"Buddhism and Sanskrit Turn"

The public evening lecture by Professor Peter Skilling (Bhadra Rujirathat), Chulalongkorn University, (Bangkok) is part of the 26th International Conference of the European Association for South Asian Archaeology and Art. It takes place from 16–20 September 2024 in Leipzig, Germany.

Abstract

The linguistic history of Buddhism is anything but simple. From the start, Buddhists recruited a wide array of languages, starting with early Middle Indic dialects and developing to embrace most of Asia’s language families. As a result, Buddhist literature is polyglot, a fascinating linguistic jumble. It is regrettable that for sectarian and curricular reasons, modern scholarship has tended to ignore the historical and literary evidence and to simplify and streamline Buddhism’s linguistic diversity. Today the predominant narrative presents a ‘two-track’ Buddhism that transmitted Buddhist ideas in either Pali or Sanskrit. The ramifications of the mainstreamed accounts of linguistic history have been many, and they challenge us with intriguing questions. Should we meekly accept academia’s received models? Or should we delve deeper to explore and to learn from Buddhism’s rich linguistic heritage?

South Asian Buddhism began with and evolved through several centuries of orality, during which the Buddhist orders or schools and their scriptural collections were formed. This formative oral period is inaccessible to today’s researchers except through the palimpsests of written texts and the flotsam and jetsam of ancient material culture. An assessment of the growing epigraphic and manuscript evidence from South Asia leads one to question the ‘two-track’ theory and the related idea that at a certain point Buddhism took a ‘Sanskrit turn’. Language use has always been entangled, and Buddhism’s shifting panoply of schools never followed linear monolingual or dual-track language practices. For at least two of the early schools—the Theriyas and the Sāṃmitīyas—the ‘canonical’ language of choice remained Middle Indics. Another school, the Mahāsāṃghikas, developed a deeply Prakritic canonical language that today’s scholars call ‘Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit’. Similar dialects were adopted by the composers of Vaipulya/Mahāyāna dharmaparyāyas. Recent epigraphic and manuscript discoveries contribute new perspectives to the complexity, and raise new questions like did Buddhists ever take a Sanskrit turn? And if so, what was it like?

Conference information:

26th International Conference of the European Association for South Asian Archaeology and Art