Ashtadhyayi

01From the damaru of Shiva

The tradition of the grammarians says that at the end of his dance Bhagwan Nataraja sounded his damaru fourteen times, and from those beats came the fourteen Maheshvara Sutras, beginning a-i-u-ṇ, ṛ-ḷ-k. Panini took them as the alphabet of his grammar. The verse that tells this, ‘nṛttāvasāne naṭarājarājo nanāda ḍhakkāṃ navapañcavāram’, is recited in pathshalas before the first lesson. Kathasaritsagara adds its own katha: Panini was the dullest pupil of the teacher Varsha at Pataliputra, went to the Himalaya in shame, and won the grammar from Shiva by tapas.

02The sage of Shalatura

Panini came from Shalatura in Gandhara, near where the Kabul river meets the Indus; later writers call him Shalaturiya after it, and Patanjali calls him Dakshiputra, son of Dakshi. Grammar was already an old discipline when he wrote. He names ten earlier teachers whose views he records: Apishali, Kashyapa, Gargya, Galava, Chakravarmana, Bharadvaja, Shakatayana, Shakalya, Senaka and Sphotayana. Yaska’s Nirukta and the Pratishakhyas of the Vedic schools came before him too. What Panini did was to fold all of this into one system so tight that the works of his predecessors were no longer copied, and are lost.

03Fixing the date

Tradition, following the Kathasaritsagara, sets Panini in the age of the Nanda kings, and some Indian scholars place him far earlier. Most modern scholars put him around the fifth or fourth century BCE. The evidence is internal: he knows the janapadas of the northwest and their towns, mentions the Yavanas and a word yavanani that commentators take for their script, and describes a spoken Sanskrit, bhasha, alongside the older language of the Vedas, chandas. Since Katyayana and then Patanjali, who is dated to about the second century BCE, already comment on him, the Ashtadhyayi must be older than both.

04Eight chapters, four feet

Ashtadhyayi means ‘the eight chapters’. Each adhyaya has four padas, thirty-two in all, and a sutra is cited by three numbers: 1.1.1 is vṛddhir ādaic. The grammar does not stand alone. With it go the Shiva Sutras, the Dhatupatha listing about two thousand verbal roots in ten classes beginning with bhū, the Ganapatha listing groups of words that a single sutra can name by their first member, and the Linganushasana on gender. Pathshalas teach the sutras by heart in order, then learn them again arranged by topic in the Siddhanta Kaumudi or its shorter form, the Laghu Kaumudi.

05Pratyahara and the sutra

Each Shiva Sutra ends in a marker consonant, the it, which is not pronounced. Take any sound and any later marker and you name everything between: ac is every vowel, hal every consonant, ik the vowels i, u, ṛ, ḷ. This is the pratyahara. With it a rule like iko yaṇaci, 6.1.77, says in three words that i, u, ṛ, ḷ become y, v, r, l before a vowel, which is why dadhi atra becomes dadhyatra. Words carried forward from earlier sutras (anuvritti) and headings that govern long runs of rules (adhikara) keep each sutra short. The grammarians’ saying puts it plainly: they rejoice at saving half a mora as at the birth of a son.

06How a word is made

Panini builds every word from parts. A pada is what ends in a noun ending (sup) or a verb ending (tin), says 1.4.14. Take the root bhū, ‘to be’. Add the present-tense ending tip, then the class marker śap between them; the it-markers drop, the u of bhū takes guṇa and becomes o, o before a becomes av, and out comes bhavati. Behind the noun endings stands karaka theory: the agent is ‘the independent one’ (svatantraḥ kartā, 1.4.54), the object is what the agent most wants to reach, and so on for the instrument, recipient, source and location. When two rules apply at once, meta-rules settle which wins, and the last three padas, the tripadi, are treated as not yet applied for all rules before them (8.2.1).

07Veda and the spoken tongue

Panini describes two forms of one language. Bhasha is the Sanskrit of educated speech in his day; chandas is the language of the Vedic mantras, and many sutras open with chandasi, ‘in the Veda’, to record its older forms. He also gives full rules for the Vedic accents, udatta, anudatta and svarita, so that recitation stays true. Here and there he notes how northerners and easterners speak differently (udichām, prāchām). The grammar ends with the shortest sutra of all, a a, 8.4.68, which restores the ordinary closed sound of short a that the first rules had treated as open. It is the last word of the book.

08The three munis

After Panini, Katyayana wrote his varttikas, short notes that refine and extend the sutras, and Patanjali wrote the Mahabhashya, the great commentary in lively dialogue, around the second century BCE. Panini, Katyayana and Patanjali are honoured together as the munitraya, the three sages of grammar. Bhartrihari’s Vakyapadiya, around the fifth century CE, turned grammar into a philosophy of language. The Kashika of Jayaditya and Vamana in the seventh century, Bhattoji Dikshita’s Siddhanta Kaumudi in the seventeenth and Nagesha Bhatta’s works in the eighteenth carried the teaching to every pathshala from Kashi to Thanjavur.

09Panini in the modern world

Europe met Panini through H. T. Colebrooke’s Sanskrit grammar of 1805. Otto Böhtlingk printed the sutras at Bonn in 1839–40 and with a German translation at Leipzig in 1887, and Srisa Chandra Vasu’s English translation came from Allahabad in 1891–98. Leonard Bloomfield learnt his method partly from him, and in 1933 called the grammar one of the greatest monuments of human intelligence. Computer scientists have compared its rule notation with the Backus–Naur form used to define programming languages. In 2022 Rishi Rajpopat’s Cambridge thesis proposed a new reading of the rule-conflict sutra 1.4.2, and the debate it started is still going on.

What it contains

1. 1
   Adhyaya 1

   Technical terms (samjna) and meta-rules (paribhasha): vṛddhi, guṇa, savarna, pada and the rest. It sets out the it-markers, the ātmanepada and parasmaipada endings, and the karakas, the relations of nouns to the action, with the nipatas and upasargas.

2. 2
   Adhyaya 2

   Compounds: avyayibhava, tatpurusha, bahuvrihi and dvandva, with their gender and number. Then the case endings assigned by meaning, and the rules for dropping suffixes (luk).

3. 3
   Adhyaya 3

   Suffixes after verbal roots, under the heading dhātoḥ (3.1.91). Derived roots such as desideratives and causatives, the krit suffixes that make nouns and participles, and the tin endings of the ten tenses and moods (the lakaras).

4. 4
   Adhyaya 4

   Noun endings (sup) and feminine suffixes, then the first taddhita suffixes that make words of descent, region and origin. Gotra names and place names of Panini’s Bharat fill many sutras here.

5. 5
   Adhyaya 5

   The remaining taddhita suffixes: for quantity and measure, for ‘having’ or ‘possessing’ (matup), for comparison (tarap, tamap), and for words of time and place.

6. 6
   Adhyaya 6

   Reduplication, samprasarana, vowel sandhi (6.1.77 iko yaṇaci, 6.1.87 ād guṇaḥ), and the accent of words and compounds. The last padas begin the changes made to the stem (anga) before a suffix.

7. 7
   Adhyaya 7

   Further operations on the stem: replacing suffixes, vṛddhi and guṇa of the root vowel, and the augments such as iṭ that are inserted before endings.

8. 8
   Adhyaya 8

   Doubling of whole words, then the tripadi (8.2–8.4), whose rules are asiddha to everything before them. Final consonants, visarga, retroflexion of n and s, consonant sandhi, and the closing sutra a a.

Famous verses

वृद्धिरादैच्

The sounds ā, ai and au are called vṛddhi.Ashtadhyayi 1.1.1

सुप्तिङन्तं पदम्

That which ends in a noun ending (sup) or a verb ending (tiṅ) is a word (pada).Ashtadhyayi 1.4.14

स्वतन्त्रः कर्ता

The independent one is the agent (kartā).Ashtadhyayi 1.4.54

इको यणचि

Before a vowel, i, u, ṛ and ḷ are replaced by y, v, r and l.Ashtadhyayi 6.1.77

अ अ

The open a is restored to the closed a: the last sutra of the grammar.Ashtadhyayi 8.4.68