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Kātyāyana (कात्यायन) also spelled as Katyayana (est. 6th to 3rd century BCE) was a Sanskrit grammarian, mathematician and Vedic priest who lived in ancient India. According to some legends, he was born in the Katya lineage originating from Vishwamitra, thus called Katyayana. The Kathāsaritsāgara mentions Kātyāyana as another name of Vararuci, a re-incarnation of Lord Shiva's gana or follower Pushpadanta. The story also mentions him learning grammar from Shiva's son Kartikeya which is corroborated in the Garuda Purana where Kartikeya (also called Kumara) teaches Katyayana the rules of grammar in a way that it could be understood even by children. It may be that his full name was in fact Vararuci Kātyāyana. In texts like Kalika Purana, it is mentioned that he worshipped Mother Goddess to be born as his daughter hence she came to be known as Katyayani or the "daughter of Katyayan" who is worshipped on the sixth day of Navratri festival. According to the Vamana Purana once the gods had gathered together to discuss the atrocities of the demon Mahishasura and their anger manifested itself in the form of energy rays. The rays crystallized in the hermitage of Kātyāyana Rishi, who gave it proper form therefore she is also called Katyayani. He is known for two works: The Vārttikakāra, an elaboration on Pāṇini grammar. Along with the Mahābhāṣya of Patañjali, this text became a core part of the Vyākaraṇa (grammar) canon. This was one of the six Vedangas, and constituted compulsory education for students in the following twelve centuries. He also composed one of the later Śulbasūtras, a series of nine texts on the geometry of altar constructions, dealing with rectangles, right-sided triangles, rhombuses, etc. Kātyāyana's views on the sentence-meaning connection tended towards naturalism. Kātyāyana believed, that the word-meaning relationship was not a result of human convention. For Kātyāyana, word-meaning relations were siddha, given to us, eternal.

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Related concepts (16)

Sanskrit grammar

The grammar of the Sanskrit language has a complex verbal system, rich nominal declension, and extensive use of compound nouns. It was studied and codified by Sanskrit grammarians from the later Vedic period (roughly 8th century BCE), culminating in the Pāṇinian grammar of the 4th century BCE. Vyākaraṇa Sanskrit grammatical tradition (vyākaraṇa, one of the six Vedanga disciplines) began in late Vedic India and culminated in the Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini.

Bhartṛhari

Bhartṛhari (Devanagari: भर्तृहरि; also romanised as Bhartrihari; fl. c. 5th century CE) was a Hindu linguistic philosopher to whom are normally ascribed two influential Sanskrit texts: the Trikāṇḍī (including Vākyapadīya), on Sanskrit grammar and linguistic philosophy, a foundational text in the Indian grammatical tradition, explaining numerous theories on the word and on the sentence, including theories which came to be known under the name of Sphoṭa; in this work Bhartrhari also discussed logical problems such as the liar paradox and a paradox of unnameability or unsignifiability which has become known as Bhartrhari's paradox, and the Śatakatraya, a work of Sanskrit poetry, comprising three collections of about 100 stanzas each; it may or may not be by the same author who composed the two mentioned grammatical works.

Aṣṭādhyāyī

The (Devanagari अष्टाध्यायी) is a grammar that describes a form of an early Indo-Aryan language: Sanskrit. Authored by Sanskrit philologist and scholar Pāṇini and dated to around 500 BCE, it describes the language as current in his time, specifically the dialect and register of an élite of model speakers, referred to by Pāṇini himself as śiṣṭa. The work also accounts both for some features specific to the older Vedic form of the language, as well as certain dialectal features current in the author’s time.