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8. K. BELYALKAR
२०९
misinterpreted under the influence of the diversified contemporary tongues and idioms. The Buddha, however, gave his ruling flat against the proposal:
Na bhikkhaye Buddhayacacam Chandaso āropetabbam. Yo āropeyya, apatti dukkhatassa. Anujānāmı bhikkhave sakāya niruttigā Buddha
vacanam pariyāpunitun ti. This passage unfortunately has been wrongly interpreted, and that by Do legs a scholar than H Oldenberg, who says that the Buddha bere decrees that every one should learn the sacred texts in his own language. Oldenberg imagined that as the holy texts of the Buddhtsts spread all over India, "they were certainly not handed over to the different parts of India in the Māgadhi language, but in the Verpacular dialects peculiar to the several districts." But, surely, grammar requires that the sya'in sakāya zrettya refer to the language in which the Buddha himself preached. In his commentary on the passage, Buddhaghosa makes this quite explicit:
Ettha sakā miruttt nama Sammāsambuddhena vuttapakaro Māgadhiko voharo
This in fact is the reason why the Magadhi was designated the Mulabhāsā, the basic or mother tongue of Buddhism; and it is the study of the Canon in this basic language that the above passage from the Cullavagga enjoins. This, however, did not solve -- even after the fashion of the Jain Aupapātika-sitra -- the difficulty raised by the Bhikkhus. The Buddha calls upon his disciples to study the original Māgadhi of the Canon just as Lord Mahavira emphasises the study of the Addhamagadhi, but that could not have guaranteed - apart from the miracle - that the words of the Canon would be easily and correctly understandable throughout the length and breadth of Bhārataparsa. As a matter of fact, at the time we are speaking about, Sanskrit would have been understood by a much larger proportion of the peoples of India than the language of a small province such as the Māgadhi or the Ardhamāgadhi. These two languages were, like most other provincial Prākrits, derived from Sanskrit and had considerable common Vocabulary. A Sanskrit-knowing person would have been able to understand, with a little effort, most of the provincial Prākrits, but not so the exclusively Magadbi or Ardbamagadhi speaking commoner ( assuming for the moment that the latter was, in its Canonical form, an actual spoken language) There was, therefore, something in the proposal of the Bhikkhus to convert the Buddhist Canon into Sanskrit.
Curiously egough, in course of time and as Jainism and Buddhism grote to attain an All-India status, they both of them did actually adopt Sanskrit 28 the medium for Icarned, disquisitive and commentorial writings intended to be read by the elite thinkers of Bhāratavarga. In the seats of learning lite
