Loke, vede, sastre: Grammarians' partition of tradition and related linguistic domains

Indian grammarians knew of linguistic variation: in Pāṇini's Aṣṭhādyāyī we already find rules to describe Vedic usages, marginal and preferred usages, even regionally restricted usages. Still, this awareness conflicts with a likewise deeply rooted belief in the intrinsic inalterability of language that Dehspande calls the "theology of Eternal Sanskrit". This leads, as far as Pāṇini is concerned, to a description of Sanskrit language as a panchronistic flatland, i.e. as a totality which includes "all known diachronic and synchronic facts of Sanskrit" (Deshpande 1985: 124). Pāṇinian grammar is based on a common set of rules which represents all the shared facts of Sanskrit, including what we would consider Vedic facts, as long as they are not exclusively Vedic. Of course Pāṇini and his commentators distinguish restricted domains inside this totality i.e. they identify rules which apply exclusively in the domain of mantras (mantre), in the domain of the Vedic hymns (chandasi), in the domain of ordinary language and so on. The present paper will focus on the codification of such domains by later commentators and in particular in the (linguistic) domain of śāstra and what it can tell us about tradition as codified by ancient grammarians