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CHAPTER VII.
LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION IN THE TREATISES
OF THE BOWER MANUSCRIPT.
The language in which the treatises of the Bower Manuscript are written, is a kind of ungrammatical Sanskrit, or what has sometimes been called "mixed Sanskrit," i.e., a mixture of literary and popular Sanskrit. The popular element is far more conspicuous in the more popular treatises on divination and incantation in Parts IV-VII, than in the more scientific treatises on Medicine in Parts I-III.
The term "popular Sanskrit" is not strictly appropriate, "Sanskrit," ie., prepared or polished, was the name of the form of language (bhasa) which was elaborated, from about the seventh to the fourth centuries B.C., in the ancient Brahmanic grammar schools of India, out of the previously existing language of the sacred poetry (chhandas) of the Veda. That language owned a great wealth of inflectional forms and syntactical usages, not very clearly demarcated, and used with great freedom. The object of the grammar schools was to elaborate out of this more or less "rank growth" a well-ordered (sanskrita) language by eliminating some forms and usages, and demarcating the remainder103. The elaboration was a long continued process, which finally resulted, probably at some time in the fourth century B. C., in the production of Pânini's celebrated standard grammar. In its intermediate condition, the language is illustrated in the priestly writings of the so-called Brahmana period. For its ultimate condition, the first witness appears in the Brahmanical treatises of the so-called Sûtra period; but the earliest, actually existing original record of that condition, known at present, is in the Brahmanic inscription, incised on a sacrificial post at Isâpur, near Mathurâ, which is dated in the year 33 B. C. 104. In consequence of its origin, the Sanskrit language tended to perpetuate the phonetic conditions of its Vedic parent, and thus came to bear an air of artificiality.
Outside the Brahmanic schools, the language of the people followed the usual course of linguistic evolution. While it preserved much of the Vedic inflectional forms and syntactic usages which had been discarded in the scholastic Sanskrit, it suffered, on the other hand, the usual process of phonetic deterioration. In was this natural (prâkṛita) language, of spontaneous growth, in which the early literature was written of the two great religious movements, Buddhism and Jainism, which, in the sixth century B. C. and subsequently, agitated the people outside the Bralimanic schools. But after a time, the prestige of the latter produced its natural effect on the writers of the non-brahmanic communities. With the rise of the Mahâyâna School of Buddhists in northern India, about the first century B. C., attempts began to be made by Buddhist writers to imitate their Brahmanic rivals in the use of the scholastic Sanskrit. Ultimately they fully succeeded in their endeavours; but at first their efforts were attended with but partial success, differing according to the amount of literary knowledge they possessed It is this earlier period of literary endeavour, which, as will be shown in the sequel, is reflected in the several treatises of the Bower Manuscript.
103 See Professor Lanman's remarks in the Journal of the American Oriental Society vol. X, p. 326: upon both, the field of the noun and that of the verb, the Veda shows a rank growth of forms which die out later. ... The inflective system of the nouns has become contracted, rigid, and uniform, but not, like that of the verb, essentially mutilated."
104 That is, in the 24th year of the Kusans king Väsisaka; see Dr. Fleet's remarks in the Journal, Royal Asiatic Society, 1910, pp. 1315-7.
