Tagged: Epigraphic Prakrit
Pages with this tag
Cousins - The Early Development of Buddhist Literature and Language in India (2013)
1L.S. Cousins re-examines the early development of Buddhist literature, arguing that the Pali Canon was first systematically written down not in Ceylon, but on the Indian mainland around the first century B.C. before being imported to the island. This written canon was based on a largely non-sectarian oral tradition of chanted texts (*bhāṇaka* tradition) that had been developing since the Buddha's time (c. 400 BCE), and its initial contents included the four main Nikāyas, Vinaya, Abhidhamma, and several Khuddakanikāya texts. The language used was not a spoken dialect but an evolving written lingua franca, which Cousins terms 'Old Pali,' derived from a post-Asokan epigraphic Prakrit. This written language subsequently underwent a process of Sanskritization, becoming 'Hybrid Pali,' before being standardized into the classical Pali we know today by commentators around the fourth or fifth century A.D., who consistently referred to it as Māgadhī.
Karpik - The Buddha taught in Pali - A working hypothesis (2019)
2This paper challenges the scholarly consensus that the Buddha taught in multiple dialects like Māgadhī, a theory known as the Multiple Oral Transmission Theory (MOTT). Instead, it argues for a Single Oral Transmission Theory (SOTT), proposing that the Buddha used a single standard language, which is the language we now call Pali. The author contends that oral translation of the vast canon was impractical, unnecessary due to the mutual intelligibility of Indo-Aryan dialects, and explicitly discouraged by the suttas' emphasis on word-for-word transmission. The traditional identification of the Buddha's language as Māgadhī is based on a misreading of the term *Māgadhabhāsā* in the commentaries, which actually defined it as *Ariyaka* (Indo-Aryan), a pan-regional term. The paper posits that Pali was a natural, pre-existing standard language based on a western dialect, a precursor to the widespread Epigraphic Prakrit, and that the Buddha adopted this sociolect of the educated to ensure a fixed, albeit phonetically fluid, transmission of his teachings across different regions. This working hypothesis refutes the MOTT by explaining dialectal variants in Pali as natural artifacts of a single transmission rather than remnants of a translation, thereby aligning with the Theravada tradition's claim.