Questions of King Milinda Part 01

Author(s): T W Rhys Davids
Publisher: Oxford

Page 48

INTRODUCTION.
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India, or in the Panjâb itself. And this is confirmed by the great improbability of any memory of Menander having survived elsewhere, and more especially in Ceylon, where we should naturally look for our author's residence if he did not live in the region thus suggested.
As my space is here limited, I postpone to the next volume the discussion as to how far the knowledge displayed by our author, the conditions of society with which he shows himself acquainted, and the religious beliefs he gives utterance to, afford evidence of his date. I will only say here that on all these points his work shows clear signs of being later than the Pitaka texts. And in the present state of our knowledge, or rather of our ignorance, of Pâli, there is very little to be drawn from the language used by our author. In the first place we do not know for certain whether we have the original before us, or a translation from the Sanskrit or from some Northern dialect. And if, as is probably the case, we have a translation, it would be very difficult to say whether any peculiarity we may find in it is really due to the translator, or to the original author. No doubt a translator, finding in his original a word not existing in Pâli, but formed according to rules of derivation obtaining in Pâli, would coin the corresponding Pâli form. And in doing so he might very likely be led into mistake, if his original were Prakrit, by misunderstanding the derivation of the Prakrit word before him. Childers in comparing Buddhist Sanskrit with Pâli, has pointed out several cases where such mistakes have occurred, and has supposed that in every case the Sanskrit translator misunderstood a Pâli word before him'. As I have suggested elsewhere it is, to say the least, quite as likely that the Sanskrit Buddhist texts are often founded on older works, not in Pâli, but in some other Prakrit. And it may be possible hereafter to form some opinion as to what that dialect was which the Sanskrit writers must have had be
1 See the articles in his Pâli Dictionary,' referred to under note 3, p. xi of the Introduction.
* See the note on pp. 178, 179 of my 'Buddhist Suttas.'
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