DHARMA-ŚĀSTRA. - These are “treatises on law,” sacred and secular, composed in verse, ordinarily śloka. They derive for the most part from older dharmasūtra, “rules of law” in aphoristic prose, with a few stanzas inserted into the text. Such is the case of the Mānava-d.-ś. or “code of Manu,” a reworking of a Mānava-d.-ś., of which a lengthy quotation remains in the code of Vasiṣṭha.
The code of Manu, the first man, regarded as the founder of social institutions, is the best-known d.-ś., also owing to Bühler’s excellent translation in the Sacred Books of the East. The oldest is the code of Gautama, to which that of Vasiṣṭha refers, composed “some centuries B.C.” (Bühler). The code of Manu, on the other hand, is later, and belongs to an indeterminate period between the 2nd century B.C. and the 2nd century A.D. The dharmasūtra, also called, by catachresis, d.-ś., being, by reason of their antiquity (8th–3rd centuries B.C.), more closely connected with the Vedic schools, contain a greater number of religious prescriptions. Whereas in the Dharmasūtra of the school of Āpastamba norms of a juridical character occupy about one seventeenth of the work, in the code of Manu they exceed one quarter. The traditional masters of d. are eighteen; an anthology of 28 treatises was published in Bombay in 1883 under the title D.-ś.-sangraha.