Manusmriti in English - Description
Dear readers, today we are going to share Manusmriti in English PDF Download for all of you. The Manusmṛiti is also known as मनुस्मृति in the Sanskrit language. It is one of the most popular and knowledgeable books that is also known as the Laws of Manu.
There are many legal texts and constitutions among the many Dharmaśāstras of Hinduism. Manusmriti is one of them. There are 12 chapters in Manusmriti. The sages often wrote their ideas on how society should run in the manuscripts of ancient India.
It is believed that many things written in the manuscript are contrary to each other which is why the original form of Manusmriti was changed. So guys if you want to know more information about Manusmriti in English then read this article carefully.
Manusmriti PDF in English Download – Information
- Manusmriti is the first book on the law in the world, which deals with the social and moral conduct of a person. It falls in the Smriti category of Hindu scriptures and hence, it is less authoritative than the Vedas and the Upanishads.
- It is also one of the most defamed Hindu books as Dr Ambedkar had burnt copies of it to protest against the Hindu caste system. To date, many people look at it as a symbol of the caste system.
- The evangelists use this book as a weapon against Hinduism to provoke Dalits. Manusmriti was written in the post-Vedic period after the fall of the Mauryan Empire but they are based on Dharma Sutras written in the Vedic period.
- The sages who wrote it modified Dharma Sutras to fit the era of a rigid caste system that prevailed during the post-Vedic period.
- Another name of Manusmriti is “Dharmasutras of Manava”. There are other Smritis also like Narad Smriti, Yajnavalkya Smriti, Brihaspati Smriti, etc. but Manusmriti is the most famous of them all.
- Manusmriti does not talk about caste but it talks about Varna, viz. Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaisya, and Shudra. There is no mention of the Varna system according to birth but it advocates the system based on the qualities of a person.
- If a Shudra possesses the qualities of a Brahmin, he could be promoted to a Brahmin but if a Brahmin does not possess the qualities required, then he could be demoted as a Shudra. It was translated into English by George Buhler.
Manusmriti PDF English
Nomenclature :
The title Manusmriti is a relatively modern term and a late innovation, probably coined because the text is in verse form. The over-fifty manuscripts discovered of the text never use this title but state the title as Manava Dharmasastra in their colophons at the end of each chapter. In modern scholarship, these two titles refer to the same text.
Chronology :
Eighteenth-century philologists Sir William Jones and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel assigned Manusmriti to the period of around 1250 BCE and 1000 BCE respectively, which from later linguistic developments is untenable due to the language of the text which must be dated later than the late Vedic texts such as the Upanishads which are themselves dated a few centuries later, around 500 BCE.
Later scholars, shifted the chronology of the text to between 200 BCE and 200 CE. Olivelle adds that numismatic evidence, and the mention of gold coins as a fine, suggest that the text may date to the 2nd or 3rd century CE. Most scholars consider the text a composite produced by many authors put together over a long period.
Olivelle states that the various ancient and medieval Indian texts claim revisions and editions were derived from the original text with 100,000 verses and 1,080 chapters. However, the text version in modern use, according to Olivelle, is likely the work of a single author or a chairman with research assistants.
Manusmriti, Olivelle states, was not a new document, it drew on other texts, and it reflects “a crystallization of an accumulated knowledge” in ancient India. The root of theoretical models within Manusmriti relies on at least two shastras that pre-date it: artha and dharma (an ancient Indian concept that includes duties, rights, laws, conduct, virtues and others discussed in various Dharmasutras older than Manusmriti).
Its contents can be traced to Kalpasutras of the Vedic era, which led to the development of Smartasutras consisting of Grihyasutras and Dharmasutras. The foundational texts of Manusmriti include many of these sutras, all from an era preceding the common era. Most of these ancient texts are now lost, and only four have survived: the law codes of Apastamba, Gautama, Baudhayana and Vasishtha.
Structure :
The ancient version of the text has been subdivided into twelve Adhyayas (chapters), but the original text had no such division. The text covers different topics and is unique among ancient Indian texts in using “transitional verses” to mark the end of one subject and the start of the next. The text can be broadly divided into four, each of different lengths and each is further divided into subsections:
- Creation of the world
- Source of dharma
- The dharma of the four social classes
- Law of karma, rebirth and final liberation
To Manusmriti PDF in English Free Download, you can click on the following download button.