The Aṣṭādhyāyī

This series of lessons describes the fundamentals of the Aṣṭādhyāyī, the core text of the Pāṇinian school of Sanskrit grammar. We wrote these lessons for a general audience, so that even someone who knows zero Sanskrit can follow along. (But the more Sanskrit you know, the better!)

If you want a more friendly and general introduction to Sanskrit grammar, please use our grammar guide instead.

Origins of the Pāṇinian 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 Pāṇini. Pāṇini 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. Pāṇini's treatment of language is so thorough and so precise that no older schools of vyākaraṇa survive; evidently, they were no longer worth retaining.

The eight chapters

The core of the Pāṇinian system is the Aṣṭādhyāyī (“the eight chapters”), a system of around 4000 rules divided into eight major chapters. Together, these rules generate grammatically valid Sanskrit expressions. And if an expression is not grammatically valid, then it cannot be generated by the system of rules.

In other words, we can say that the Aṣṭādhyāyī defines a generative grammar for Sanskrit. And it does so by defining a formal language to specify the various transformations of sounds, words, and sentences that Sanskrit requires. So in some sense, the Aṣṭādhyāyī is the first program.

The Aṣṭādhyāyī is so comprehensive that essentially all later Sanskrit literature is consistent with its model of Sanskrit. Perhaps Pāṇini's greatest achievement is that he “froze” Sanskrit and preserved the form it has today.

Why study the Aṣṭādhyāyī?

The Aṣṭādhyāyī has an obvious appeal to anyone who is intellectually curious. If you are interested in linguistics, mathematics, computer science, philosophy of language, Indian intellectual traditions, or all of the above: welcome! Feel free to skip to the next section below.

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 Aṣṭādhyāyī is that it will improve your Sanskrit. But is that actually true?

It's true if you are an advanced learner who wants to understand subtle points of usage and become an authority on correct Sanskrit. Then the Aṣṭādhyāyī will be of tremendous value to you.

But for beginning and intermediate learners, we do not think that studying the Aṣṭādhyāyī will meaningfully improve your Sanskrit. All major theories of second language acquisition agree on the fundamental importance of something called comprehensible input, which 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 learners who mainly want to improve their Sanskrit should focus on receiving comprehensible Sanskrit. (See our resources page for recommendations here.)

Entering the Aṣṭādhyāyī

The Aṣṭādhyāyī is exceptionally difficult, for several reasons:

It is only natural, then, that an entire tradition of Sanskrit commentaries has arisen to make the Aṣṭādhyāyī 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.

That's why we've created this series of novice-friendly lessons about the Pāṇinian system and the Aṣṭādhyāyī. We illustrate the system with a core set of around 200 rules, all of which are general and useful. And we maintain focus on the practical aspects of the system so that the discussion is clear and concrete. Together, these rules give a complete sense of the Pāṇinian system.

Not everyone can master the Aṣṭādhyāyī, but everyone can appreciate its profound and ingenious design. We hope that our series will make it easier than ever to do so.