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LITERATURE
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for granted; that the Pali canonical literature is always called "the Southern Recension" or "the Singhalese Canon "?
The expression is ambiguous, and apt to be misleading. But though it is doubtless sometimes used in such a way as to suggest that these books were composed in Ceylon, this is not its real meaning, and it is never so used by careful writers. It simply means that of the few works known to the European scholars who first studied Buddhism, the MSS. of some came from Ceylon; and that such works were therefore called southern, to distinguish them from the others, known from MSS. which had come from Nepal, and therefore called northern.
It is very possible that Burnouf, to whom the popularity of this mode of speech is mainly due, leaned at first to the opinion that the canonical works had been actually written in Ceylon. He always spoke of them in his first work as "the Pali books of Ceylon," not as Ithe Pali books of India." But that phrase is also ambiguous. Very conscious how meagre, and for the most part how late, were the works he used, he was much too careful a scholar to express, at first, any clear opinion at all. At the end of his long labours, however, he certainly was quite clearly of the contrary opinion. For at the very close of his magnificent work, at p. 862 of the 'Lotus," he suggests that the Pali works may have been popular among inferior castes, and the great mass of the people, in Magadha and Audh, while the Buddhist Sanskrit works were in use among the brahmins." He at that time regarded them all,
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Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
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