Indian Palaeography c15.s4.t2.1

c15.s4.t2.1

Max Müller notes the following tradition regarding the ownership of the manuscript: 'We have good evidence showing that these leaves were brought to Japan in a.d. 609, and that they came from China. It is further probable that in China they belonged to the monk Yashi, who died in a.d. 577, and before him to Bodhidharma, who emigrated from India to China in a.d. 520’. Relying on this tradition, Bühler adds: ‘Leaving all probabilities aside it is certain that this MS., which evidently has been written by an Indian scribe, cannot date later than the first half of the 6th century a.d.’¹ Later he² remarks: ‘If we had no historical information regarding the age of the Horiuzi palm leaves, every palaeographist, I believe, would draw from the above facts the inference that they belonged to the beginning of the eighth century a.d.’ Finally, he draws the conclusion: ‘They clearly illustrate the truth of the maxim that the inscriptions are not safe guides for the investigation of the history of the Indian alphabet, but that in the development of the letters they lag behind the literary documents.’³ This maxim is probably true when two allied scripts are used—one for the inscriptions and the other for literary purposes or business documents. Examples can be cited of the simultaneous use of Hieratic and Demotic in ancient Egypt, or of Kūfic and Naskh in the Muslim world during the early centuries of the Hijra. Here the two scripts show development in their own ways. But when the same script is employed for inscriptions and literary documents, the difference will be merely stylistic unless a particular archaic form is deliberately preserved; e.g. in India and Pakistan even today only Naskh script is used for the letters of the Holy Qur’ān, though for other purposes Nasta‘liq script is used. This same Nasta‘liq turns into the Shikastā style in ordinary letter writing. But all three styles have been in use in the subcontinent at least from Mughal times. In the case of Indian inscriptions there is no reason to believe that the archaic form was deliberately preserved. On the other hand, the epigraphic writing shows changes that are traceable to the literary style because the new forms seen in the letters are the natural result of the technique of the pen rather than that of the engraver. In consequence of technical improvement new forms were being created, no doubt first in the literary style, but when these forms came into general use they were certainly adopted even in the inscriptions. An exceptional literary document may show one or two new forms, but in the general tenor of writing they must conform to the current system. It is on these grounds that the two manuscripts (*g*) and (*h*) pp. 147–51 have been dated in the same manner as the inscriptions. If we rely on the historical tradition about the Horiuzi MS. and antedate it by two centuries, there is no reason why the above two manuscripts should not also be antedated by a similar period. This will lead us to accept a date for the complicated forms of the Bower MS. even before the appearance of the simple style in the Gupta inscriptions of the fourth century a.d. This is hardly possible. Hence I prefer to rely on the evidence of general palaeography for the date of the Horiuzi MS. In this choice support is derived from the fact that so much importance was attached not only to the text but also to the forms of the letters that as late as the seventeenth century a.d. Ziogon attempted to reproduce an identical copy. It may be that the original copy was made by an Indian scribe at the time referred to by Max Müller, but the present copy could not have been written earlier than about a.d. 700 at the earliest.