Re: International Week of Pali Studies in Paris

Thank you, Dr Ciurtin,

Regarding "Search of new paradigms: the position of Pali in the ancient corpus of Buddhist texts", mentioned in the program, - I would like to elaborate on the notes by Lance Cousins, based on newly available epigraphic evidence:

"The standard epigraphical language used in the Gangetic plain and beyond in the last centuries B.C. and a little after was a form of Middle Indian rather close to Pali. We have no reason to believe that any other written language existed in that area at that time. Like Pali it is eclectic with word-forms originally from different dialectics and also with no standardized spelling (as was probably originally the case for Pali). So the first Buddhist texts written down in that area should have been in that form. Since the enlarged kingdom of Magadha eventually extended over nearly the whole Gangetic plain, that language was probably called the language of Magadha, if it had a name. And that of course is the correct name of the Pali language.

Pali is essentially a standardized and slightly Sanskritized version of that language. Māgadhī is a language described by the Prakrit grammarians and refers to a written dialect that developed later (early centuries A.D. ?) from the spoken dialect in some part of 'Greater Magadha'.

In effect, then, Pali is the closest we can get to the language spoken by the Buddha. And it cannot have been very different — we are talking about dialect diferences here, not radically distinct languages."

http://www.buddha-l.org/archives/2013-May/018487.html

"If von Hinuber's work has a bias, it lies perhaps in a certain tendency to neglect or undervalue the results of English-language scholarship. Of course, in many ways this only redresses the balance, since English-language writing has all too often neglected work done in German! But it does have the result that this account is oddly conservative in places, sometimes to my mind unacceptably so. One example of this is von Hinuber's acceptance of the old claim that the inscriptions of the Emperor Asoka can be used to 'draw a very rough linguistic map of northern India' and that Pali is therefore 'rooted in a language spoken in western India far away from the homeland of Buddhism' (§ 7). Quite apart from the fact that we are here talking of minor differences of dialect, rather than the difference between distinct languages, it is clear that the variations between the inscriptions of Asoka in different parts of India (excluding the case of the North-West) may often be better accounted for by different scribal or epigraphic practices i.e. the degree to which it was felt necessary to adopt a more 'literary' form. Since Pali itself is a more literary form of Middle Indian, such practices can sometimes produce a result closer to Pali, but this may be nothing to do with geography."

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=3672772

Richard Salomon writes about the inscriptions:

"All in all, the Aśokan inscriptions give a broad view of the dialect spectrum of MIA vernaculars in the third century B.C. But it must also be understood that they do not provide anything like a real dialectal map of the time. For the geographical distribution of the dialects - especially of the eastern dialect - can hardly correspond with linguistic reality; the eastern dialect was obviously not the mother tongue of residents of the far north and the central south, though it was used for inscriptions (Kālsī, Eṛṛaguḍi, etc.) in those regions. Moreover, the languages as they are presented in the inscriptions are surely not exact renditions of the contemporary vernaculars.

...

After the Mauryan period there is a major shift in the linguistic features of the inscriptional Prakrits. The predominance of the eastern dialect of the Aśokan and other inscriptions of the Mauryan period ends abruptly; in fact, not a single inscriptional record in eastern dialect has been found from the post-Mauryan era. The dominant role in all regions except the northwest and Sri Lanka falls hereafter to a variety of Prakrit which most resembles, among the Aśokan dialects, the western dialect of the Girnār rock edicts, and which among literary languages has the most in common with Pāli and archaic forms of Śauraseni. In other words, this dialect partakes of the typical characteristics of the western and central MIA languages: nominative singular masculine in -o, retention of Sanskrit r and l, predominance of the sibilant s, and so on. Like the Aśokan Prakrits, this central-western epigraphic Prakrit is still relatively archaic, with only occasional intervocalic voicing of unvoiced stops and elision of voiced stops. But unlike some of the Aśokan inscriptions, consonant groups from Sanskrit are nearly always assimilated.

The causes of the abrupt dialectal shift from east to west undoubtedly lie in political and historical developments, that is, the decline of Magadha as the center of power in northern India after the collapse of the Mauryan empire and the movement of the center of political power in the following centuries toward the west and northwest. Like the eastern dialect under Aśoka, the central-western dialect of the post-Mauryan era was used far beyond what must have been its original homeland. Thus we find inscriptions in this standard epigraphic Prakrit as far afield as Orissa in the east, for instance, in the Hāthīgumphā inscription (SI 1.213-21), while in the south it is abundantly attested in inscriptions from such sites as Nāgārjunakoṇḍa and Amarāvatī. This central-western MIA dialect was, in fact, virtually the sole language in epigraphic use in the period in question, and therefore seems, like Pāli, to have developed into something like a northern Indian lingua franca, at least for epigraphic purposes, in the last two centuries B.C.

This is not to say that the inscriptions in this dialect, which Senart called "Monumental Prakrit", are totally devoid of local variations. ... But all in all, the standard epigraphic or "Monumental" Prakrit can be treated as essentially a single language whose use spread far beyond its place of origin, and which should not be taken to represent the local vernacular of every region and period where it appears."

R. Salomon - Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the other Indo-Aryan Languages

So it turns out that Magadhi (Pali) as a lingua franca, in a somewhat modified form, encompassed as well many other regions of India, as evidenced by many inscriptions (including one in Hathigumpha, see the article http://dhamma.ru/paali/MrGautamMore.html ).

Hathigumpha inscription, which was made by the Jain emperor of Mahamedhavana dynasty, further confirms the link of Pali with Ārṣa (Ardha-Magadhi), the language of the early Jain Canon, composed by Mahavira (Nigantha Nataputta).

Evidently the evolution of Magadhi as a state-supported lingua franca went through the following stages:
- Magadhi of Buddha's lifetime, preserved in the Pali texts - Haryanka dynasty;
- language of the Shishunaga and Nanda dynasties - not preserved;
- Magadhi of Asoka's edicts - Maurya dynasty;
- language of inscriptions from the dissolution of Maurya empire until the sanskritization - Satavahana and Mahameghavana dynasties. The latest of these inscriptions are dated by 3rd-4th centuries CE.


Best wishes,

                    Dmytro

______________________________________________________________
> Od: "Eugen Ciurtin eu.s.ciurtin@... [palistudy]" <palistudy@yahoogroups.com>
> Komu: "palistudy@yahoogroups.com" <palistudy@yahoogroups.com>
> Datum: 09.06.2014 11:28
> Předmět: [palistudy] International Week of Pali Studies in Paris
>