The History of Buddhist Thought c28.17

c28.17

If this were all, it would appear that the Pāli scholars were right. But to show that the Pāli sources are older does not prove that they are primitive. These scholars assumed that all the works in Sanskrit showing a connection with Pāli must have been translated from Pāli. But these related Sanskrit works are distinct both from the Mahāyāna compositions and the Pāli, and belong to the Canon of the Sarvāstivāda and its branches. These schools had translated them, not from the Pāli of the Theravādins, but from their own Scriptures in the Prakrit dialect in which they were at first composed. It is now possible to see how they all developed from one nucleus of doctrine preserved by memory, but were gradually differentiated owing to the precarious method of their preservation in widely separated communities.²