Panini : his place in Sanskrit literature : an investigation ... - Cristo Raul

THE CHAMPIONS OF THE WORTERBTJCH—CONCLUSION. 267
privately, at our Sanksritic parties, to Professors Weber and Kuhn
and the longer the interval passed over, the less I felt disposed to
speak of it in print. At present, after twenty years' time, I should
have considered it almost unfair to rake up the past ; for a sense
of charity -would have told me that the moral and intellectual con-
dition of a man may undergo considerable changes during so con-
siderable a period of his life. But in spite of my strongest desire
to combine the defence of literary interests with a regard for all
the circumstances connected with the author himself, I am not
allowed to remain silent, in consequence of the insolent provoca-
tions which I receive. Not only does Dr. Boehtlingk quote his
''edition" of Panini, in his Worterbuch,—not only does he thus
force it, as it were, on us by the references he makes to it, and
acknowledge it to this day as his legitimate child,—but one of his
own scribes, well acquainted with the judgment I should pass on
it, has the hardihood to defy me publicly, by bidding me have
respect for the "editor of Panini."
"Well, then, I have taken up this impertinent challenge. In
so far as my present subject permitted, I have illustrated the
nature of this immaculate book ; and it will not be my fault if I am
compelled to recur to it again.
Still a provocation of this kind alone would have as little
induced me to take up my pen now as it did heretofore; but
when I see the public told authoritatively, yet without any
proof, that Sayana teaches that understanding of the Veda which
was current in India no longer than a few centuries ago;
when I see that the most distinguished and the most learned
Hindu scholars and divines—the most valuable, and sometimes
the only, source of all our knowledge of ancient India—are
scorned in theory, mutilated in print, and, as a consequence,
set aside in the interpretation of Vaidik texts ;—when I see that
the most ancient records of Hindu antiquity are interpreted
to the European public in such a manner as to cease to be that
which they are ;—when a clique of Sanskritists of this description
vapours about giving us the sense of the Yeda as it existed at the
commencement of Hindu antiquity ;—when I see that the very forms
— ;