Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c12.s12.9

c12.s12.9

This Eastern speech was unquestionably the same for the upper classes in Kosala, Kāśi, Videha and Magadha; it was the language of the Buddha, who called himself a Kshatriya of Kosala (Kosala Khaṭṭiya), and of Mahāvira also; it was the language of Aśoka and also of Chandragupta and the Nandas. The oldest Buddhist canon, as Sylvain Lévi and Heinrich Lüders amply demonstrated, was composed in this Eastern Prākrit, and not in Pāli. The Pāli canon appears not yet to have been known—at least, sufficiently known, in Magadha. Aśoka, when he quoted from the Buddhist texts, quotes from a version in this Eastern dialect, and not from the Pāli.