Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 21.djvu/23

Rh interval separating the younger parts of the Satapatha and the beginnings of Buddhist literature can hardly be supposed to have been very great. Among those coincidences I cite, a word which as yet has not been discovered in the whole range of Sanskrit literature except Satap. XIV, 7, 1, 10, and in Northern Buddhist writings, as well as in Pâli. The ἂπαξ λεγόμενον  Satap. XII, a, 2, 4 recurs in, Lalita-vistara,  p. 147, 8 ; p. 439, 6; Pâli. The expression  in the sense of 'equipped, furnished with' occurs in Satapatha thrice, in Atharva-veda once, in Saddharma-pundarîka several times, e.g. in  , chap. xxii. We may add the Prâkritism  in , Brihad-âranyaka VI, 4, 23, the usual form in Buddhist works in Sanskrit, Gâthâ dialect, and Pâli; further  , Satap. V, 5, 4, 11;  in the compound , Satap. II. 3, 3, 15 ; cf. . An archaic trait in the stanzas is the expletive use of the particle u, e.g. in, for. Both in prose and poetry we meet with, sometimes in the sense of Sansk. , which etymologically of course is identical with it, at other times in that of Sansk. . An analogous case is Sansk. , almost imperceptibly differing from. Perhaps the most curious of similar forms in the Gâthâs is, in meaning exactly coinciding with  ; this   I take to be the older form of the Mâgadhî   in the Asoka edicts.

From the occurrence of peculiar old words and forms we may draw inferences as to the age of certain compositions in ordinary cases; but it is not safe to apply the same test, if there is sufficient reason to suppose that the work, the date [21]