Rishi Bodhayana

Bodhayana (Baudhayana) is the author of one of the oldest Sutra collections of the Krishna Yajurveda, in the Taittiriya school: the Baudhayana Shrauta, Grihya, Dharma and Shulba Sutras. Together with the Karmanta and Dvaidha sections they make up the Baudhayana Kalpasutra. The pravara chapter of the Baudhayana Shrauta Sutra is one of the main sources of the gotra and pravara lists still used today.

Almost nothing is known of his life. Tradition, as reported by Robert Lingat, makes Apastamba his pupil and Hiranyakeshin Apastamba's, each founding a school of the Taittiriya sutras. Scholars doubt that these persons wrote every part of the texts that bear their names, and the order of Baudhayana and Apastamba is disputed: Kane puts Baudhayana first, while Olivelle ranks the Apastamba Dharmasutra as the oldest of the surviving Dharmasutras and the Baudhayana Dharmasutra third.

1. The Baudhayana Shulba Sutra: rules for building fire altars, with the earliest known verbal statement of the relation between the sides and diagonal of a rectangle, now called the Pythagorean theorem, and a close approximation of the square root of 2 (577/408)
2. The gotra-pravara lists: a pravara chapter attached to his Shrauta Sutra lists the ancestor sages (pravara rishis) of the gotras, the basis of the rule against marrying within the same pravara; one count gives 91 pravara rishis
3. The Baudhayana Dharmasutra: a code of duties in four prashnas on students, householders, penances, inheritance and the life stages; Olivelle treats Book One and the first sixteen chapters of Book Two as the oldest core
4. The Baudhayana Kalpasutra as a whole: the Shrauta, Karmanta, Dvaidha, Grihya, Dharma and Shulba sections together form a complete manual of ritual and conduct for the Taittiriya school
5. The Vrittikara Bodhayana, a separate question: Ramanuja's Sri Bhashya relies on an old commentary (vritti) on the Brahma Sutras by a Bodhayana; some accounts treat this Vrittikara as a different and later man from the author of the Kalpa Sutras

The Shulba Sutra is usually dated about 800 BCE and is generally placed earliest among the surviving Shulba Sutras. Its geometry grew out of the need to lay out altars in squares and rectangles with cords. The rule it gives for the diagonal of a rectangle is the earliest known statement of what is now called the Pythagorean theorem. Editions number the verses differently, so this page cites the chapter only.

The Dharmasutra survives in a layered form. Bühler and Kane judged the last two books to be later additions, and its only commentary, by Govindasvamin, is late and thin compared with Haradatta's on Apastamba and Gautama.

The pravara chapter is not a list of persons living in his time. John Brough, who translated the medieval Gotra-pravara-manjari, describes these chapters as appendices to the ritual sutras that set out the system as it stood at the end of the sutra period, and warns that the long lists of family names were handed down in a corrupt state.

Ramanuja's Sri Bhashya says it follows abridgments of the long vritti on the Brahma Sutras by Bodhayana, and names him the Vrittikara. The vritti itself is lost and survives only in quotations. Tradition in the Sri Vaishnava school holds that Ramanuja went as far as Kashmir to get the text. One detailed account argues that this Vrittikara was not the author of the Kalpa Sutras and places him about the fifth century CE. Others treat the identity as unsettled. This page does not assume the two are one.

Encyclopedia summaries report that the Baudhayana Shrauta tradition is still followed by some Smarta Brahmins (Iyers) and some Iyengars in Tamil Nadu, by Namboothiris in Kerala, and by other communities in the South. Followers of the Baudhayana and Apastamba sutras are reported across South India and in Maharashtra.

• A fire-altar ground being laid out with cords and pegs
• A Smarta household keeping the Baudhayana rites at home