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A History of Sanskrit Literature c7.s2: 2. The Character and Extent of the Use of Sanskrit

A History of Sanskrit Literature c7.s2

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English

2. The Character and Extent of the Use of Sanskrit

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We have seen that the Sanskrit of the grammarians is essentially a legitimate development from the Vedic speech; it remains to consider the extent of its use, in the time of Pāṇini and later. In examining the matter it is essential to remember the social conditions of India. In Britain to-day the varieties of English spoken and written are complex and numerous; in India, where caste, clan, and racial distinctions were far more prominent and important, linguistic facts were far more complicated still. What is clear¹ is that Sanskrit represents the language of Brahmanical civilization, and the extent of that civilization was ever increasing, though the Brahmanical religion had to face competition from new faiths, in special Buddhism and Jainism, from the fifth century B. C. The Buddhist texts themselves afford the most convincing evidence of all of the predominance of Brahmanism; the Buddha is represented as attempting not to overthrow the ideal of Brahmanism, but to change its content by substituting merit in place of birth as the hall-mark of the true Brahmin. The public religious rites and the domestic ritual were recorded and carried out in Sanskrit, and education was in Brahmin hands. The Buddhist texts repeatedly confirm the Brahmanical principle that instruction of the people (*lokapakti*) was the duty of Brahmins, and the tales of the Jātakas² show young men of all classes, not merely Brahmins but boys of the ruling class, Kṣatriyas, and children of the people, Vaiçyas, seeking instruction in the north from Brahmin teachers. Sanskrit was the language of science, not merely grammar, prosody, astronomy, phonetics, etymology, but doubtless also of more magic arts, such as the physiognomy and demonology recorded in the Buddhist texts and confirmed by the inclusion of magic, Sarpajanavidyā, and Devajanavidyā in the list of the subjects taught by the Brahmin to the people given in the *Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa*.³ The same text⁴ mentions also Anuçāsanas, Vidyās, Vākovākya, Itihāsa, Purāṇa, Gāthās, and Nārāçaṅsīs, and the continuity of tradition is attested by the *Mahābhāṣya*¹ which includes under the range of Sanskrit speech the four Vedas with their Aṅgas and Rahasyas, the Vākovākya, Itihāsa, Purāṇa, medicine. The *Āçvalāyana Gṛhyasūtra*,² probably not far removed from Pāṇini in date, repeats in the main the list of the *Çatapatha*, but adds Sūtras, Bhāṣyas, *Bhārata*, *Mahābhārata*, and the works of the Dharmācāryas. Other sciences such as those of the bow, music, architecture, and politics are recorded in the *Mahābhārata*,³ and, so far as they were in the hands of the Brahmins, we need not doubt that Sanskrit here also had its place.

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¹ Thomas, JRAS. 1904, pp. 465 ff.

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² Fick, *Sociale Gliederung*, p. 131.

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³ xiii. 4. 3. 9 ff.

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⁴ xi. 5. 6. 8. Cf. *Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad*, ii. 4. 10; iv. 1. 2; 5. 11; *Chāndogya*, vii. 1. 2; Faddegon, *Act. Or.* iv. 4 ff., 133. Vākovākya perhaps denotes the dialogues which develop into philosophy.

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¹ i. 9.

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² iii. 3. 1; 4. 1. Cf. Utgikar, POCP. 1919, ii. 46 ff.

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³ Hopkins, *Great Epic*, pp. 11 ff.

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These facts are not in dispute, and the predominance of Sanskrit in the sphere in question remained unchallenged until the Mahomedan invasions brought a new literary language into prominence. The evidence indicates clearly that Sanskrit must have been in constant use as a means of teaching and performing religious duties among the Brahmins at least. It has been denied that it was really even their vernacular in the time of Pāṇini, and *a fortiori* later, but the evidence for this view is unsatisfactory. Pāṇini has rules⁴ which are meaningless for anything but a vernacular, apart from the fact that the term Bhāṣā which he applies to the speech he teaches has the natural sense of a spoken language. Thus the doubling of consonants is expressly forbidden in passionate speech, as in the term of abuse *putrādini* applied to a cruel mother; he prescribes the use of prolongation in the case of calling from a distance, in greeting, question, and reply; he gives information on the terminology of dicing and the speech of herdsmen; he cites expressions redolent of real daily life. Indeed, it is the grammarians alone who preserve for us such usages as the repetition of the second person imperative followed by the present indicative to express intense action: *khāda khādeti khādati*, ‘eagerly he eats’, whence we have in colloquial Marāṭhī *khā khā khāto*; other popular uses are *udarapūram bhuṅkte*, ‘he eats filling his belly’; *daṇḍādaṇḍi keçākeçi*, ‘a struggle in which sticks are brandished and hair is pulled’; *atra khādatamodatā vartate*, ‘eat and enjoy’ is the rule here; *jahistambo ’yam*, ‘he is one who says “strike the sheaves of corn”’. They record also the parenthetical use¹ of *manye*, ‘I think’; the humorous *apacasi*, ‘you’re no cook’; and authorize such quaint forms² as *yāmaki*, ‘I go’. The elaborate rules regarding the accent reflect also actual speech.

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⁴ Wackernagel, i, p. xliii; Bhandarkar, JBRAS. xvi. 330.

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¹ As in Pāli; Franke, ZDMG. xlvi. 311 f.

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² Keith, JRAS. 1915, pp. 502 ff.

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Confirmatory evidence can also be adduced from the references of Yāska,³ Pāṇini, and Kātyāyana to particular usages of the northerners and the eastern peoples; Kātyāyana also recognizes as a matter of notoriety the existence of local variations, which Patañjali illustrates by reference to the practice of the Kambojas, Surāṣṭras, Prācyamadhyas, &c. Here too may be mentioned the references of Kātyāyana and Patañjali to changes in usage after Pāṇini’s time, as when the former⁴ finds fault with Pāṇini for not giving *nāma* as well as *nāman* as the vocative, for not mentioning that pronominal forms are permitted in the masculine as well as in the feminine singular of *dvitīya* and *tṛtīya*, and for allowing only the feminines *upādhyāyī*, *āryā*, *kṣatriyā*, and *mātulānī*. Patañjali shows us that in his time participial phrases had superseded the second person perfects such as *tera*, *ūṣa*, *peca*, a fact specially characteristic of a genuine living speech.⁵

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³ *Nirukta*, ii. 2; v. 5, *Mahābhāṣya*, i. 9; v. 8 on vii. 3. 45.

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⁴ Bhandarkar, JBRAS. xvi. 273. Cf. Macdonell, *Vedic Grammar*, p. 307, n. 2.

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⁵ Bloch, MSL. xiv. 97; L. Renou, *La valeur du parfait*, p. 189.

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Further information of a precise character is incidentally given us by Patañjali.⁶ He insists that grammar does not exist to create words, but to make clear what are correct uses; in ordinary life (*loke*) a man thinks of a thing and uses the appropriate word without going to a grammar; the words of Sanskrit are of ordinary life (*laukika*). We find a grammarian and a charioteer (*sūta*) engaged in a discussion conducted in Sanskrit, and the latter has decided opinions of his own on the etymology of his designation and on that of the term *prājitṛ*, driver. The norm of speech is that of the Çiṣṭas, and these are people who speak correct Sanskrit without special tuition; the purpose of grammar is to enable us to recognize who are Çiṣṭas, and thus to apply to them to find the correct form of such terms as *pṛṣodara*, which do not fall under the ordinary rules of grammar. The Çiṣṭas are further defined as Brahmins of Āryāvarta, the region south of the Himālayas, north of Pāriyātra, east of the Ādarça, west of the Kālakavana, who are not greedy, who do good disinterestedly, and who store only so much grain as a pot can hold. Other persons may make errors; thus they may pronounce *ṣaṣa* for *çaça*, *palāṣa* for *palāça*, *mañjaka* for *mañcaka*; or they may commit graver errors by using incorrect forms (*apaçabda*) such as *kasi* for *kṛṣi*, *disi* for *dṛçi*, *gāvī*, *goṇī*, *gotā*, *gopotālikā* for *gaus*, or even verbal forms such as *āṇapayati*¹ for *ājñāpayati*, *vaṭṭati* for *vartate*, and *vaḍḍhati* for *vardhate*. But from the Çiṣṭas they could acquire the accurate forms. This suggests a close parallel to modern conditions in England, where an upper educated class sets the norm to all those in lower social classes; the speech of that class is clearly a living language, and Sanskrit was so in much the same sense. The standard comparison of Latin in the Middle Ages is somewhat unsatisfactory; in the earlier period of the use of Sanskrit it is clear that it was much more closely similar to the speech of the lower classes in its numerous varieties than was Latin in medieval Europe. Comparison of Sanskrit with the dialects of the inscriptions of Açoka is significant in this regard; their differences are not essential nor such as to hinder mutual comprehension, and could easily be paralleled in English speech to-day.

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⁶ vi. 3. 109; Bhandarkar, JBRAS. xvi. 334 ff. Grierson (JRAS. 1904, pp. 479 ff.) misunderstands the passage to mean that Çiṣṭas require to be taught Sanskrit.

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¹ So Açoka's Brahmagiri inscr. 1; *vaḍhati* (the usual single consonant is merely graphic; CII. i, p. lix; Grierson's argument (JRAS. 1925, p. 228) from the writing of other conjuncts is clearly untenable) occurs in Delhi-Toprā, iv. 20.

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Moreover, the conclusions thus attained are directly supported by the evidence of the drama, in which Brahmins and kings and other persons of high station and education use Sanskrit, while inferior characters employ some form of Prākrit. It has been attempted to argue against this view on the score that the drama was originally in Prākrit, and that Sanskrit was introduced only when it became essentially the general language of culture. But this contention ignores the fact that on one side at least the drama is closely connected with the epic in Sanskrit; Bhāsa, indeed, has one drama without Prākrit, and there is little of it in his other dramas based on the epic. Nor was the Sanskrit unintelligible in early times at least to the audience, which might be one including persons of quite humble rank; the *Nāṭyaçāstra* expressly lays it down that the Sanskrit is to be such as is easily intelligible to every one. The denial that realism was ever aimed at in the use of language by the characters in the drama is negatived by the facts; the Prākrits used by the dramatists show a steady advance from those of Açvaghoṣa through those of Bhāsa to the dialects of Kālidāsa, who introduced to the stage the Māhārāṣṭrī which, earlier unimportant, had won fame in India as the medium of erotic lyric.¹ The evidence of Açvaghoṣa is of special value, for it attests the fact that about A. D. 100 the stage tradition was so firmly in favour of the use of Sanskrit by the persons of the highest rank that he adopted it in his plays despite their Buddhist theme, and despite the fact that the Buddha himself, according to tradition, had forbidden the employment of Sanskrit as the medium for preserving his sayings.²

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¹ Keith, *Sanskrit Drama*, pp. 72 ff., 85 ff., 121 f., 140, 155.

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² *Cullavagga*, v. 33. 1; Keith, IHQ. i. 501.

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The extent to which Sanskrit was used or understood is further attested by the epics. It is perhaps hardly necessary now to do more than mention the implausible conjecture³ which ascribes the writing of the epics in Sanskrit to some period after the Christian era and sees in them translations from some Prākrit. The silence of antiquity on this vast undertaking is inexplicable, and it is incredible that the translation should have taken place at a period when Buddhism was triumphant and Brahminism comparatively depressed. The language itself has a distinctive character which renders the idea of translation absurd;⁴ we have in Buddhist literature of the so-called Gāthā type abundant evidence of the results produced by efforts to Sanskritize, and the arguments which are adduced to establish the reality of translation would suffice to prove that Vedic texts were likewise translations. Moreover, there is conclusive evidence that Pāṇini⁵ knew a *Mahābhārata* or at least a Bhāratan epic in Sanskrit, and that the bulk of the *Rāmāyaṇa*⁶ was composed long before Açoka. Now, though the Brahmins made the epics largely their own, they were not the earliest composers of this form of literature, and the fact is attested in the simpler, more careless, language which shows indifference to many of the refinements of Brahmanical speech. Pāṇini ignores these deviations from his norm; it was no part of his aim to deal with the speech current outside the hieratic circle, and in the epic speech we have doubtless the form of language used by the Kṣatriyas and the better educated of the Vaiçyas during the period when the poems took shape. Both the *Mahābhārata* and the *Rāmāyaṇa* are, it must be remembered, essentially aristocratic; they correspond to the *Iliad* and the *Odyssey*, and like them became the objects of the deep interest of wider circles. In recent times, no doubt, the epics have been unintelligible to the audience, to whom interpretation has been requisite, though delight is still felt in the sound of the sacred language. But this doubtless was not the case in older times; we must postulate a long period when the epic was fairly easily intelligible to large sections of the people.

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³ Grierson, IA. xxiii. 52; Barth, RHR. xxvii. 288.

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⁴ Jacobi, *Rāmāyaṇa*, p. 117; ZDMG. xlviii. 407 ff.; Keith, JRAS. 1906, pp. 2 ff.

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⁵ Hopkins, *Great Epic*, p. 385.

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⁶ Keith, JRAS. 1915, pp. 318 ff.

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Doubtless, as time went on, the gulf between Sanskrit and the languages of the day became more and more marked; even between the epic language and that of the Brahmin schools there were differences to which express reference is made in the *Rāmāyaṇa*,¹ and both the practice of the dramas and such passages as that in Kālidāsa's *Kumārasambhava*,² in which Sarasvatī addresses Çiva and his bride, the one in Sanskrit, the other in Prākrit, attest dialectic differences based on rank, sex, and locality. In a sense doubtless Sanskrit came more and more to resemble Latin in the Middle Ages, but, like Latin, its vitality as the learned speech of the educated classes was unimpaired, and it won victories even in fields which were at first hostile to it.³ The medical textbook current under the name of Caraka tells us that Sanskrit was used in discussions in the medical schools of the day. A work of very different character, the *Kāmasūtra* of Vātsyāyana, bids its man of fashion in his conversation in polite society use both Sanskrit and the vernacular of his country (*deçabhāṣā*). Hiuen Tsang tells us in the seventh century that Buddhist disputants used officially Sanskrit in their debates; in his *Upamitibhavaprapañcakathā* the Jain Siddharṣi (A. D. 906) gives as his reason for preferring Sanskrit for this allegory of human life that persons of culture despise any other form of speech, and claims that his Sanskrit is so simple as to be understood even by those who preferred Prākrit. The writing of Sanskrit poems which even women and children—of course of the higher classes—can understand is contemplated by Bhāmaha in his treatise on poetics (*c.* A. D. 700). Bilhaṇa (A. D. 1060) would have us believe that the women even of his homeland, Kashmir, were able to appreciate Sanskrit and Prākrit as well as their mother tongue (*janmabhāṣā*). The famous collection of tales known as the *Pañcatantra* owes its origin in theory in part, according to one later version, to the importance of instructing princes in Sanskrit as well as in the conduct of affairs.

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¹ v. 30. 17 f.; iv. 3. 28 f.; ii. 91. 22; vii. 36. 44; Jacobi, *Rāmāyaṇa*, p. 115. Cf. Hopkins, *Great Epic*, p. 364.

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² vii. 87.

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³ Cf. Jacobi, *Scientia*, xiv. 251 ff.; Oldenberg, *Das Mahābhārata*, pp. 129 ff.

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There were, of course, spheres in which Sanskrit was at first rejected, beyond all in the early literatures of Jainism and Buddhism, which were probably couched in an old form of what became known as Ardhamāgadhī Prākrit. As has been shown,¹ however, the question was early raised, if we may trust the Buddhist tradition, whether Sanskrit should not serve as the medium to preserve the Master's instruction, a notice which bears emphatic testimony to the predominance of Sanskrit as a literary medium. In both cases, however, Sanskrit finally won its way, and first Buddhists, then Jains, rendered great services both to Sanskrit literature and grammar.

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¹ Keith, IHQ. i. 501 f.

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The Buddhist revolt against Sanskrit had, however, one important result. The edicts of Açoka, in which he impressed on his subjects throughout his vast realm the duty of practising virtue, were inevitably couched in Prākrit, not Sanskrit, and the epigraphic tradition thus established died hard. But it had to contend with facts; inscriptions were intended to be intelligible, and in the long run it proved that Sanskrit was the speech which had the best chance of appealing to those who could read inscriptions. In the second century B. C. traces of the influence of Sanskrit are apparent; in the next century on one view¹ is found the first inscription which on the whole may be called Sanskrit, and Samskritisms are on the increase.² In the first century A. D. Prākrit still prevails, but, though it is prominent also in the next century, we find the great Sanskrit inscription of Rudradāman which displays clearly the existence of an elaborate Sanskrit literature. In the next century Sanskrit and Prākrit contend, in the fourth Prākrit becomes rare with the Brahmanical revival under the Gupta dynasty, and from the fifth it almost disappears in Northern India. A parallel process was going on in literature; in such Buddhist works as the *Lalitavistara* and the *Mahāvastu* we find the results of an effort to convert a Prākrit into Sanskrit, and similar results are to be found in other fields, as in the medical treatises of the Bower manuscript. From this the Buddhists soon advanced to the stage in which Sanskrit proper was used, as in the *Divyāvadāna*, perhaps of the second century A. D.³ The Jains showed more conservatism, but even they ultimately accepted the use of Sanskrit as legitimate. Serious competition with Sanskrit as the language of literature again arose when the Mahomedan conquests brought Persian into play, and when the vernaculars in the period shortly after A. D. 1000 began first to influence Sanskrit and then to develop into literary languages.

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¹ On sacrificial post at Īsāpur, 24th year of Vāsiṣka, 33 B. C. acc. Fleet, JRAS. 1910, pp. 1315 ff.; Hoernle, *Bower MS.*, p. 65; *Ann. Rep. A. S., India, 1910–11*, pp. 39 ff. It is much more probably of the second century A. D. (? A. D. 102); an inscr. of Huviṣka shows almost correct Sanskrit; JRAS. 1924, pp. 400 ff.

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² Franke, *Pāli und Sanskrit*, pp. 13, 58; Rapson, JRAS. 1904, p. 449.

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³ Przyluski (*La légende de l'empereur Açoka*, pp. 14 ff.) ascribes much to the influence of Mathurā and its Sarvāstivādin school, and places its use of Sanskrit in the *Açokāvadāna* at least in the second century B. C. (cf. pp. 166 ff.).

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The true home of the Çiṣṭas is given by Patañjali as Āryāvarta, but even in his time the Dekhan was a home of Sanskrit; Kātyāyana himself seems to have lived there in the third century B. C. Yāska⁴ (*c.* 500 B. C.) already mentions a southern use of the Vedic word *vijāmātṛ*, and Patañjali records the love in the south for derivative formations and the use of *sarasī*, large pond. Even in Southern India, despite the existence of a vigorous Kanarese and Tamil literature, Sanskrit inscriptions appear from the sixth century onwards, often mixed with Dravidian phrases, attesting the tendency of Sanskrit to become a Koine, and Sanskrit left a deep impression even on the virile Dravidian languages. Ceylon fell under its influence, and Sinhalese shows marked traces of its operation on it. It reached the Sunda Islands, Borneo, the Philippines, and in Java produced a remarkable development in the shape of the Kavi speech and literature. Adventurers of high rank founded kingdoms in Further India, where Indian names are already recorded by the geographer Ptolemy in the second century A. D. The Sanskrit inscriptions of Campā begin perhaps in that century, those of Cambodia before A. D. 600, and they bear testimony to the energetic study of Sanskrit grammar and literature. Of greater importance still was the passage of Sanskrit texts to Central Asia and their influence on China, Tibet, and Japan.

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⁴ vi. 9. Cf. Bühler, WZKM. i. 3. For Āryāvarta, see IA. xxxiv. 179 (Madhyadeça) and *Kāvyamīmāṅsā*, p. xxiv.

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It is characteristic of the status of Sanskrit as the speech of men of education that in one sphere of use it only slowly came to be widely employed. Coins were meant for humble practical uses, and even Western Kṣatrapas, like Rudradāman, who used Sanskrit for their inscriptions, were contented with Prākrit for coin legends; but even in this sphere Sanskrit gradually prevailed.¹

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¹ Bloch, *Mélanges Lévi*, p. 16.

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The results which we have attained are in accord with the evidence afforded by Greek renderings of Indian terms.² These are neither wholly based on Sanskrit forms nor on Prākrit. Derived doubtless from the speech now of the upper, now of the lower classes, they remind us of the salient fact that at any given moment in India there were in active use several forms of speech varying according to the class of society. The denial of the vernacular character of Sanskrit³ rests largely on a failure to realize the true point at issue, on a confusion between the earlier period when Sanskrit was far more close to the speech of the lower classes and later times, or on the fallacious view that the only speech which deserves the style of a vernacular must be the language of the lower classes of the population. Still less plausible is the suggestion¹ that Sanskrit as a vernacular was preserved in Kashmir during its eclipse in India generally, a view which has no support either in tradition or in the form of the Kashmirian vernacular. What we do find is that the Buddhism which penetrated Kashmir was strongly influenced by Mathurā, where the new faith had fallen into the hands of men trained in the Brahmanical schools, who applied their own language to the propagation of the faith. We have in this one more proof of the hold which Sanskrit had in Brahmanical circles, and of the obvious fact that it was far better fitted as a language of theology and philosophy than Ardhamāgadhī or any similar dialect.

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² Lévi, BSL. viii, pp. viii, x, xvii; Franke, ZDMG. xlvii. 596 ff.; Bloch, *Mélanges Lévi*, pp. 1 ff.

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³ Grierson, JRAS. 1904, p. 481. On this view standard English would not be a vernacular.

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¹ Franke, *Pāli und Sanskrit*, pp. 87 ff.

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