Dharmasutras The Law Codes of Apastamba, Gautama, Baudhayana, and Vasistha

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The Dharmasutras are the four surviving works of the ancient Indian expert tradition on the subject of dharma, or the rules of behaviour a community recognizes as binding on its members. Written in a pithy and aphoristic style and representing the culmination of a long tradition of scholarship, the Dharmasutras record intense disputes and divergent views on a wide variety of religious and social issues. These unique documents give us a glimpse of how people, especially Brahmin males, were ideally expected to live their lives with an ordered and hierarchically arranged society. In this first English translation of these documents for over a century, Patrick Olivelle uses the same lucid and elegant style of his award-winning translation of the Upanisads and incorporates the most recent scholarship on ancient Indian law, society and religion. The fresh editions of the Sanskrit texts present new manuscript material, variants recorded in medieval commentaries and legal digests, and emendations suggested by philologists.

Experts from Review:

This volume is a tour de force, the first significant attempt at translating the Dharmasutras since George Buhler's pioneering work of 1879. The volume gathers under one cover the ritual and the legal aphorisms ascribed to four sages, compiled over the final three centuries BCE. The sutras are said to be "vedic supplements" and the content of vedic injunctions and, like the Vedas, are said to have a divine source. The Dharmasutras provide the rules for the correct behaviour… They give extensive prescriptions for rituals including bathing, marrying, eating, purificatory ceremonies, and others. They prescribed correct etiquette and conduct of the male as a student and as a husband, provide rules for heritance, the giving of gifts, the owning of property, etc. Moral attitudes and legal obligations are detailed as are penances for legal codes broken, as in the case of theft, murder, association with outcastes, and illicit sex.

The attempt at making continuities with an authenticating past, the negotiation of appropriate compromises while maintaining an orthoprax lifestyle are illustrated clearly enough in these sutras for even the generalist to follow. For the speciality in Indian religion, law, history, and society these translations are virtually indispensable.

About the Author:

Patrick Olivelle is the Chair, Department of Asian Studies, at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Religions.