Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 21.djvu/22

xvi (Sansk. ), and the like are anything else but instances of inaccurate spelling. This much is certain that  occurs in the inscriptions of Asoka, and in these the diphthong cannot but have the value of a short a followed by i.

If we eliminate the Sanskrit, there remain two dialects, Pâli and the Gâthâ idiom. Which of the two can lay claim to being the original language of the Buddhist scriptures or is the nearest approach to it? Pâli is intelligible in its phonetics, the Gâthâs are not. Under ordinary circumstances the comparatively greater regularity of Pâli would tend to favour its claims; the case before us is, however, so peculiar that it is not safe to draw inferences from the state in which the Gâthâs have come to us. It seems to me that the verses in the Northern books in general, as well as the prose of the Mahâvastu, have been Sanskritised to a large extent, so that they ought to be restored, as much as possible, to a more primitive form, before a comparison with Pâli can lead to satisfactory results. When we come across such words as  (Sansk.  ), , &c., we easily perceive that these forms are more primitive than Pâli  ; but what warrant have we of such forms being really in use at the time when the Gâthâs were composed, if we observe that in a verse, Lalita-vistara 53, the syllable   is reckoned as a short one in the words  ? In short, in their present state the Gâthâs afford no conclusive evidence that the language in which they were composed is older than Pâli.

Whatever may have been the phonetic aspect of the oldest standard dialect of the Buddhists, its vocabulary is unmistakably closely related to that of the Satapatha-brâhmana. The coincidences are so striking that the