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LITERATURE
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degree) throughout the world? Or are we to suppose that the Buddhist community formed a section so completely cut off from the rest of the peu. ple that they were uninfluenced by the existence, in their immediate surroundings, of the great Indian Epics. The Rāmāyaṇa, as Professor Jacobi has shown, was composed in Kosala, on the basis of ballads popularly recited by rhapsodists throughout that district. But the very centre of the literary activity of the Buddhists was precisely Kosala. After the Rāmāyaṇa had become known there as a perfect epic, with the distinctive marks of the epic style, would such of the people in Kosala as had embraced the new doctrine have continued to use only the ancient method of composition ? This would be quite without parallel. But we have to choose between this supposition (not a probable one) and the alternative proposition — that is to say, that whatever the date to be assigned to this ballad liter. ature, in mixed prose and verse, preserved in the Nikāyas, the date of the Mahā.bhārata and of the Rāmāyaṇa, as Epics, must be later.
We may be pretty sure that if the Epics had existed at the period when this Buddhist literature was composed, they would have been referred to in it. But they are not. On the other hand, the ballads in prose and verse, such as those sung by the rhapsodists (the stage out of which the epics were evolved), are referred to under their technical naine of akkhānas (Sanskrit ākhyānas) in one of the oldest documents.' Mention is there made of various
Dialogues of the Buditha, 1. S.
Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
