The Historical Reception of Panini’s Sanskrit Grammar

The Aṣṭādhyāyī is a comprehensive grammar of the Sanskrit language as known to its author Pāṇini. It stands out for doing more than merely describing its object language: the Aṣṭādhyāyī is a full-fledged machine which helps construct grammatically correct Sanskrit words and sentences through a step-by-step derivation process. In the Aṣṭādhyāyī, Pāṇini does not give us a general introduction to his work, nor does he discuss the theoretical principles that have been used to construct his sūtras. He conveys whatever has to be said, through his sūtras alone. And this absence of an explicit statement by Pāṇini about the exact nature of his work makes the historical reception of his grammar so interesting: how are we to decide what Pāṇini sought to achieve with his unique grammar and how the commentaries of subsequent traditional scholars have influenced our understanding of Pāṇini’s work and motives? In this paper, I first dwell on why it is challenging to interpret the Aṣṭādhyāyī and discuss the interpretative developments that likely followed its composition within a couple of centuries. I then explain what metarules are and why they play such a pivotal role in our decipherment of Pāṇini’s grammatical framework while also outlining the history of what has come to be called the Pāṇinian grammatical tradition. Next, I discuss how modern scholarship has received the Aṣṭādhyāyī and whether it can be called a ‘machine’. Thereafter, I summarize the problem of rule conflict in the Aṣṭādhyāyī, underscore the key findings of my doctoral thesis, and explain my work in a philosophical context—broaching issues surrounding the epistemology and the ontology of this discipline. Finally, I offer a succinct intellectual history of the Pāṇinian grammatical tradition focusing on the one metarule that Pāṇini has taught us to deal with rule conflict.