No surviving biographical record fixes Panini's lifetime. Estimates rest on internal evidence within the Ashtadhyayi itself, such as which earlier grammarians it cites and is cited by, and on references to Panini in later Sanskrit grammatical and historical works, none of which converge on a single date.
What would resolve this A securely datable primary source naming Panini or precisely placing the Ashtadhyayi within the sequence of ancient Indian grammatical works would narrow the range; short of new textual or archaeological evidence, the centuries-wide estimate is unlikely to close further.
OpenIndology and the philology of ancient Sanskrit grammatical literaturePanini, Ashtadhyayi