Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c12.s12.21

c12.s12.21

Pāli as a literary language associated with the Theravāda school of Hinayāna Buddhism appears not to have been prominent during the Nanda and Maurya periods, if it had come into existence at all. Buddha gave a great charter to all the languages of mankind when he declared that people were to study his message in their own languages : and we may presume that as a result of this great pronouncement, translations into different dialects were encouraged. There is evidence that the teachings of Buddha were first written in the Eastern Prākṛit. But this form of Aryan speech, in spite of its being the official language of the empire was not a central dialect, but belonged to the easternmost extremity of the empire, and it was most deviated from the norm of the rest of Aryandom. As such it was not much intelligible to the rest of India. The Midland forming the real heart of Āryāvarta, had a dialect which could be understood by the Udicya people, as well as by the Prācyas and the Dākṣiṇātyas. It was the precursor of the Śaurasenī apabrahṁśa of late mediaeval times (c. 600-1200 A.D.) and of Brajbhākhā (c. 1500-1700) and the Khariboli Hindi or Hindustani of the present day. Buddha's discourses were rendered into the Midland dialect, as current in Mathurā (and extended from Mathurā into Ujjain and Malwa) : after the death of the master, some of his disciples who were from Mathurā had a hand in redacting the canon—at least one version of it ; just as they were rendered into the North-western Prākṛit, as fragments in this dialect recovered from Central Asia show. The same process was repeated in later times : Kabir (15th century A.D.) spoke and composed in the Bhojpuri dialect current in his native city of Benares, and yet his writings are found in a mixed variety of Western Hindi, Brajbhākhā and Khariboli of Delhi with plenty of Awadhi (Eastern Hindi) forms and a few Bhojpuri forms occurring as palimpsests. Mahendra, the son of Aśoka born and brought up in his mother's city of Ujjain, according to the Ceylonese tradition, took the Pāli canon to Ceylon. It is likely that Mahendra studied his Buddhist texts not in the Eastern version as his father evidently did, but in the Midland one (which was Pāli) as it was current in Ujjain.