Madhuvidya

Author(s): S D Laddu, T N Dharmadhikari, Madhvi Kolhatkar, Pratibha Pingle
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 358

PALI-ITS HISTORY AND ITS RELATION
then become more frequent. In the early stages of Sanskrit and Pali, both these languages shared with Avesta the isogloss of merging IE r and 1 into r. But later they fall apart and begin to show I forms due to dialect mixture.
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Language of the Original Buddhist Canon:
The Ceylonese tradition asserts that Pali is Magadhi and it represents the language in which Buddha taught his disciples. If this tradition is to be believed the Pali canon would represent the original Buddhist canon. But this Ceylónesè claim has been seriously doubted. As was noticed above Päli does not agree with later Magadhi, but it very closely resembles the Girnar dialect i.e. the western dialect of Asokan inscriptions. It is therefore difficult to accept the view that Pali preserves the preachings of Buddha in its original form.
Pali is not a very homogeneous dialect. It shows many dialectal features belonging to the eastern dialect. These usually go under the name Magadhisms. The question arises how do we explain these Magadhisms in Pali. Lüders, en compering the Pali and the Sanskrit versions of the Buddhist Canon, came to the conclusion that there must have been an original canon in the eastern language of which Páli and Sanskrit writings are trän slations. This original canon however, has been completely lost to us. According to Lüders, this language of the original canon agreed in many respects with the Magadhi of the Aśokan inscriptions.
Although Lüders had given expression to this opinion as carly as 1927, he had not come out fully with his complete description of the language of the original canon for quite a long period. It appears that he wanted to publish his findings in his introduction to the edition of the Udanavarga based on the fragments discovered in Turfan. Unfortunately the edition of the Udanavarga was destroyed in the Second World War. But, fortunately, some part of the manuscript related to the introduction of the edition escaped destruction. This has been edited and published in 1954 by Prof. Waldschmidt under the title Beobachtungen über die Sprache des buddhistischen Urkanons. This publication helps us to get at least some idea of what Lüders thought of the eastern language in which he had assumed the original canon was composed. The Magadhisms in Pali occur, according to Lüders, because the Pali translator occasionally retained some eastern forms in his translation or because he misunderstood the text of the original canon.
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