onists.

Though many suttas are little more than an exposition of some doctrine
arranged in mnemonic form, others show eloquence and dramatic skill.
Thus the Samannaphala-sutta opens with a vivid description of the visit
paid one night by Ajatasattu to the Buddha[646]. We see the royal
procession of elephants and share the alarm of the suspicious king at
the unearthly stillness of the monastery park, until he saw the Buddha
sitting in a lighted pavilion surrounded by an assembly of twelve
hundred and fifty brethren, calm and silent as a clear lake. The king's
long account of his fruitless quest for truth would be tiresome if it
were not of such great historic interest and the same may be said of the
Buddha's enumeration of superstitious and reprehensible practices, but
from this point onwards his discourse is a magnificent crescendo of
thought and language, never halting and illustrated by metaphors of
great effect and beauty. Equally forcible and surely resting on some
tradition of the Buddha's own words is the solemn fervour which often
marks the suttas of the Majjhima such as the descriptions of his
struggle for truth, the admonitions to Rahula and the reproof
administered to Sati.

5

As mentioned above, our Pali Canon is the recension of the
Vibhajjavadins. We know from the records of the Chinese pilgrims that
other schools also had recensions of their own, and several of these
recensions--such as those of the Sarvastivadins, Mahasanghikas,
Mahisasakas, Dhammaguttikas, and Sammitiyas--are still partly extant in
Chinese and Tibetan translations. These appear to have been made from
the Sanskrit and fragments of what was probably the original have been
preserved in Central Asia. A recension of the text in Sanskrit probably
implies less than what we understand by a translation. It may mean that
texts handed down in some Indian dialect which was neither Sanskrit nor
Pali were rewritten with Sanskrit orthography and inflexions while
preserving much of the original vocabulary. The Buddha allowed all men
to learn his teaching in their own language, and different schools are
said to have written the scriptures in different dialects, e.g. the
Mahasanghikas in a kind of Prakrit not further specified and the
Mahasammatiyas in Apabhramsa. When Sanskrit became the recognized
vehicle for literary composition there would naturally be in India
(though not in Ceylon) a tendency to rewrite books composed in other
dialects[647].