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)