A History of Sanskrit Literature c7.s2.34

c7.s2.34

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.