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Shri Mahavir Jain Aradhana Kendra
www.kobatirth.orgAcharya Shri Kailashsagarsuri Gyanmandir
( liv ) Sanskrit. The Sthaviravādi line has continued in Ceylon, Burma and Siam until to-day, while the Sautrāntika and Mahāsaṁghika lines culminated in Classical Sanskrit. The various recensions of Asoka's Rock and Pillar edicts, distributed over a vast geographical area, from Gandhāra to Kalinga and from Nepal to Mysore, appear in history as so many indelible records of a reaction agaiust the standardisation of Buddhist scriptural languages. The repeated attempts of the Buddhist emperor to adapt the language of each adict to local dialects were fruitful in more than one way. These suggested a possibility of translating the Buddbist Canonical texts into local dialects, outside the Middle Country and it was really left to his missionaries to accomplish the task. The compilation of a Dhammapada text, such as the Prakrit, in a local dialect of Khotan or in that of the countries round Peshawar, broadly the Gandbāra region, may be singled out as the first visible fruit of the reaction implied in Asokan edicts. Since Asoka the Buddhist missionaries penetrated into dark regions within and outside India with the torch-light of the truths of Buddhism. It is these missionaries and their successors and disciples who translated the sacred texts into several local dialects and thus raised those dialects to the status of literary languages and laid the foundation of many national literatures, characters, languages, arts and civilisations. The history of the subsequent Buddhist literature goes to show that the development of Prakrit became an undercurrent to manifest itself again in about the 10th Century A.D. in the songs and treatises of Sahajiya and other schools of Buddhist Tăutriks. The history of the Dhammapada literature covers some twelve centuries, from the 4th century B.C. to the 9th century A.D. The Dhammapada texts have an international importance, for it is through them that the lofty massages of Buddhism could be appealed to the various nations of Asia who were less
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