Why a Grammar Counts as a Religious Text

Grammar is one of the six Vedangas, the limbs of the Veda, alongside phonetics, metre, etymology, ritual procedure and astronomy. Those disciplines exist because of a specific conviction about how the Veda works: that its power lies in exact sound, that a mantra recited with the wrong accent or the wrong sandhi does not merely fail but can turn against the reciter, and that the text must therefore be transmitted without drift across centuries in which the spoken language moves on. The elaborate memorisation techniques, in which the same text is recited word by word, in pairs and in reversed sequences, exist for the same reason. Panini gave that concern its most rigorous instrument by making correctness statable rather than only inherited.

Indian tradition places him in the north west and tells that the sound groupings at the head of his work were given to him by Shiva, who beat them out on his drum at the end of a dance. The later commentaries, above all Patanjali great commentary, turned the grammar into a subject of philosophy in its own right, and the schools that grew from it took up questions about how a word carries meaning and whether meaning attaches to the sentence as a whole that occupied Indian philosophy for the next fifteen hundred years.