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inferior and barbarous dialect. They do not know exactly what prakrit is as they speak of apabhramsa as a prakrit and they call it the language of animals. Then how could we admit that they had the least idea of what paisācī was, when we see them attribute the use of it to the Sthaviras, that is to the sects of Ceylon? Shall we admit that the Tibetan tradition, though altered on that point, can be ancient and worthy of belief as to the use of Paiśācīby certain sects ? There is no doubt it can be relied on as far as the Sarvāstivādins are concerned. It is not only to attribute to themselves the first able as Mr. Kern? seems to believe, that the Sarvāstivādins have boasted to have had their sacred books written in sanskrit. The Sarvăstivādina are (says I - Tsing) one of the four school of the Mūla-Sarvāstivādins, of which the Vinaya has found place in the lists of Chinese and Tibetan sacred books. Now, in the Chinese canon Mr. S. Levi has discovered 32 of the 86 chapters which form the sanskrit compilation called the Divyāvadāņa and 21 of those chapters are borrowed from the Vinaya of the mūla-Sarvāstivādins. The language of the Divyāvadāna, though having singularly deviated from that of Pānini. is all the same true sanskrit. But if the Sarvāstivādins have told the truth concerning themselves, their classification, as to the additions, shows too much sprit de systemefor us to believe it to be based of facts. I agree with Mr. Kern that we have here a simple imitation of the laws imposed by the theoricians of the stage, who make their personages speak a dialect as far different from sanskrit as their social status is lower. The Sarvāstivādins attribute to the schools a regular language, the more vulgar in proportion to their being more beyond the pale of orthodoxy. The Sthaviras, occupying in that respect the lowest degree in the Tibetan classification, have been assigned Paiśācī, the very name of which seems to imply something degrading. The repartition of the languages among the four main groups of schools is necessarily posterior to the distribution of the eighteen schools under the headings which is itself recent. Nothing, however, authorizes us to believe that we are in presence of an ancient tradition.
Of the subvarieties of Paisācī only one, Cūlikā-Paisacī is known to us and that by one text (Arya stanzas quoted by Hemacandra, Gram. d.P.S. (Pischel), IV, 326).
There can hardly be any question of the use of Paiśācī as spoken language. A literary prakrit has never been identical with a language. But Mr. Senart has suggested the idea that the name Paisācī might very well have been applied just to the popular language, i.e. to apabhramsa. It would only be, he says, two different names to designate two analogous, if not identical, things. Perhaps it is for that reason that Vararuci does not mention apabhramśa. It is probable that, at the time when his grammar was written, the arbitrary differentiation had not gone so far as to distinguish between apabharamca and paiśācī. It is true as we shall see later on, that
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