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that they were all reduced to the language of Pāțaliputra, prevalent at that time among the classes of men, from which Jaina monks were recruited. A thousand years later the whole Jaina literature was again collected and revised in the language of the time under the superintendence of Devardhigani. The little of the Purvis that were still extant disappeared from that time, --and we have absolutely no means of knowing the structure of the language in which the Purvis were written. But reading through the literature revised by Devardhigani we often meet with forms and expressions belonging to the older language. He and his co-adjutors did not venture to change those maxims and expressions which had become the common property of the Jainas, – and through these only we have a peep into the language of the previous literature. One who has seen the Bengali of the early 19th century will be struck with many older forms, even Sanskrit forms, in the language of writers. The present day Urdu has often Arabic and Persian words and phrases, so to say, imbedded in it. That is the case with the language of Devardhigani in relation to the Purvis.
Coming to the Buddhists we feel that we are on more firm ground. We do not know in what language Buddha and his followers preached. There is a diversity of opinion amongst scholars as to the dialect of the early preachers of Buddhism. But hundred years after the death of Buddha, that is in the second century of the Buddhist Era there was a schism. The majority was known as the Mahāsamghikas. Some of their books have come down to us and this is written in Misrabhāsā, that is, in a language in which Sanskrit forms are freely mixed up with the vernacular forms. This Miśrabhāsā was most likely the language in which the literature of the Mahasamghikas was written. In two or three centuries the Mahāsamghikas developed into the Mahāyāna School, and we find that in all early Mahayana books the subjects are treated in Sanskrit prose of a sort, but the authorities are cited at the end of each chapter in verses written in the mixed language. And I have reasons to think, that the prose portions of Lalitavistara, Saddharmapunda rika and others were originally written in mixed language too. Scholars wonder that many of the idioms in the Lalitavistara are not, Sanskrit, bul Pali. But I suspect it is not Pali, but the mixed language, for what do we find the condition of Saddharmapundarika? We know it is Sanskrit prose with verses in mixed language. But from the Central Asian desert come, from under the sand, leaves of Saddharmapundarika wholly in mixed language. Books continued to be written in that language, for after the compilation of the Sata-sahasrikā Prajñāpāramită in the 4" or the 5 century A.D., we find a book written on that work in the mixed language, entitled, Sala-Sahasrika
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