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Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c6.s1: 1. The Problem and the Sources

Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c6.s1

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1. The Problem and the Sources

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THE most attractive and influential expositions of Buddhism in England and Germany present us with a simple and effective picture of an Indian sage, who spent a blameless life in the years 563 to 483 B. C. engaged in the development of a remarkably sane and modern ethical doctrine. This sage turned aside from idle metaphysical speculations; if he held views on such topics, he deemed them valueless for the purpose of salvation, which was his goal as it was that of his contemporaries, and declined to discuss these issues generally. But he had emancipated himself from the theory of the existence of any permanent entity in the nature of a soul, such as it was understood by his contemporaries; he had abandoned an ego-centric position, and found greater truth in the conception of constant change under a law of causality, thereby effecting a Copernican revolution in the tendency of philosophical thought. This realization of the unreality of the self led him to a wise and reasonable ethical system; the end of man, Nirvāṇa, consists not in strivings, inevitably painful, for the sake of a self which has no real existence, but in the eradication of passion of every kind, which brings man to supreme bliss, attainable and attained only on this earth, a view free from the delusion of a life of perpetual happiness after death.

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This portrait of an early rationalist, introducing the blessings of common sense into a world which knew nothing better than the mysticism of the Upaniṣads, or something still more crude, is unquestionably fascinating. ‘Surely a notable milestone in the history of human ideas,’ an enthusiast¹ has said, ‘that a man reckoned for ages by thousands as the Light not of Asia only but of the World,² and the saviour from sin and misery, should call this little formula [the doctrine of the chain of causation] his Norm or Gospel, or at least one aspect of that Gospel.’ The exponents of this view are far too well informed to ignore the difficulties in their theory, above all the perplexing fact that a rationalist should have assumed as self-evident the reality of a process of transmigration not less real because it is not the transmigration of an ordinary soul; but their faith can remove mountains, and there are diverse ways of escape. The Buddha could not disregard the ordinary terminology of his time³; his teaching had to be expressed in the terms of his day, and accommodated for practical purposes to ordinary intelligences; the new wine had to be poured into old bottles. Or again, when the crudities of the Buddha’s views become painful to modern rationalism, recourse may be had to the subtle irony⁴ which distinguishes Buddhist utterances and presents a key which, skilfully turned, is fitted to open any locked door of Buddhist doctrine. Or, more frankly, we may accept the view that the Buddha himself was a true rationalist, and absolutely declined to accept the dogma of transmigration, conscious that to do so would be to stultify, as in fact it does, his teaching and reduce his followers to painful intellectual straits. Further, we must admit, however reluctantly, that the masses of Asia, who have seen in the Buddha the Light of the World, have not done so because of his rationalist doctrines, his chain of causation, which they have understood as little as do we, or even his wise advice to still passion. They have adored him, because they have regarded him as the God of Gods, and believed that by devotion to him they shall attain eternal salvation, consisting of perpetual bliss. It is necessary, then, for believers in a primitive rationalism to admit that in some manner the simple humanity of the wise teacher has been overlaid by a divinity not his own, one moreover which on his own theory he would have treated as wholly absurd. This is a remarkable fate for a rationalist, and it is idle to claim it as plausible by quoting the case of Kṛṣṇa. There is not the slightest ground beyond conjecture for the belief that the character of Kṛṣṇa developed from a devout teacher mentioned once in the Upaniṣads to the interesting and popular divinity familiar to India. Supporters of this view rely on the parallel of the Buddha, and in both cases the contention is one which must be established, if at all, on its own merits without the insecure support of the other. In Kṛṣṇa’s case every consideration of probability points to the view that he was a tribal god who gradually attained the rank of a universal deity¹; but the modes of attaining divinity are diverse, and the case of the Buddha should be discussed in the light of the evidence of the relevant texts and not on the basis of dubious and uncertain analogies.

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¹ Mrs. Rhys Davids, Buddhism, p. 89. A true Buddhist (Aung, Compendium, pp. 283-5) follows authority, not reason.

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² But see Poussin, Nirvāṇa, p. 168.

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³ Cf. Mrs. Rhys Davids, Budd. Psych., p. 21; JRAS. 1903, p. 590; Compendium, p. 278.

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⁴ Rhys Davids, SBB. ii. 33, 160, 163; cf. Poussin, JA. 1902, ii. 250.

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¹ See Keith, *Indian Mythology*, pp. 123 ff., 187 ff.

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Now it is admitted that the evidence for the rationalistic theory of the Buddha depends on the texts of the Pali Canon of the school of the Vibhajyavādins, undoubtedly the most precious record of Buddhism preserved to us. The pious respect attributed to the antiquity and authority of these texts by devout Buddhists is as natural as it is laudable. But it is strange to find that western criticism, ruthless in probing the claims of its own sacred scriptures, has treated the Pali Canon with a respect so profound as to regard with open hostility² any attempt to apply to these sources of information the same dispassionate scrutiny which is demanded from the researcher into the history of Christianity. The problem, it must be realized, is not whether, given the texts and the orthodox tradition regarding their origin and authenticity, it is possible, by a liberal use of constructive imagination, to make the tradition harmonize more or less tolerably with the obvious facts revealed in the texts themselves. The issue is whether the texts, fairly interpreted, yield a result compatible with the traditional account of their origin and date. Nor is it legitimate in such an examination to adopt the view that what can be shown to be possible really happened. Nothing is more fallacious than the belief which transforms what is conceivable into what is actual. We must accept the limitations which the state of our sources often imposes upon us, and be content, when we have attained a position in which decision is impossible, to recognize that this and nothing else is the legitimate and scientific conclusion to be recorded.

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² Winternitz, *Ind. Litt.* ii. 357 ff. Walleser’s views (PGAB., pp. 15 ff.) are gravely affected by his erroneous identification of the Pali and Northern Abhidharma texts.

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Faith, it would seem clear on normal principles of interpretation, is decisively out of place in Buddhist traditions of the origin of their scriptures, when it is realized that the primary source, the Cullavagga, XI and XII, a chapter appended to the Vinaya Piṭaka, gives an account which is frankly incredible.¹ We are asked to believe that the Vinaya and the Dhamma were rehearsed in a Council held immediately after the death of the Buddha, when in the Dhamma, i. e. the Sutta Piṭaka, itself appear references to a date posterior to the Buddha's death, and the Vinaya can be analysed into sets of rules, an ancient commentary upon them, and a further careful elaboration based on the rules and the comment. If our faith in tradition is thus shattered at the outset, it becomes hard to ask us to accept as valid the legend of a second Council held a hundred years later at Vaiçālī, which condemned ten errors of discipline of the Vajjian monks and at which, the Cullavagga tells us, the Vinaya was once again recited. The Sinhalese sources, beginning with the Dīpavaṃsa (c. A. D. 400),² show their inferior value by further embroidering the story; the excommunicated Vajjiputtakas hold another great concourse of their own, while at the Council of the orthodox both the Dhamma and the Vinaya are recited. When the northern sources are compared, the confusion and obscurity deepen, and it is impossible, with any regard to the value of evidence, to come to any conclusion whatever regarding it, which can claim to be more than a mere hypothesis. Yet upon belief both in the fact of the Council and of its date—say not later than 377 B. C.—is based the leading argument for the date of the Vinaya Piṭaka. That text, it is urged, must have been completed before the condemnation of the ten points at the Council, or these points would have been disposed of, directly or indirectly in the text, and not left to the Cullavagga. The argument, however, breaks down hopelessly in view of the facts; the tenth of the breaches of discipline, the acceptance of gold and silver, is clearly condemned in the Vinaya, and the majority, if not all, of the other matters can be shown to be condemned more or less clearly in that text. It may, indeed, as legitimately be concluded that the compilers of the Vinaya, as we have it, were aware of the errors in question and took trouble to secure that they were not left unprovided against. At any rate a purely negative conclusion is alone possible.

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¹ See Minayeff, *Recherches sur le Bouddhisme*, chs. ii. and iii; Kern, *Ind. Buddh.*, pp. 101 ff.; Franke, JPTS. 1908, pp. 1 ff.; Poussin, IA. xxxvii. 2 ff.; *contra* Oldenberg, VP., pp. xxv ff.; ZDMG. lii. 613 ff.; cf. Smith, JRAS. 1901, pp. 843 ff.; Barth, RHR. xlii. 74 ff. See also Franke, DN., pp. xlii. ff.

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² Cf. Franke, VOJ. xxi. 203 ff.; Smith, IA. xxxii. 265 ff.

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The evidence for an early date of the Sutta Piṭaka is still less satisfactory. Reliance is specially placed by supporters of an early date on the Bhābrū edict of Asoka, in which he recommends seven passages or topics of the law for the study of his co-religionists. Ingenuity has identified all seven with certain passages of the Sutta Piṭaka, but there is a lamentable lack of unity in these identifications, as was only to be expected when terms so vague as all but one of the names are concerned.¹ Even in that case, the instruction of Rāhula on falsehood, it is absurd to claim that Asoka knew the text as we have it in the Majjhima Nikāya. All that we do know from this passage of Asoka’s records, as from their general tone and expression, is that Buddhist texts were already in existence, probably of the type preserved in the Sutta Piṭaka, and proof of such a fact is hardly necessary. Yet these conflicting identifications are still apparently taken as serious evidence that the Sutta Piṭaka had come into existence, such as we have it, before Asoka’s date.

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¹ Winternitz, Ind. Litt. ii. 13; D. Kosambi, IA. xli. 37 ff.; Smith, Asoka 3 p. 157; JRAS. 1915, p. 805; IA. xlviii. 8 ff.

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This conclusion is strengthened, in the opinion of those who hold it, by the tradition, not recorded until the fifth century A.D. in the commentators Dhammapāla and Buddhaghosa, that the Kathāvatthu in the Abhidhamma Piṭaka was composed by Tissa, son of Moggalī, at the court of Asoka at Pāṭaliputra in the middle of the third century B.C.¹ As such a tradition contradicts the view, asserted then to be current, that all the Canon was held to be the work of the Buddha, it is urged that the tradition must have been of overwhelming weight so as to overcome the scruples of the commentators. But the commentators escape the difficulty by accepting the authorship of the Buddha and ascribing a subordinate rôle to Tissa, and it is a delusion to imagine that their mention of that sage must have been based on tradition. For he is part and parcel of the Third Buddhist Council held, according to the Ceylonese tradition, under Asoka, approximately in 247 B.C., and of that Council, at which the Abhidhamma Piṭaka took final shape according to the same authorities, we have no other information. It is incredible that it ever took place without receiving some mention in the numerous records of Asoka; the efforts of those² who try to find a place in Asoka’s reign for the Council at such a time as to explain his silence are mistaken attempts to justify a tradition, the antiquity of which is wholly uncertain, but which is first recorded six centuries after the event whose happening it asserts. The desire to save the credibility of the Council has indeed led Mr. Vincent Smith to a paradox; he admits candidly that the Ceylonese date, sixteen or eighteen years after the consecration of Asoka, must be erroneous, since, if it had then met, it must have been recorded in the seventh Pillar Edict which reviews all the internal measures taken up to that date by the sovereign for the promotion of the law of piety. He admits further that any attempt to reconstruct a narrative of the actual proceedings of the Council is hopeless, in view of the conflict of traditions, and he recognizes³ that the Council of Vaiçālī is a figment. Yet, in face of these facts, he throws over the Ceylonese date in an effort to preserve the Council. Unless Asoka’s Council is formally revealed to us by an inscription yet to be discovered, the only verdict of scientific history must be that the Council was a figment of the pious or fraudulent imaginings of a sect, which desired to secure for its texts, and especially for the new Abhidhamma, a connexion with the greatest of Buddhist sovereigns, and that the northern tradition does well to ignore the Council entirely. Tissa himself, son of Moggali, bears a suspicious aspect¹; his name seems to be reminiscent of Upatissa, alias Sāriputta, and Moggallāna, the dearly beloved disciples of the Buddha, and independent authority for his existence there is absolutely none. His legend may be founded on the existence of some teacher of eminence in Asoka’s time; a Moggaliputta is mentioned on a Stūpa at Sānchi,² a fact which absurdly has been hailed as evidence of the historical existence and activity of Tissa. Equally absurd is his identification³ with the Upagupta of the northern tradition, for we have copious information regarding that sage and not a word of the alleged Council, so that we are asked to assume that the northern legends preserved faithfully his reputation, but omitted the most important happening of his life.

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¹ Mrs. Rhys Davids, Points of Controversy, pp. xxx ff. Contrast Poussin, Bouddhisme (1898), p. 56, n. 4.

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² Smith, op. cit., pp. 55, 217; but see Fleet, JRAS. 1910, p. 426.

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³ JRAS. 1901, pp. 843 ff. Geiger's defence of the Ceylonese records (ZDMG. lxiii. 540 ff.) is ineffective; see Franke, DN., pp. xliv. ff. There is

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¹ Kern, *Buddh.*, ii. 352 : Walleser, PGAB., pp. 23 f. To Sāriputta, be it noted, tradition ascribes nos. 33 and 34 of the *Dīgha*, which are in effect Abhidhamma texts; see SBB. iv. 198 ff.

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² Marshall, *Guide to Sānchi*, p. 137.

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³ Waddell, Proc. ASB. 1899, p. 70. See Barth, RHR. xlii. 73.

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Nothing more definite can be learned from the *Milindapañha*, on which, however, much stress has been been laid in support of the antiquity of the Tripiṭaka, on the score that practically the whole of the Piṭakas were known and regarded as a final authority when the work was produced, that is in the north-west of India about the time of the Christian era. The fatal defect of this argument,⁴ which its author has unhappily still overlooked, is that the quotations from the Piṭakas which establish his thesis are confined to Books IV to VII and to passages in the earlier books which are not the slightest evidence that they ever rested on any ancient tradition and they abound in admitted absurdities.

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⁴ SBB. II. ix, x.; still maintained in SBB. IV. vii. ff., despite the new facts.

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patent additions¹ much later than the main body of the text; the date even of the latter is uncertain, and may be considerably later than the Christian era.

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¹ Winternitz, *Ind. Litt.* ii. 140, 146.

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We come to firmer ground when we find in the inscriptions at Sāñchi² the terms *dhammakathika*, ‘preacher of the Law’, *sutātikini*, ‘one who knows a Suttanta’, *peṭaki*, ‘one who knows a Piṭaka’, and, most important of all, *pacanekāyika*, ‘one who knows the five Nikāyas’. The term *peṭaki* is dubious in sense; it might mean ‘one who knows the Piṭakas’, whether two or more, but it is more probable that only one Piṭaka is meant, and that in this period that name, unknown to the Canon, was applied to the five Nikāyas, as indeed it is certainly applied in the work *Peṭakopadesa*, while Suttanta was specifically applicable to the dialogues. The date of these records, therefore, becomes of real importance; it may conceivably be the second century B. C., but it is quite possible that it should be placed a century later.³ We have, therefore, moderately secure ground for thinking that in the two centuries after Asoka the *Sutta Piṭaka* of the Pali Canon was coming into being, and in the same period we may place the redaction of the *Vinaya Piṭaka*, in the composite form in which we have it, thus avoiding the absurdity of supposing that Asoka knew these great collections and yet managed to avoid ever mentioning them. It is needless to say that there is nothing in Indian history to make us doubt this result; if Asoka’s empire was brief in duration, Buddhism went on developing and flourishing, receiving, it is clear, patronage from the Greek and Çaka invaders until it received once more imperial patronage from the Kuṣāṇa Kaniṣka, probably at the close of the first century A. D. The date suggested is rather strengthened by the fact that under Kaniṣka there is evidence of literary activity in dealing with the scriptures of the Sarvāstivādin school, which may, therefore, have been coming into form much in the same period as the texts which we have in the Pali Canon.⁴

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² EI. ii. 93 f. ; ZDMG. xl. 58 f. ; IA. xxi. 225 ff. ; SBB. II. xii. f.

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³ The early dating of Waddell (JRAS. 1914, pp. 138 ff.) is incorrect ; cf. MASI. i. 14 f.

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⁴ Lévi, *T’Oung Pao*, 1907, pp. 114 ff. ; JRAS. 1910, pp. 1017 ff. ; JA. 1914, ii. 495.

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The evidence of the Chinese translations¹ as well as of the fragments in Sanskrit and various languages used in Central Asia,² which have been recently discovered, shows the existence of a series of texts, the *Dīrghāgama*, the *Madhyamāgama*, the *Saṃyuktāgama*, the *Ekottarāgama*, parallel with the four Pali Nikāyas, and of several texts, *Sthaviragāthā*, *Udāna*, *Dhammapada*, *Sūtranipāta*, *Vimānavastu*, *Buddhavaṃça*, which are found in the fifth Pali Nikāya. There is also conclusive evidence of strong similarity in the *Prātimokṣa* rules of the Vinaya, and we are justified in seeing the growth of a common tradition in India in the period immediately succeeding Asoka, which is preserved in varying purity in our texts.³

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¹ See Anesaki, *Trans. As. Soc. Japan*, xxxv. (1908.)

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² See references in Winternitz, *Ind. Litt.* ii. 186 f., 374; A. F. R. Hoernle, *Manuscript Remains of Buddhist Literature* (1916.)

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³ Cf. Lévi, *Les Saintes Écritures du Bouddhisme* (1909); JA. 1912, ii. 495 ff. Oldenberg, GN. 1912, pp. 197 ff. The relative priority of Vinaya and Sutta Pitakas is uncertain; cf. Kern, *Ind. Buddh.*, p. 2; Winternitz, *Ind. Litt.* ii. 17; Franke, JPTS. 1908, pp. 8 ff., 68 ff.; SBB. iii. 75 f.

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Within the Nikāyas themselves it is impossible to establish any very definite chronological strata. The division is artificial: into long texts, called Suttas in a terminology which differs from the use of Brahmanical texts; middle sized texts; texts united by subject matter—understood very vaguely; and texts grounded on a numerical basis in accordance with the regrettable practice of Buddhism, late and early, to form groups of ideas on the basis of number. There is some ground for treating this last Nikāya as younger than the other three⁴ but while the *Saṃyutta Nikāya* may be suspected of being late, it is impossible to assert⁵ that the *Dīgha* is as a whole the oldest source of our knowledge of Buddhism. What is clear from the enormous amount of common material, both verse and prose, is that the Nikāyas, as we have them, are redactions of floating material, in which old and new are commingled; it is unnecessary to go further and postulate one master mind for the redaction of each Nikāya⁶; the theory is open to the objection that it requires too much subjective judgement to discover the master mind, even measuring its mastery on the Buddhist standard of relevancy. The texts of the *Khuddaka Nikāya* still less admit of reference to any one period; they contain old matter and new, even within the limits of one and the same text. That we have in the *Udāna* or *Itivuttaka* the actual words of the Buddha is wholly implausible, and old as the *Suttanipāta* is reckoned, we find already the Buddha surrounded with an elaborate mythology. The *Jātaka* book is a strange conglomerate of old and new verses with new prose; some of its tales, as we know from Buddhist sculpture and a stray citation or two, go back to the Asokan epoch or shortly after; as folk-lore its contents are often of undeniable age, but as Buddhist fables their antiquity is uncertain.

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⁴ Winternitz, *Ind. Litt.* ii. 50, 365.

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⁵ Franke, ZDMG. lxix. 455.

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⁶ Franke, ZDMG. lxviii. 473 ff.; VOJ. xxix. 134 ff. for the *Majjhima*; *Festschrift Windisch*, pp. 196 ff. on the *Suttanipāta*; DN., pp. iv. ff.

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The case of the *Abhidhamma Piṭaka* is far worse than that of the *Sutta* and *Vinaya Piṭakas*. These two texts know nothing of such a Piṭaka; the division recognized is that of Dhamma, i. e. Sutta, and Vinaya with Mātikā, ‘lists’ as the third, the germ, doubtless, of the actual Abhidhamma.¹ None the less the most grandiose claims have been advanced for the Abhidhamma books. Mrs. Rhys Davids² claims that the *Dhammasaṅgaṇi* is to be dated about 385 B. c., basing the assertion on the internal evidence of form and content as compared with the *Kathāvatthu* (247 B. c.). Professor Walleser³ denies the validity of the argument, but resorts to the view that the *Dhammasaṅgaṇi* is the *Dharmasaṃgraha* of Ṣāriputra among the northern Abhidhamma texts, and is referred to by Asoka as the Upatisa-pasine, Upatissa being the other name of Sāriputta; the suggestion is impossible of credit, and it is certain that the *Dharmasaṃgraha* is wholly different from the *Dhammasaṅgaṇi*. A useful antidote to these extravagant estimates is afforded by Professor Rhys Davids⁴ who places the four Nikāyas at the period assigned to the *Dhammasaṅgaṇi* and brings that text down later than the late texts of the *Khuddaka Nikāya*. He himself,⁵ however, asserts that in the subjects of which it treats and its style the *Kathāvatthu*, the latest text of the Piṭaka, accords perfectly with all we know or expect of Asokan India, but the assertion is idle and is unsupported by any evidence.

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On the contrary the work shows the clearest signs, as Mrs. Rhys Davids' candidly allows, of much addition, which has deprived it of coherence or order. The admission is necessary in view of the obvious confusion of the work, and it deprives of all point the only serious attack made on Minayeff's criticism of the traditional origin of the Kathāvatthu; the inclusion in the text of a heresy known to have been held by the Vetulyakas in the second century A. D. in Ceylon and later does not prove that the work was only begun then, but it indicates that in all probability it was still open to additions in the second century A. D. and later. Moreover the theory that it is the latest of the Abhidhamma books is without foundation; it ignores three of them, Dhātukathā, Puggalapaññatti, and Yamaka. The scholastic character of these works suggests that they are divided by no small space from the other Piṭakas, and are very possibly younger than the older portion of the Milindapañha,² which refers to the Abhidhamma only in passages certainly late. The lateness of the Abhidhamma is confirmed also by the Ceylonese tradition itself. When it tells of the Great Council held by the heretical Vajjiputtakas, it says that they rejected the Abhidhamma books, along with the Paṭisambhidā and the Niddesa and portions of the Jātaka from the fifth Nikāya, and the Parivāra appendix of the Vinaya.

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Now it is not disputed that the Paṭisambhidā and Niddesa, which are really commentaries or Abhidhamma, are late, that the Jātaka is full of late matter, and that the Parivāra is not original; we are confirmed, therefore, in the view that the Abhidhamma has no claim to the antiquity asserted for it. This is supported by the undeniable fact that, while the Sutta and Vinaya Piṭakas have parallels in other schools, based on a common tradition, the Abhidharma of the Sarvāstivādins, of which we now have information,³ utterly disagrees with the Pali Abhidhamma. As this Abhidhamma existed at the time of the Council of Kaniṣka, it is doubtless to it and not to the Pali Abhidhamma that we have to refer the term Trepiṭaka,⁴ which appears in an inscription of this time, and we are left to conjecture a date for the Pali Abhidhamma. All that can be said is that in the third century A. D. the Abhidhamma Piṭaka seems to have been studied in Ceylon,¹ and that in the commentators of the fifth century we find the Abhidhamma Piṭaka treated as authoritative, as also in the late additions to the Milindapañha. But we are without means of judging precisely at what date the old Mātikās were formed into our present texts, possibly after the Christian era.

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¹ Geiger, PD., pp. 118 f.

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² *Psych. Ethics*, pp. xviii. f.

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³ PGAB., pp. 20 ff.

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⁴ CHI. i. 197.

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⁵ SBB. II. xi.; CHI. i. 194.

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¹ Points of Controversy, p. xxxi; cf. Poussin, ERE. iv. 184.

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² Barth, RHR. xlii. 73.

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³ Takakusu, JPTS. 1904-5, pp. 67 ff. A Dharmagupta Abhidharma also existed. JA. 1916, ii. 20, 38.

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⁴ EI. viii. 176. It is important to note that DN. no. 33, Saṅgīti Suttanta, is

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¹ Hardy, Eastern Monachism, p. 156.

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The place of the production of the Pali Canon is uncertain; it comes to us as that of the Vibhajjavādin school of the Mahāvihāra of Ceylon; and its connexion with Ceylon is recognized in Sanskrit texts. But that is not to say that the Pali Canon was redacted in Ceylon; we need credit the Ceylonese tradition of the early conversion of the people to Buddhism as little as we do any other part of its legends. We may, therefore, treat the Canon as the work of an Indian school, and note the Ceylonese tradition recording its reduction to writing² under Abhaya Vaṭṭagāmani, perhaps at the close of the first century B. C., as perhaps applicable to the two older Piṭakas, though not necessarily in their present form in detail; certainly not in the case of the Jātaka book. It is a different question whether the Abhidhamma Piṭaka was a product of Ceylon; there is nothing to prove its northern origin, and accordingly the matter must remain open, in view of our almost total ignorance of the facts on which a conclusion of value could be framed.

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² This record is not favourable to the theory that Piṭaka means box for MSS. (Bühler, Ind. Alph., pp. 86 ff.) Cf. SBE. xxxv. 28, n. 1.

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Part of this ignorance arises from the uncertainty of the origin of Pali, the language of the Canon. One fatal objection to the orthodox theory, and to the attempts of recent authorities to defend it, is the fact that the language of the Canon is plainly and undeniably a post Asokan literary dialect, assuming much communication between the learned monks of different parts of India.³ Even if we

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³ See Lévi, JA. 1912, ii. 495 ff. (Geiger's reply (Pāli, pp. 1 ff.) is ineffective.)

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parallel with the Saṃgītiparyāya of the Sarvāstivādins; this suggests that it was the Sarvāstivādin example which induced the Vibhajjavādins to develop a separate Abhidharma. For other Abhidhamma matter in the Sutta Piṭaka see MN. i. 299 ff.

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assumed that the Canon was established by Asoka, we would have to admit that it has been radically altered in form, and it would be absurd to claim that the alteration in form had taken place without change of substance. The complexity and artificiality of the language as it stands are shown by the extraordinary diversity of the suggestions as to the vernacular which must lie at the basis of Pali. Oldenberg¹ found it in the region south of the Deccan; Rhys Davids,² on historical grounds, in Avanti; Franke,³ on linguistic considerations, in the tract whose centre was Ujjayinī; while Grierson,⁴ accepting Windisch’s contention in favour of the Indian tradition which makes Māgadhī the basis of Pali, finds that Pali is the literary form of the Māgadhī language, the then Koine of India, as it was spoken and as it was used as a medium of literary instruction in the Takṣaśilā University, the vernacular of Takṣaśilā being Paiśācī Prakrit, whose home he places in the north-west though Konow⁵ locates it about the Vindhya region; or again it is held that Ardha-Māgadhī underlies our Pali texts. The obvious deduction is that Pali came into being, such as we have it, by a slow and complex process occupying some centuries, and variations of place.

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¹ VP., p. liv.

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² CHI. i. 187; cf. Buddhist India, pp. 140 ff.

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³ Pāli und Sanskrit, p. 138.

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⁴ Bhandarkar Commem. Essays, pp. 117 ff.; Windisch, Actes du XIVe Congrès International des Orientalistes, i. 277. But see SBA. 1913, pp. 1003 ff.

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⁵ ZDMG. lxiv. 114 ff. Paiśācī is attributed to the Sthaviras by Wassilieff, Bouddhisme, p. 268; cf. Lacôte, Bṛhatkathā p. 44.

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