Vedic Chronology And Vedanga Jyotisha

Abstract

The ancient Indian literature is divided into two sections-Vedic and post-Vedic -and the chronological sequence of events in the latter can now be pretty accurately determined by referring to the date of Buddha, the invasion of Alexander the Great, the inscriptions of Ashoka, the Shaka era, and a number of other archaeological facts recently discovered. But when we go back to the Vedic literature, the oldest portions of which admittedly depict the most ancient Aryan civilization of which any records have been left, we find no such landrmarks ; and in their absence the method at first adopted by Western Sanskrit Scholars to ascertain the antiquity of the Vedic Civilization was necessarily vague and arbitrary. On the face of it, the Vedic literature is divided into four strata or layers - Chhandas, Mantra, Brahmana, and Sutra ; and it is evident that each of these stages of development must have lasted, at least for a few centuries before it passed into the next. Taking, therefore, these layers for the basis of his calculation, and assuming, at the lowest, 200 years for each stage of development, Prof. MaxMuller, in his HISTORY OF ANCIENT SANSKRIT LITERATURE, roughly fixed the age of Vedic civilization at 800 years before Buddha, or at 1200 B. C. The moderation here exhibited, was no doubt unobjectionable, even from a sceptical point of view. But it hardly corresponded with facts; and many other Vedic Scholars even then considered this estimate as too low, and assigning 400 instead of 200 years for each successive stage of development, carried back the antiquity of the Vedic culture to 2400 B. C. This was the general opinion about the antiquity of the Vedic civilization before the publication of my ' Orion ' and Dr. Jacobi's essay "on the age of the Rigveda," in 1893, in both of which the antiquity is carried back to about 4500 B. C. on the strength of astronomical statements contained in the Vedic literature.