Brief History Of Buddhist Studies In Europe And Maerica

Author(s): J W De Jong
Publisher: J W De Jong

Page 56

THE EASTERN BUDDHIST
inscriptions de Piyadasi, II, Paris, 1886, p. 470). Edgerton's Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit refers only to Buddhist texts and does not include secular texts and inscriptions. The publication of Edgerton's work makes it possible to study the linguistic history of India on a much more comprehensive basis than in 1886 when Senart tried to unravel the relations between Sanskrit, mixed Sanskrit and Prakrit (op. cit., pp. 447–538). Edgerton's work is in the first place descriptive. He divides the BHS in three classes according to the degree of hybridization of the language. The first class contains texts of which both the prose parts and the verses are entirely in BHS. This class consists mainly of the Mahāvastu. One must add now the parts of the Virtaya of the Mahāsāmghika edited by Gustav Roth and Jinananda.? The second class comprises texts of which the verses are in BHS but the prose parts contain few signs of Middle Indic phonology and morphology. However, the vocabulary is largely BHS. The third class consists of texts of which both prose and verse are Sanskritized. Only the vocabulary shows that they belong to the BHS tradition. According to Edgerton BHS tradition goes back to an early Buddhist canon, or quasi-canon, which was composed in a Middle Indic vernacular that very probably already contained dialect mixture. In his view the Prakrit underlying BHS was not an eastern dialect as had been assumed by Heinrich Lüders, who maintained that at least parts of the works of the Pāli and Sanskrit canon were translated from Old-Ardhamāgadhi. Edgerton did not have at his disposal Lüders's Beobachtungen and referred to Lüders's view that the original dialect of the Saddharmapundarika was Māgadhi, solely on the ground of voc. pl. forms in -ābo. The Beobachtungen contain more evidence in support of Lüders's theory but it is certainly true that the characteristics of BHS cannot be explained exhaustively by an Old-Ardhamāgadhi canon. It is of course possible that some texts were transmitted in Old-Ardhamāgadhī but that later additions to the canon were composed in a mixture of dialects with the consequence that the older parts of the canon also were transposed into the same language. This mixture of dialects was subjected to a process of Sanskritization when BHS texts were written. Brough, Renou' and Regameyło agree on this point
7 G. Roth, Bhiksūni-vinaya. Patna, 1970; B. Jinananda, Abbisamācārikā. Patna, 1969. 8 The Language of the Buddhist Sanskrit Texts, BSOAS, 16, 1954, pp. 351-375. 9 Histoire de la langue sanskrite, Paris, 1956, p. 209. 10 Randbemerkungen zur Sprache und Textüberlieferung des Kārandavyūha, Asiatica.*