Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/35

I.] dialect, apply to it up to this day. According to him র and ণ change into ল and ন, and য় is pronounced as জ in this form of Prākrita, and of শ, ষ, স, one form only is found in current use. These are, generally speaking, the characteristic features of spoken Bengali up to this day and our old manuscripts are full of examples of them. The reasons which made Kriṣṅa Pandit give our language the contemptuous name of Paiçāchī Prākrita, are not far to seek. It is the same that made Manu condemn all touch with this land. The dialect of the Buddhist people, in which the Buddhist priests were writing books, could not be accepted by the Sanskritic school which arose with the revival of Hinduism.

Several works written in the tenth and the eleventh centuries of the Christian era in a very old form of Bengali, have lately been discovered by Mahāmahopādhyāya Hara Prasāda Çāstrī in Nepal. These are (1) Charyyācharyya Viniçchaya, (2) Bodhicharyyāvatāra and (3) Dākārṅava. The manuscript of BudhicharyyāvatārBodhicharyyāvatāra [sic] is incomplete. They appear to be but poor fragments of a literature which owed its origin chiefly to the earnestness of the Tāntrika Buddhists for popularizing their creed. Though these specimens have hownow [sic] been nearly all lost, we hope some portion of them may be yet recovered by careful research carried into the literary archives of Nepal and Chittagong,—the present resorts of Buddhism in Eastern India.

This effort on the part of the Buddhists to raise Bengali to the status of a written language,