The Ashtadhyayi is not a textbook. It does not explain Sanskrit the way a teacher explains it to a student. It generates Sanskrit, every grammatical form the language is capable of producing, from a set of rules so compact they were designed to be memorised whole, recited aloud, and carried in the body rather than stored on a page. Panini wrote for a reader who already knew the language and wanted to understand its skeleton. What he gave them was something closer to a machine than a manual.
