________________
316
BUDDHIST INDIA
provisionally, accept this till the authorities on which it rests shall have been proved to be mistaken. In either case the date of the poem must be approximately the last half of the second century A.D. And just as the first public proclamation addressed, in regular Sanskrit, to the public, was written at the court of a foreign king, the Scythian satrap at Giri-nagara, so it would be consistent with all our other information if one of the first, if not the first, literary work addressed, in regular Sanskrit, to the laity, should have been written at the court of a foreign king, the Tartar sovereign of the Kushan realm.
The above argument is further confirmed by the fact that at a Council of the Buddhist Order, held under the patronage of Kanishka, three works were composed in Sanskrit as official commentaries on the ancient canonical books. These three Sanskrit works are extant in Chinese translations, and it is most deplorable that these important documents have not yet been published. But even without having them, in full, before us, we can safely draw the conclusion that Kanishka cannot have reigned before the time when it had become recognised that the right language to use on such an occasion was, not Pāli, but Sanskrit. And this would be equally true though the Sanskrit of these works should turn out, when we can consult them, to be less elegant than that written by Asvaghosha.'
This introduction of the use of Sanskrit as the lingua franca is a turning - point in the mental
1 See, on this Council, my Milinda, vol. ii., pp. xv., xvi.
Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
