(This article requires basic understanding of Samskritam grammar)

When it comes to Samskritam grammar, the definitive books are Panini’s Ashtadhyayi and Dhatupaatah. Then why do we have so many other books like vartikas, bhashyas and kaumudis. What gap do they address? Specifically, what does a book like Siddhanta Kaumudi adress? To understand that we need to start with the basics and go down in a systematic way.

Let’s start with a simple sentence

गृहतः कार्यालयं गच्छति

When you see this sentence and have no clue about Sanskrit, you will know that, this sentence is made up of three words.

It can split once again by separating the प्रकृति: and प्रत्यय as follows. In each section, the first word is the प्रकृति: and the second, the प्रत्यय

Can this be split even further, like how we can split NaCl into Sodium and Chlorine and then into atoms and other sub-atomic particles? How far can we split the words in Samskritam and what is the end beyond which we cannot split further? In Samskritam, that root is called a धातु. There are approximately around 2000 धातु and 480 प्रत्यय. All the known words are formed by a combination of these.

Samskritam grammar is essentially a reverse engineering of the rules of the spoken language. The language came first and then the grammar. If you are a grammarian, and want to construct the rules of the language, there are two ways of doing it.

List the rule for each word. This obviously does not scale. The real world example would like calling the name of each student in the school and asking them to come into the class.
Come up with generalized rules which apply to a broad category. Come up with exceptions to those rules. The general rule could be, everyone enter the class and the exception could be – except Rahul. This makes the encoding of the rules simpler and easier to remember.

List the rule for each word. This obviously does not scale. The real world example would like calling the name of each student in the school and asking them to come into the class.
Come up with generalized rules which apply to a broad category. Come up with exceptions to those rules. The general rule could be, everyone enter the class and the exception could be – except Rahul. This makes the encoding of the rules simpler and easier to remember.

Panini demonstrated that with just less than 4000 sutras, he could come up with all the rules for all the words in Samskritam. This was possible only because the approach he took was the second one.

Panini’s two books cover this

Dhatupatah – covers all the dhatu and their meaning
Ashtadhyayi – covers all the प्रत्यय, (Chapters 3, 4, and 5)

The Ashtadhyayi consists of 8 chapters and they cover the following topics

1, 2 – संज्ञा, परिभाषा, समासः, कारकं
3,4,5 – प्रत्ययाः
6, 7, 8 – संधिः, प्रत्ययानां योजनम्

Among the Sanskrit grammarians, the most famous are Panini, Katyayana and Patanjali. Katyayana wrote vartikas (explanatory texts) and Patanjali wrote mahabhashyam (great commentary). The books they wrote are succinct and does not contain examples of the rules. This makes it hard for a student who try to study the grammar.

Then came a second set of books called व्रित्तिग्रन्धा: These books have more details about the sutra, like how to split it, the meaning of these words, examples, clarification of doubts, etc. Among these the famous are काशिकवृत्तिः and प्रथमावृत्तिः These texts follow the same order as the sutras in Ashtadhyayi.

This becomes a problem if you are interested in one topic like समासः. The sutras for these are not together and hence a student following the original texts or the व्रित्तिग्रन्धा: will have to collate the related sutras and figure it out.

To address this issues, there came a type of text called the प्रक्रियाग्रन्धा: These are organized according to topics with everything related to संधिः in one place and everything related to समासः in one place. Famous in this category are रूपावतारः, प्रक्रियाकौमुदि. But these books had some issues and caused confusion. Then Bhattoji Dikshit wrote सिद्धान्तकौमुदि fixing all the issues among the previous books. He explained all the sutras, in the style of प्रक्रियाग्रन्धा:and corrected the issues with the previous books.

(Based on the lecture by Tilak Rao. If you are interested in learning Siddhanta Kaumudi, here is the playlist)

(It is recommended that you read The brilliance of Panini before this article)

Panini's Ashtadhyayi — Panini’s Ashtadhyayi

रामः पठति – Rama studies. If it happened in the past, you would say, रामः अपठत् and if it is going to happen in the future, it would be रामः पठिष्यति. You can see the transformations of the word पठ and you would think that is the root word. According to Panini, the root is पठं. That is the dhatu or the verbal root. That root has some extra attachments which is then transformed through a set of operations, which we can call a Paninian Prakriya, to the commonly used form. We don’t use all the letters in a dhatu while speaking or common usage and so the dhatu has to be cleaned up.
Given that there are around 1943 dhatus, how do you come up with rules that can be applied to derive the common form? That’s where you see the brilliance of Panini, who built on top of the work of other grammarians. Paninian grammar is the only complete, explicit, rule-bound grammar of any human language and studying this grammar gives insight into the mind of our rishis.
To give concrete examples of how the Paninian prakriya works, let’s look at a set of rules called it-saṁjñā. As we saw, the dhatu has a bunch of extra additions and they need to be cleaned up. In it-saṁjñā, Panini specifies a sequence of rules which are applied to the dhatu. Each rule attaches a flag to certain letters in the dhatu. Once you run through all the rules, the last rule says, drop all the letters that have been marked. With this, the dhatu is cleaned up.

Few rules of it-saṁjñā

Here we will look at few of the rules and use simple examples. Once these are laid out, we will use some complex examples and see how they all connect as an algorithm. If you don’t get these concepts, it’s fine. How all these play together will be explained in the final section.
Rule 1: उपदेशेऽजनुनासिक इत् It means that any vowel that is nasalized, gets it-saṁjñā For example, take the dhatu धूपँ and split the words as ध् ऊ प् अँ. In this list there is a nasalized vowel, and it is अँ, so the अँ gets the it-saṁjñā. Think of it as underlining the अँ with a red color marker for now.
Rule 2: हलन्त्यम् This means that if there is a consonant (hal) that is at the end (antyam) then it gets the it-saṁjñā. To take an example, इङ् can be split into इ ङ् and since ङ् is a consonant, it gets the it-saṁjñā. What remains is इ. Also take a look at the प्रत्याहारः rules to see what hal means.
Rule 3: न विभक्तौ तुस्माः means that there is an exception to rule #2. This rule falls into a category known as उत्सर्ग-अपवादः The rule says, yes, you can drop the consonant as per rule #2, except when the consonants are त्, थ्, द्, ध्, न्, स्, or म् (the expansion of तुस्माः) or is the end of a विभक्ति . Take the word तस् = त् अ स्. Due to rule #2, स् should be dropped. But स् is at the end of विभक्ति प्रत्यय and hence is not marked as it-saṁjñā.
Rule 4: आदिर्ञिटुदवः ञि, टु, and डु (ञिटुडवः) are marked as इत् if it is at the beginning (आदिः) Take the dhatu डुदाञ् = ड् उ द् आ ञ्. Here डु receives the इत्-संज्ञा by this rule.
Rule 5: षः प्रत्ययस्य The letter ष् (षः) found at the beginning (आदिः) of a प्रत्यय is given the marker इत्. For example, in षाकन् = ष् आ क् अ न् , the first letter ष् receives the इत्-संज्ञा.
Rule 6: चुटू The letters च्, छ्, ज्, झ्, ञ्, ट्, ठ्, ड्, ढ्, or ण् (चुटू) found at the beginning (आदिः) of a प्रत्यय are marked इत्. For example, in णिच् = ण् इ च्. Here ण् receives the इत्-संज्ञा because of this rule.
Rule 7: लशक्वतद्धिते The letters ल्, श्, क्, ख्, ग्, घ्, or ङ् found at the beginning of a प्रत्यय, but not at the beginning of a तद्धित प्रत्यय are marked इत्
Running the above the rules underlines various letters for इत्. The last rule is like the garbage collector in programming languages. It finds all those marked letters and drops them.
Rule 8: तस्य लोपः — All those elements that received the marker इत् (तस्य) disappear (लोपः)

Examples with explanations

Now that we know all the rules, it would help to take some examples and run them through this sequence and see the transformation of a dhatu.

णमुँल् – Breaking down into individual letters, you get ण् + अ + म् + अँ + ल् Now apply rule #1 and since there is a nasalized vowel (अँ), mark it with red color. Then go down the list of rules and see which one matches. The next one that matches is #2 and mark ल् with a red color marker. Scan through the rule set and we find that #6 applies as well. So we mark ण् with our marker. No other rule applies here and so we come to rule #8 which says, drop all those letters which were marked. Doing that gives us अम्
ञिष्विदाँ – Breaking down that again, you get ञ् + इ + ष् + व् + इ + द् + आँ . Going through the rule set, rule #1 applies you we mark आँ with a marker. Then going down, we find that rule #4 also applies, marking ञ. Finally, we come to rule #8 and drop those two letters leaving us with ष्विद्
Let’s do one more. ध्वम्. This breaks down into ध् + अ + व् + म्. Rule #2 applies here and we mark म्. Then the third rule kicks in and says, hold on. You cannot mark it and so we are left with ध्वम् itself.

The grammarians of India looked at Sanskrit used in scripture and for speaking and then came up with the grammar which was used to build up the rules. The it-saṁjñā is just one of the many such rules.
There is one question though. If you are using the word पठ, then why bother writing it as पठं. and then apply all these rules to drop few characters. That is a topic for another post.

PS:

Based on the lectures by Varun Khanna at Chinmaya International Foundation and my Sanskrit teachers.
Taking धूपँ and splitting up it into ध् ऊ प् अँ is called anupurvi
The dhatu णमुँल् is called sa-anubandha dhatu and the cleaned up version अम् is called the niranubandha dhatu

Tag: Panini

Sanskrit Notes: Why Siddhanta Kaumudi?

The Paninian Prakriya

Few rules of it-saṁjñā

Examples with explanations

PS: