Early explorations of the issue of intertextuality in the Mānava Dharmaśāstra centered on the hypothesis first articulated by Max Müller in a letter to one Mr. Morley on July 29, 1849 that the extant śāstra was a versified version of a lost Mānava Dharmasūtra. This hypothesis was given strong support by George Bühler (1886, xviiif) in the introduction to his renowned translation of Manu, although it has been abandoned by and large in recent scholarship and vigorously refuted by Kane (1962-75, I: 143-49). The focus on this issue, however, has obscured the very real textual connection between Manu and one of the extant Dharmasūtras, the Gautama Dharmasūtra. It is this śāstric intertextuality that is the subject of this paper. It studies the textual and thematic dependence of the Mānava Dharmaśāstra on the Gautama Dharmasūtra amounting in several instances to the versification of the sūtras of Gautama. This analysis also throws some light on the process of composition undertaken by the author of Manu.

The textual parallels between Gautama and Manu are so close and so numerous that it is safe to conclude that the author of Manu used Gautama as one of his primary sources; the frequency of these parallels makes it unlikely that the authors of both texts were drawing from a common source. What is given below is not an exhaustive list of all the parallels between the two texts.