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14
BHAGAVADGirâ.
deciphered, and some of which date from the early centuries of the Christian era. Take again the exuberance of figures and tropes which is so marked in the classical style. There is little or nothing of that in the Gità, where you have a plain and direct style of natural simplicity, and yet a style not by any means devoid of æsthetic merit like the style of the Satra literature. There is also an almost complete absence of involved syntactical constructions; no attempt to secure that jingle of like sounds, which seems to have proved a temptation too strong even for Kalidasa's muse entirely to resist. But on the contrary, we have those repetitions of words and phrases, which are characteristic, and not only in Sanskrit, of the style of an archaic period. Adverting specially to the language as distinguished from the style of the Gità, we find such words as Anta, Bhâsha, Brahman, some of which are collected in the Sanskrit Index in this volume, which have gone out of use in the classical literature in the significations they respectively bear in the Gita. The word ha,' which occurs once, is worthy of special note. It is the equivalent of 'gha,' which occurs in the Vedic Samhitâs. In the form 'ha' it occurs in the Brahmanas. But it never occurs, I think, in what is properly called the classical literature. It is, indeed, found in the Puranas. But that is a class of works which occupies a very unique position. There is a good deal in the Puranas that, I think, must be admitted to be very ancient ? ; while undoubtedly also there is a great deal in them that is very modern. It is, therefore, impossible to treat the use of 'ha' in that class of works as negativing an inference of the antiquity of any book where the word occurs; while its use in Vedic works and its total absence from modern works indicate such
Compare Muir, Sanskrit Texts, vol. I, p. 5. Sec, too, Goldstucker's Remains, 1, 177.
"This opinion, which I bail cxpiressed as long ago as 1874 in the Introaluction to msalition of Bhartrihari's Satakas, is, I find, also beld by Dr. Buhler; see his Introcluction to Apastamba in this series p. xx seq., notr. Puranas are mentioned in the Sutta Nipata (p. 115), as to the date of which, sc inter alia Swamy's Introduction, p. xvii.
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