Specialty of Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Literature
Before the publication of Franklin Edgerton’s Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Grammar
and Dictionary (1953), the language of scriptures of the Northern Buddhists such
as the Mahavastu, the Lalitvistara, the Divyavadana, etc was known as Buddhist
Sanskrit.
The early Buddhist scriptural works that see to have been produced in the
northern half of the sub-continent of India are either in Middle Indo Aryan i.e
Prakrit or in a style of Sanskrit minus the standards set by Panini. These northern
Buddhist texts do not represent any identical language. They are a mix of Prakrit
and Sanskrit and formed from non homogenous words. A proper study reveals
that the Buddhist Sanskrit is not a hybrid language and though the overall pattern
is like Sanskrit, it is free from the rigid pattern set by Sanskrit grammarians.
Buddhist Sanskrit has always been a general language spoken by common people
who were not aspiring for any brahmanical scholarship or veneration. It was an
unstable literary language that varied as per time and place. Hence it is incorrect
to call such a language as “hybrid”.
Buddhist Sanskrit was not an artificially made up language fashioned by fusing
Sanskrit and Prakrit. Any language whether spoken or literary borrows its
vocabulary. In case of Buddhist Sanskrit, it borrows heavily from both Sanskrit and
Prakrit. Buddhist Sanskrit was used as an administrative language in
Madhyadesha by Kanishka and his successors.
We have come to know through our understanding of Buddhist history that an
enormous amount of Buddhist literature was created in Sanskrit, beginning right
after the Buddha’s Mahaparinirvana, continuing up to the 12th century AD in
India. Out of this vast literature, comprising several thousand texts, only a portion
was translated into Tibetan between the 7th and 15th centuries and into Chinese
between the 2nd and 11th centuries. Unfortunately, with the passage of time, the
great treasure of Buddhist literature in Sanskrit was lost or destroyed due to
various developments over the course of history. An exhaustive history of the
Sanskrit Buddhist literature has long been needed. The reasons behind the
scarcity of research into Sanskrit Buddhist literature are many. One of the major
reasons is the disappearance of Buddhism from most of India and the
unavailability of the original Sanskrit Buddhist works.
In 1824, Mr. Brian Hodgson, a British diplomat, discovered a great number of
Sanskrit Buddhist manuscripts in Nepal and reported their existence to the
modern world. The existence of these texts was unknown to the rest of the world
before his time, and his discovery completely revolutionized the understanding of
Buddhism among Europeans in the early part of the nineteenth century.
With regard to the situation at this time, Prof. Jaya Deva Singh observes in
his Introduction to Madhyamika Philosophy: Books on Mahayana Buddhism were
completely lost in India. Their translations existed in Chinese, Japanese and
Tibetan. Mahayana literature was written mostly in Sanskrit and mixed Sanskrit.
Scholars who have made a study of Buddhism hardly suspected that there were
also books on Buddhism in Sanskrit.
Similarly, Suniti Kumar Chatterji writes: One great service the people of Nepal did,
particularly the highly civilized Newars of the Nepal Valley, was to preserve the
manuscripts of Mahayana Buddhist literature in Sanskrit. It was the contribution
of Sri Lanka to have preserved for humankind the entire mass of the Pali literature
of Theravada Buddhism. This went also to Burma, Cambodia, and Siam. It was
similarly the great achievement of the people of Nepal to have preserved the
equally valuable original Sanskrit texts of Mahayana Buddhism.
This Himalayan Kingdom not only played an important role in the expansion of
Buddhism but also in the preservation of various ancient Buddhist traditions and
texts. Mahayana / Vajrayana texts preserved in Nepal—many of which are
available nowhere else in the world—are of immense significance to the study
and development of Buddhism.
Buddhism already existed in the Himalayan region before the Ashokan period.
During the course of time, Vajrayāna Buddhism became a dominant form of
Buddhism in Nepal. Eminent Indian monks from great Indian Universities such as
Nalanda, Somapuri and Vikramsila fled to Nepal, bringing along a large number of
Sanskrit texts, which were soon massively copied by Nepalese Buddhists. The
tradition of copying texts was regarded as an act of merit among Nepalese
Buddhists, and this was the main reason that Nepal came to have such a huge
collection of Buddhist manuscripts. Ordinary (lay) Buddhists purchased those
texts and used them for religious purposes. Most are written in Sanskrit, using
Newari, Ranjana, Bhujimol and Devanagari scripts. The manuscripts, written on
palm leaves and collected in birch bark folios, are preserved intact and are in
surprisingly good condition.
The Sanskrit literature in Buddhism, however, is by no means exclusively
Mahayana. The Hinayana also possessed a canon of its own and a rich literature in
Sanskrit.
Style:
The meter of Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit verses throws a flood of light on the
phonology of the language, and must therefore be carefully analyzed.
Unfortunately it has always been misunderstood. (pg.197)