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MAY, 1907.]
seem, ought to give us a hint as to what was the real state of matters. The simplest explanation clearly is to see in the general absence of the long vowel the result of an intentional simplification, and to regard the exceptional occurrence of it in the plate as a mere slip of the writer or engraver who at the very end and in this one case only reverted to a practice that came familiar to him, not, as Dr. Fleet wishes, as a sign of the still uncertain use of a newly introduced notation. In our inscription, on the other hand, there is no similar inadvertency; here the simplication is a consistent one, and is moreover justified in this kind of graffito, where the characters, slender and somewhat cursive, are traced distinctly but very slightly, as if cut with a knife, but yet without presenting either in detail or in their general aspect any trace of those modifications that usually reveal a difference in time. It is certainly rash to judge of the age of a document [545] from simple paleographic analogies. But when, as is the case here, there is a complete identity, not only as to the component parts, but also as to the style, with memorials of the same origin, hesitation is no longer permissible. It would require an incontrovertible proof to make us separate our inscription from the neighbouring ones of Nigliva and Rumminder by two centuries or more.
THE INSCRIPTION ON THE PIPRAHWA VASE.
119
This argument concerns only the age assigned by Professor Rhys Davids to the inscription. The following one touches the very core of his interpretation, namely, the description of the Sakyas as "brethren of the Buddha." In Sanskrit, as well as in Pali, the word that here occurs in the Prakrit form of bhati properly signifies "brother," and in the present case, where it is immediately followed by the words for "sister, son, wife," there is, a priori, every probability that it has been employed, like these, in its proper sense. In certain cases it can also be used, by extension, for a very near relative, such as a cousin. Now we do not know of any " brothers" of the Buddha,10 and the cousins whom we know he had have nothing to do with the matter in hand. For more distant degrees of relationship we have jñāti, vamiya, bandhu, sagōtra, and others, but never bhrātṛi; at most, this word might be employed in such a sense in direct address, but in that case with a shade of familiarity which would be absolutely out of place here. Even spiritual brotherhood does not admit the use of this term; we find Buddhaputras, Sakyaputras, " sons of the Buddha, of the Sakya," but the religious language knows of no " brethren of the Buddha." When ascetics meet, they address each other as "venerable one," or with ayushmat (equivalent to "may you live long"), never as "brother" and when a monk accosts a nun and calls her bhagini, "sister," it is in a very different sense, so as distinctly to mark the purity of their relations. All the more would pious laymen have scrupled to use, in an authentic document, the familiar term of "brother" in connection with Buddha Bhagavat, "the Saint, the Blessed Buddha," the exalted being who in the oldest books of the sect is called "the Master of gods and men." Even for the period contemporaneous with that of the Buddha the supposition appears to me improbable, and I may add at once that it would be still more so if the inscription were of a later date. Professor Rhys Davids asks himself if the sole reason of the sceptics, who feel doubts as to his demonstration, might perhaps be that "it is too good to be true." And, indeed, there is something in this, but there is something else besides.
Professor Pischel has arrived at the same conclusion as Professor Rhys Davids, [540] but by another way. He objects to the word expressing the idea of gift or of pious act being understood, although the case frequently occurs, perhaps in one out of every three similar documents, and even though in the present case the word need not really be understood at all. It is so, in fact, only for us, in consequence of the requirements of our languages; in the original it is sufficiently expressed by nidhana, "receptacle, repository," this nidhana
10 Tradition ascribes to him a half-brother, Nanda, who became a monk.
11 Allgemeine Zeitung, Beilage, 7 Jan. 1902; Zeitschrift der deutschen morg. Gesellschaft, LVI. (1902), p. 1571.; Bitungsberichte of the Berlin Academy, July 1908, p. 710, and May 1905, p. 526.
A quite similar ellipsis is the rule in inscriptions on coins and seals, where the name of the king or of the owner is simply put in the genitive, without a governing word.
