Panini (grammarian) - Date and Context

Date and Context

Nothing definite is known about when Pāṇini lived, nor even which century he lived in. The scholarly mainstream favours a 4th-century BC floruit (corresponding to the Pushkalavati site in Gandhara), contemporary to the Nanda Dynasty ruling the Gangetic plain, but a 5th or even late 6th century BC date cannot be ruled out with certainty. Pāṇini's grammar defines Classical Sanskrit, so Pāṇini by definition lived at the end of the Vedic period. He notes a few special rules, marked chandasi ("in the hymns") to account for forms in the Vedic scriptures that had fallen out of use in the spoken language of his time. These indicate that Vedic Sanskrit was already archaic, but still a comprehensible dialect.

An important hint for the dating of Pāṇini is the occurrence of the word yavanānī (यवनानी) (in 4.1.49, either "Greek woman", or "Greek script"). Some Greeks, such as the Persian admiral Scylax of Caryanda were present in Gandhara as co-citizens of the Persian empire, well before the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 330s BC; the name could also have been transmitted via Old Persian yauna, and the administrative languages Elamite or Aramaic, so that the occurrence of yavanānī taken in isolation allows for a terminus post quem as early as 519 BC, i.e. the time of Darius the Great's Behistun inscription that includes the Indian province of Gandara (Sanskrit Gandhāra).

It is not certain whether Pāṇini used writing for the composition of his work, though it is generally agreed that he knew of a form of writing, based on references to words such as "script" and "scribe" in his Ashtadhyayi. These must have referred to Aramaic or early Kharosthi writing. It is believed by some that a work of such complexity would have been difficult to compile without written notes, though others have argued that he might have composed it with the help of a group of students whose memories served him as 'notepads' (as is typical in Vedic learning). Writing first reappears in India in the form of the Brāhmī script from c. the 3rd century BC in the Ashokan inscriptions.

While Pāṇini's work is purely grammatical and lexicographic, cultural and geographical inferences can be drawn from the vocabulary he uses in examples, and from his references to fellow grammarians, which show he was a northwestern person. New deities referred to in his work include Vasudeva (4.3.98). The concept of dharma is attested in his example sentence (4.4.41) dharmam carati "he observes the law" (cf. Taittiriya Upanishad 1.11).