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SEPTEMBER, 1892.]
THE INSCRIPTIONS OF PIYADASI.
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the circumstance of an earlier tradition, local, religious or Literary, kept up by means and under conditions which may have varied, that the grammatical reform, from which sprang the grammatical Prakrits in the form in which we know them, can have been possible. I am here content with pointing out the fact in its general aspect. I have not set myself to approach the thorny questions of literary history which surround the pecaliar origin of each of these dialects. I have at least wished to shew, while laying before the reader the proposition to which the facts of philology appear to me irresistibly to drive us, that as a whole it presents nome of those insurmountable difficulties which a mind pre-possessed by different theories might expect. In concluding, I wish to remark that this necessary allowance of a previous tradition, is an important corrective to what might seem too positive in my statements regarding the final redaction of the Pali or Praksit books. This reserve is indispensable. As for laying down the limits in each particular case, for accurately distinguishing between what is the work of the last editors, and what the inheritance of earlier tradition, such a task would be infinite. Perhaps we shall never be in a position to accomplish it in its entirety.
PART IV.
CONCLUSION. The above observations have led me to touch on most of the more general problems which the linguistic history of ancient India presents. I cannot conclade without summing up the principal conclusions to which I have been conducted. They are, in several respects, in conflict with generally received ideas; but we must consider that, hitherto, the examination of these questions is, as is admitted by all, far from having ended in categorical results.14 Our knowledge on this subject is still too incomplete, too floating, to allow a little novelty to excite surprise or to justify distrust. I have dealt with one sole order of considerations, with arguments based on epigraphy and philology, the only ones which were called forth by the principal subject of this work. I consider that these argaments furnish my views with it sufficiently solid basis; and I have every confidence that proofs of other kinds will come to add themselves to mine, and to gradually confirm them. I shall not be charged, I think, with having disdained these other sources of information. I well know all their value. Even if it be not true, as I think it is, that the series of facts to which I have confined myself is the one most likely to lead us to decisive results, the other considerations would hardly come within the limits which have been laid down for me.
The principal literary dialects of ancient India are three in number; the Vedio language, Classical Sanskrit, and the group of Prakrits. To these we must add that idiom which was in a way intermediate between Sanskrit and Prakpit, for which I have proposed the name of Mixed Sanskrit.
1. So far as concerns the religious language of the Vedas, the inscriptions of Piyadasi indirectly testify that it was, at the commencement of the 3rd century before our era, the object of a certain amount of culture, and that this culture was purely oral. That is a point which has been discussed in the preceding chapter.
2. As for Classical Sanskrit, its elaboration in the Brahmaņical world, essentially based on the Vedic language, and on the school-language which might have formed, so to say, its prolongation, but enlivened by the first applications of writing to the popular dialects, should be placed about the 3rd century B. C., and the time following. Its public or official employment only commenced to spread abroad at the end of the first or at the commencement of the second century. No work of the classical literature can well bo of earlier date than this epoch.
3. Mixed Sanskřit is only a manner of writing Prakrit, consisting in going as near as possible to the orthography and the etymological forms known to the religious language.
14 I nay refer the reader to the recent preface pat by Prof. M. Müller at the commencement of his Sanskrit Grow mar for beginners, p. V., and also to the preface of Prof. Whitney's Sanskrit Grammar.
