Buddhist Languages and the Language of the Buddha in Premodern South Asia

The Paper Session “Buddhist Languages and the Language of the Buddha in Premodern South Asia” will center on the history in which South Asian Buddhists in different times and places employed various languages to compose and disseminate their teachings and delve into the historical evolution of linguistic changes. Presenters in this session will focus on two aspects of the theme—the practical application of languages within Buddhist traditions and the theoretical frameworks governing their usage.

Presenter 1’s paper gives a diachronic overview of Greater Gandhara from the decline of the Achaemenid Empire in the fourth century BCE to the rise of the Kushans in the first century CE. He positions Greater Gandhara as a cultural crossroads, tracing the adoption of an early writing system since the time of Mauryan India. Comparing the Indian Northwest with Lanka in the first century BCE, he suggests reasons for the writing down of Buddhist scriptures in Gandhari in this region. He highlights the literary innovations unique to the Indian Northwest—the integration of some local rulers (satraps) into Gandhari Buddhist narratives, indicating a unique local Buddhist literary strategy to win the support of the rulers, whose Iranian and central names betray their ethnic origins. Another literary innovation is the Gandhari language itself. Compared to Sanskrit and Pali, Gandhari had been characterized by significant flexibility and variation from scribe to scribe before it began to be replaced gradually by Sanskrit from the third century CE. He prompts a reconsideration of the limitations of standardized grammar and orthography in the ancient world. Maybe the non-standardization or the malleability of the Gandhari language allowed it to spread more easily across a vast region from India to China and reflected the multicultural and multiethnic nature of its user communities.

Presenter 2’s work contributes to the study of Sanskritization and Buddhist-Brahmanical interaction in the Indian Northwest, where the early Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma emerged as a vibrant scholastic tradition followed by other Mahāyāna philosophers. Within the Sarvāstivāda Abhidharmic framework, the Vaibhāṣikās designated the three linguistic dharmas–nāmakāya, padakāya, and vyañjanakāya–under the category of “conditioned factors dissociated from thoughts” (citta-viprayukta-saṃskāra). He argues that the Yogācāra Buddhists redefined the three linguistic dharmas in their commentaries and scholastic works. The Yogācārabhūmi adopts a list of forty-eight Sanskrit syllables instead of the forty-two Kharoṣṭhī alphabets used for Gandhari in its interpretation of the vyañjanakāya (body of syllables) in the commentaries on the Abhidharmasamuccaya. It also offers a multivocal interpretation of padakāya (body of pada), with the main chapter interpreting it as “a verse” (pāda) and the commentarial chapter understanding it as a single word (pada) in accordance with the grammatical tradition. Showing an openness to the Brahmanical knowledge, the Yogācārabhūmi expands the scope of the three linguistic dharmas from the Buddha’s word to the five sciences of the Brahmanical tradition, including Sanskrit grammar, logic, and so on. Based on Sthiramati’s commentary, he demonstrates that the Mahāyāna authors were well aware of the process of Sanskritization by the middle of the first millennium CE.

The interaction between the Brahmanical traditions and Buddhist scholars appears to be a pan-Buddhist phenomenon across South Asia. Drawing from Gandhari commentaries studied by Stefan Baums and earlier Pali materials, Presenter 3’s research focuses on semantic derivation (Sanskrit nirukta/nirvacana, Pali nirutti) as a form of linguistic knowledge widely adopted during the canonical period and persisting in Buddhist commentaries as an exegetical method. By comparing Buddhist semantic derivation of terms with their counterparts in Brahmanical texts, such as Yāska’s Nirukta, the study demonstrates that Buddhist semantic derivation shows consistency in their interpretive theories. Buddhist interpretations rarely aligned themselves with Brahmanical ones; instead, they constantly integrated their analyses of terms into the Buddhist philosophical framework. These interpretations can be traced back to a Middle Indo-Aryan substratum, which allows Buddhists to devise their interpretation creatively. Moreover, the consistency and effort evident in Buddhist semantic derivation suggest that Buddhists were, perhaps subconsciously or unconsciously, practicing a linguistic exegesis based on an underlying presumption that the linguistic connection between nominal words and their related actions is originary or stable. This presumption surfaced in Buddhaghosa’s elevation of Pali to the status of an “eternal” language and may explain why similar tendencies occurred in other Buddhist schools, such as Sarvāstivāda and Yogācāra discussed by Presenter 2.

Presenter 4's paper investigates how Lankan Buddhists reworked their Buddhist literature by examining three Buddhist narrative anthologies in Pali and Sinhala. These three anthologies, i.e., the Sahasavatthu, Rasavāhinī, and Saddharmālaṇkāra were composed in Sri Lanka between the last few centuries of the first millennium and the first few centuries of the second millennium. Each contains a collection of approximately one hundred short stories that illustrate the importance of qualities such as generosity and faith. Among these works, the Rasavāhinī explicitly aims to remove the aesthetic flaws of its source text, which is itself a Pali translation of an early Sinhala original. Conversely, the Sinhala Saddharmālaṇkāra seeks to render the stories accessible to Lankan readers not fluent in Pali. Besides the difference in language choice, the rewriting also increased in length. Presenter 4 examines the revision and reproduction within each text, arguing that revision and translation go beyond merely restoring an original text or perpetuating stable ideas. Through a close comparative reading, she shows how each composer’s use of language created, maintained, and recreated the Theravāda tradition. Her approach to these parallel anthologies challenges scholars of Buddhist studies to reconsider traditional methods of textual criticism, which is reading parallel texts in search of the original. We may ask: could scholars explore what has been achieved through the (re)composition in Sanskrit, Pali, and other regional languages?