it acquired the greatest importance in the practice of the Anglo-Indian law-courts through Colebrooke's translation of the section which it contains on the law of inheritance. From about 1000 A.D. onwards, an innumerable multitude of legal compendia, called Dharma-nibandhas, was produced in India. The most imposing of them is the voluminous work in five