Page:A Record of the Buddhist Religion as practised in India and the Malay Archipelago.djvu/16

 appendix to my 'India, what can it teach us?' under the title of Renaissance of Sanskrit Literature.

From I-tsing or from any of the Chinese travellers in India we must not expect any trustworthy information on the ancient literature of India. What they tell us, for instance, on the date of the birth of Buddha, is mere tradition, and cannot claim any independent value. It is interesting to know that the name of Pânini and his great Grammar were known to them, but what they say about his age and circumstances does not help us much. All that is of importance on this subject has been collected and published by me in my edition of the Prâtisâkhya, 1856, Nachträge, pp. 12–15.

The date of Pânini can be fixed hypothetically only. It has been pointed out that Patañgali in his Mahâbhâshya speaks of Pushpamitra, and according to some MSS. of Kandragupta also. Kandragupta was the founder of the Maurya dynasty, Pushpamitra was the first of the dynasty which succeeded the Mauryas. As it seems that Patañgali in one place implies the fall of the Mauryas, which happened in 178 B. C., it has been supposed that he must have lived about that time. And this date seemed to agree with the statement, contained in the Râgataraṅginî (1148 A.D.), that his work, the Mahâbhâshya, was known in Kashmir under king Abhimanyu, that is, in the middle of the first century B.C. As there is a series of grammarians succeeding each other between Patañgali and Pânini, it was argued with some degree of plausibility that Pânini cannot have lived later than the fourth century B.C.

But all this is constructive chronology only, and would have to yield as soon as anything more certain could be produced. It was quite right, therefore, that Professor Weber, of Berlin, should point out and lay stress on the fact that Pânini quotes an alphabet called Yavanânî which he (Weber) takes to mean Ionian or Greek. This alphabet, he argues, could not have been known before the invasion of Alexander, and Pânini could therefore not have written before 320