nskrit of their translations
and the classical Sanskrit of Pa_n_ini were due to the corruption
which, at the time when Buddhism arose, and still more at the time
when Buddhism spread to China, had crept into the spoken language of
India. Sanskrit had ceased to be the spoken language of the people
previous to the time of A_s_oka. The edicts which are still preserved
on the rocks of Dhauli, Girnar, and Kapurdigiri are written in a
dialect which stands to Sanskrit in the same relation as Italian to
Latin. Now it is true, no doubt, that the canonical books of the
Buddhists are written in a tolerably correct Sanskrit, very different
from the Italianized dialect of A_s_oka. But that Sanskrit was, like
the Greek of Alexandria, like the Latin of Hungary, a learned idiom,
written by the learned for the learned; it was no longer the living
speech of India. Now it is curious that in many of the canonical
Buddhist works which we still possess, the text which is written in
Sanskrit prose is from time to time interrupted by poetical portions,
called Gathas or ballads, in which the same things are told in verse
which had before been related in prose. The dialect of these songs or
ballads is full of what grammarians would call irregularities, that is
to say, full of those changes which every language undergoes in the
mouths of the people. In character these corruptions are the same as
those which have been observed in the inscriptions of A_s_oka, and
which afterwards appear in Pali and the modern Prakrit dialects of
India. Various conjectures have been started to explain the
amalgamation of the correct prose text and the free and easy poetical
version of the same events, as embodied in the sacred literature of
the Buddhists. Burnouf, the first who instituted a critical inquiry
into the history and literature of Buddhism, supposed that there was,
besides the canon fixed by the three convocations, another digest of
Buddhist doctrines composed in the popular style, which may have
developed itself, as he says, subsequently to the preaching of
_S_akya, and which would thus be intermediate between the regular
Sanskrit and the Pali. He afterwards, however, inclines to another
view--namely, that these Gathas were written out of India by men to
whom Sanskrit was no longer familiar, and who endeavoured to write in
the learned language, which they ill understood, with the freedom
which is imparted by the habitual use of a popular but imperfectly