It affords me immense pleasure to write a Foreword to a book entitled The Buddhist Gatha Sanskrit by Dr. Buddhadev Bhattachrya who is an erudite scholar in Buddhism having a good command over Sanskrit and Pali. His book is a fascinating study where very few scholars have dared penetrate to fathom the subject in a befitting manner. Franklin Edgaton's Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit (1953) has already passed into the land of oblivion, and therefore a fresh study of the subject has been a sine qua non. Dr. Bhattacharya has minutely done that job. It is interesting to note the position of Buddhist Gatha Sanskrit in the context of ancient Indian languages. I am placing very briefly the position of the language in the Buddhist context.
Linguistically India is a polyglot country. It has four linguistic families, such as, Indo-European, Dravidian, Austic and Sino-Tibetan. To the Indo-European family belongs Sanskrit or Old Indo-Aryan, branched off from Indo-Iranian (2000-1750 B.C.) as early as 1750 B.C. Of the Indo-Aryan again there are many stages of its development. The oldest phase of Indo-Aryan, linguistically called Old Indo-Aryan, is represented by the Rgveda (1500 B.C.) and the other Vedic texts, by the Ramayana and the Mahābhārata, by Classical Sanskrit as described by Panini (400 B.C.) and Patanjali (150 B.C.) and as employed by Kālidāsa and others. The Old Indo-Aryan comprises both Vedic and Classical Sanskrit.
Nearly after thousand years, there developed a group of languages or dialects of Old Indo-Aryan which is considered as the second or middle phase of that language, technically called Middle Indo Aryan. This group of languages dates from the 6th centuary B.C. and went down till the 10th or 11th century A.D. covering a period of nearly 16 hundred years.
The third or the new phase, also called New Indo-Aryan, begins from that time on till today.
The Middle Indo-Aryan languages are mainly represented by Pali and Prakrit literatures of various types and these are represented by different Prakrits like religious, literary, dramatic, inscriptional, Prakrit Dhammapada and popular Sanskrit.
The popular Sanskrit Dialects or language, which is the subject of the present study, may be divided into three classes according to the language as used by the Buddhists (chiefly Mahayanists), by the Jains and/or even by the Hindus.
The author here is only concerned with the popular Sanskrit Dialect of the Buddhists.
While describing the life of Buddha and his teachings and doctrines, a group of Buddhists used a type of Sanskrit which is not pure Sanskrit (as prescribed by Panini), but an admixture of Sanskrit, Pali and some other dialects. Such works of the Buddhists are Mahavastu, Divyavadana, Lalita-vistara, Sad-dharmapundarika, Jatakamala, Avadana-Sataka, Suvarnabhasottama-sutra and many others. The names of the language as used by them are variously termed. Some say that the name of the language is to be called "Mixed Sanskrit", or "Hybrid Sanskrit" or "Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit" or "Popular Sanskrit Dialect". This type of mixed Sanskrit language was mostly used by the Mahayanists, even though the Hinayanists also used this mixed Sanskrit. For example, Mahavastu is a Hinayana text, while Lalita-Vistara is a Mahayana text, though basically the linguistic features of both the texts are the same. I shall discuss here only the texts of the Mahayanists, particularly the book of Lalita-Vistara, keeping an eye at par with the concept of the present Volume. But it should be remembered at the same time that the same linguistic features will be found in the Hinayana texts also. The approximate date of the origin of this type of Buddhist Sanskrit is between 200 B.C. and 2nd cent. A.D. I shall give here some dominant linguistic features only.
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