The Paninian school of grammar

This series of lessons will teach you the fundamentals of the Paninian system of Sanskrit grammar. We wrote these lessons so that even someone who knows zero Sanskrit can follow along.

The Paninian system is demanding and highly technical. If you want a more friendly and general introduction to Sanskrit grammar, please use our grammar guide instead.

Origins of the Paninian school

The Vedas, the oldest of all Sanskrit compositions, have been passed down through a continuous oral tradition that is thousands of years old.

As time passed and cultures changed, six disciplines called the vedāṅga evolved to protect the Vedas in their structure and function. There is śikṣā, the study of speech sounds and their correct pronunciation; chandas, the study of meter and poetic form; nirukta, the study of etymological interpretation; jyotiṣa, the study of timekeeping and the stars; kalpa, the study of correct ritual; and vyākaraṇa, the most prestigious of the six, which is the study of grammar and linguistic analysis.

Though there have been many schools of vyākaraṇa, there is only one that is truly pre-eminent. That is pāṇinīya-vyākaraṇa, the tradition of the grammarian Panini (pāṇini). Panini lived sometime around the 5th century BCE, and we know little about his life beyond that. But what we do have is the system he developed and perfected. Panini's treatment of language is so comprehensive and so precise that no older schools of vyākaraṇa survive; evidently, they were no longer worth retaining.

The core of the Paninian system is the Ashtadhyayi (aṣṭādhyāyī, “the eight chapters”), a list of around 4000 rules that defines which words and expressions are grammatically correct and which are not. The Ashtadhyayi is so comprehensive that essentially all later Sanskrit literature is consistent with its model of Sanskrit. In a sense, Panini's greatest achievement is that he “froze” Sanskrit and preserved the form it has today.

Entering the Ashtadhyayi

The Ashtadhyayi is exceptionally difficult. It is composed in the sutra style, which is aphoristic, terse, and only truly accessible through expert commentaries. (The advantage of the sutra style is that its texts are compact and easier to memorize.) Moreover, the Ashtadhyayi is written in highly technical Sanskrit that is more like a computer program than a piece of natural language.

It is only natural, then, that an entire tradition of Sanskrit commentaries has arisen to make the Ashtadhyayi accessible. Even so, the true beginner finds these texts complex and overwhelming. There are translations and non-Sanskrit commentaries available, but they often present similar problems: they are either too complex to be useful to the novice or too vague to say anything useful.

So in this series of lessons, we want to give you a basic survey of the Ashtadhyayi and the Paninian system. We will make our survey concrete by focusing on a small core of around 200 rules. And we will make our survey general by connecting those rules to the Ashtadhyayi's overall architecture.

Why study the Ashtadhyayi?

The Ashtadhyayi has an obvious appeal to anyone who is intellectually curious. If you are interested in linguistics, mathematics, computer science, philosophy of language, or Indian intellectual traditions, or all of the above: welcome! Click the next link at the bottom of this page to go to the next lesson.

There is also an obvious appeal to those who want to preserve traditional Indian practices and knowledge systems. If this applies to you, we think you should do things in the traditional way and find a teacher, perhaps through the classes from Vyoma-Saṃskṛta-Pāṭhaśālā.

Otherwise, the common-sense reason to study the Ashtadhyayi is that it will improve your Sanskrit. But is that actually true?

Our view is that it is not true for most learners.

All major theories of sceond languages agree on the fundamental importance of something called comprehensible input. Simply, comprehensible input is understandable language that we hear or listen to for its meaning. When we receive comprehensible Sanskrit, we acquire Sanskrit. And when we receive massive amounts of comprehensible Sanskrit, we acquire an extraordinary amount of Sanskrit.

The research further indicates that explicitly studied grammar is slow to learn, easy to forget, and difficult to apply at the speed of real-world usage. Sadly, there is a limit to how many rules we can consciously apply at a time. We must ultimately rely on the language we have acquired, not the language we have studied.

Given these findings, we believe that most learners should focus their time and energy on receiving comprehensible Sanskrit. (See our resources page for recommendations here.) But if you are an advanced learner who wants to understand subtle points of usage and become an authority on correct Sanskrit, then the Ashtadhyayi will be of tremendous value to you.