SANSKRIT AND PRAKRIT. ΙΟΙ which the Sanskrit language presents, and stands forth as one of the most splendid achievements of human invention and industry. So elaborate is the structure, that doubts have arisen whether its complex rules of formation and phonetic change, its polysyllabic derivatives, its ten conjugations with their multiform aorists and long array of tenses, could ever have been the spoken language of a people. This question will. be discussed in the chapter on the modern vernaculars of India. and It is certain that a divergence had taken place before the Sanskrit time of Panini (350 B.C.), and that the spoken language, or Prákrit Prákrita-bháshá, had already assumed simpler forms by the speech. assimilation of consonants and the curtailment of terminals. The Samskrita-bháshá, literally, the 'perfected speech,' which Pánini stereotyped by his grammar, developed the old Aryan tendency to accumulations of consonants, with an undiminished, or perhaps an increased, array of inflections. In this highly elaborated Sanskrit the Brahmans wrote. It became the literary language of India,-isolated from the spoken dialects, but prescribed as the vehicle for philosophy, science, and all poetry of serious aim or epic dignity. As the Aryan race mingled with the previous inhabitants of the land, the spoken Prakrits adopted words of non-Aryan origin and severed themselves from Sanskrit, which for at least 2000 years has been unintelligible to the common people of India. The old synthetic spoken dialects, or Prákrits, underwent the same decay as Latin did, into analytic vernaculars, and about the same time. The noble parent languages, alike in India and in Italy, died; but they gave birth to families of vernaculars which can never die. An intermediate stage of the process can be traced in the Hindu drama, in which persons of good birth speak in Prákritized Sanskrit, and the low-castes in a bháshá, or patois, between the old Prákrit and the modern dialects. It is chiefly under the popularizing influences of British rule that the Indian vernaculars have become literary languages. Until the last century, Sanskrit, although as dead as Latin so far as the mass of the people were concerned, was the vehicle for all intellectual and artistic effort among the Hindus, their local ballads and the writings of religious reformers excepted. In addition, therefore, to other sources of influence, the Brahmans were the interpreters of a national literature written in a language unknown to the people. The priceless inheritance thus committed to their they handed down, to a great extent, by word of mouth. charge Sanskrit` manu Partly scripts. No very ancient Indian MSS. from this cause, but chiefly owing to the destructive climate of India, no Sanskrit manuscripts of remote antiquity exist. A fairly continuous series of inscriptions on rocks, pillars, and copper-plates, enable us to trace back the Indian alphabets to the 3rd century B.C. But the more ancient of existing Sanskrit manuscripts are only four hundred years old, very few have an age exceeding five centuries, and only two date as far back as 1132 and 1008 A.D.1 The earliest Indian Ms. 1008 A.D. (1008 A.D.) comes from the cold, dry highlands of Nepál.2 In Kashmir, birch-bark was extensively used: a substitute for paper also employed in India before 500 A.D., and still surviving in the amulets with verses on them which hang round the neck of Hindus. Indeed, birch-bark is to this day used by some native merchants in the Simla Hills for their account books. Palm-leaf MSS. of Japan. The palm-leaf was, however, the chief writing material in ancient and inediæval India. Two Sanskrit manuscripts on this substance have been preserved in the Monastery of Horiûzi in Japan since the year 609 A.D. It seems probable that these two strips of palm-leaf were previously the property of a 520 A.D.? Buddhist monk who migrated from India to China in 520 A.D.4 At any rate, they cannot date later than the first half of the 6th century; and they are the oldest Sanskrit manuscripts yet discovered. They were photographed in the Anecdota Oxoniensia, 1884. The Indian With regard to the origin of the Indian alphabets, the eviAlphabets. dence is still too undigested to safely permit of cursory statement. Of the two characters in which the Asoka inscriptions were written (250 A.D.), the northern variety, or Ariano-Páli, is now admitted to be of Phoenician, or at any rate of non-Indian, 1 Footnote 198a to Weber's Hist. Ind. Lit. p. 182 (1878), quoting the report of Rájendrá Lálá Mitra (1874), and Dr. Rost's letter (1875). Mr. R. Cust, in a note for The Imperial Gazetteer of India, assigns the year 883 A.D. as the date of the earliest existing Sanskrit Ms. at Cambridge. But this remains doubtful. For very interesting information regarding the age of Indian MSS. see the official reports of the Search for Sanskrit Manuscripts in Bengal, Bombay, and Madras; particularly Dr. G. Bühler's (extra number of the Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, No. xxxiv. A, vol. xii. 1877), and Professor P. Peterson's (extra numbers of the same Journal, xli. 1883, and xliv. 1884). 2 The present author has printed and sent to the India Office Library, for public reference, a catalogue of the 332 Sanskrit Buddhist MSS. collected by Mr. B. H. Hodgson in Nepál. 3 Dr. Bühler's Tour in Search for Sanskrit MSS., Journal Bombay Asiatic Society, xxxiv. A, p. 29, and footnote. 1877. Anecdota Oxoniensia, Aryan Series, p. 64, vol. i. Part III. (1884.) See also Part I. of the volume, and pp. 3, 4 of Part III. THE TWO ANCIENT INDIAN ALPHABETS. 103 parentage. The southern variety, or Indo-Páli, is believed by some scholars to be of Western origin, while others hold it to be an independent Indian alphabet. An attempt has even been made to trace back its letters to an indigenous system of picture-writing, or hieroglyphs, in pre-historic India.1 Quintus Curtius mentions that the Indians wrote on leaves in the time of Alexander (326 B.C.). They do so to this hour. Few, if any, Indian manuscripts on paper belong to a period anterior to the 16th century A.D. The earliest Indian writings are on copper or stone; the medieval ones generally on strips of palmleaves. General Cunningham possesses a short inscription, written with ink in the inside of a lid made of soapstone, dating from the time of Asoka, or 256 B.C. The introduction of paper as a writing material may be studied in the interesting collection of Sanskrit manuscripts at the Deccan College, Poona. almost Sanskrit literature was the more easily transmitted by word of Sanskrit mouth, from the circumstance that it was almost entirely written writings in verse. A prose style, simple and compact, had grown up entirely in during the early age following that of the Vedic hymns. But verse. Sanskrit literature begins with the later, although still ancient, stage of Aryan development, which superseded the Vedic gods by the Bráhmanical Triad of Brahmá, Vishnu, and Siva. When Sanskrit appears definitively on the scene in the centuries preceding the birth of Christ, it adopted once and for all a rhythmic versification alike for poetry, philosophy, science, law, and religion, with the exception of the Beast Fables and the almost algebraic strings of aphorisms in the Sútras. The Buddhist legends adhered more closely to the spoken dialects of ancient India, prákrita-bháshá; and they also have retained a prose style. But in classical Sanskrit literature, prose became an arrested development; the sloka or verse reigned Prose, a supreme; and nothing can be clumsier than the attempts at forgotten prose in later Sanskrit romances and commentaries. Prose 1 By General Cunningham, Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, pp. 52 et seq. The attempt cannot be pronounced successful. Dr. Burnell's Palæography of Southern India exhibits the successive developments of the Indian alphabet. For the growth of the Indian dialects, see Mr. Beames' Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India; Dr. Rudolph Hoernle's Comparative Grammar of the Gaudian Languages; two excellent papers, by Mr. E. L. Brandreth, on the Gaudian Languages, in the Journ. Roy. As. Soc., vols. xi. xii.; and Mr. R. N. Cust's Linguistic and Oriental Essays, pp. 144-171, Trübner, 1880. For a compendious view of the Indian alphabets, see Faulmann's Buch der Schrift, 119-158, Vienna, 1880. 2 Alexander in India, lib. viii. cap. 9, v. 15. art. Sanskrit diction aries. writing was practically a lost art in India during eighteen hundred years. Sanskrit dictionaries are a more modern product than Sanskrit grammars. The oldest Indian lexicographer whose work survives, Amara-Sinha, ranked among the nine gems' at the court of Vikramaditya, one of several monarchs of the same name-assigned to various periods from 56 B.C. to 1050 A.D. The particular Vikramaditya under whom the nine gems' are said to have flourished, appears from evidence in Hiuen Tsiang's travels to have lived about 500 to 550 A.D. A wellknown memorial verse makes Amara-Sinha a contemporary of Varáha-Mihira, the astronomer, 504 A.D. The other Sanskrit lexicons which have come down belong to the 11th, 12th, and subsequent centuries A.D. Those centuries, indeed, seem to mark an era of industry in Sanskrit dictionary - making; and Amarathere is little inherent evidence in Amara - Sinha's work (the kosha, 550 A.D.? Amara-kosha) to show that, in its present form, it was separated from them by any wide interval. The number of works on language published in 1877 in the Indian tongues, was 604; and in 1882, 738. The Brahman dent 500 B. C. The astronomy of the Bráhmans has formed alternately the astronomy. subject of excessive admiration and of misplaced contempt. The truth is, that there are three periods of Sanskrit astronomy Indepen(Jyoti-sástra). The first period belongs to Vedic times, and has period, to left a moderate store of independent observations and inferences worked out by the Bráhmans. The Vedic poets had arrived at a tolerably correct calculation of the solar year; which they divided into 360 days, with an intercalary month every five years. They were also acquainted with the phases of the moon; they divided her pathway through the heavens into 27 or 28 lunar mansions; and they had made observations of a few of the fixed stars. The order in which the lunar mansions are enumerated is one which must have been established 'somewhere between 1472 and 536 B.C.' (Weber). The planets were also an independent, although a later discovery, bordering on the Vedic period. At first seven, afterwards nine in number, they bear names of Indian origin; and the generic term for planet, graha, the seizer, had its source in primitive Sanskrit astrology. The planets are mentioned for the first time, perhaps, in the Taittiriya-Aryanaka. The Laws of Manu, however, are silent regarding them; but their worship is inculcated in the later code of Yajnavalkya. The zodiacal signs and the Jyotisha, or so-called Vedic Calendar,-with its solstitial points referring to 1181 B.C., or to a period still more remote,-seem to have BRAHMAN ASTRONOMY, 500 B. C.-1728 A.D. 105 been constructed, or at any rate completed, in an age long subsequent to the Veda. The influence of the Chinese observers upon Indian astronomy, especially with regard to the lunar mansions, is an undecided but a pregnant question. Greek 1000 A. D. The second period of Bráhman astronomy dates from the Second Greek and Greco-Bactrian invasions of India, during the three period; centuries before Christ. The influence of Greece infused new influences, life into the astronomy of the Hindus. The Indian astrono- 327 B.C. to mers of this period speak of the Yavanas, or Greeks, as their instructors; and one of their five systems is entitled the Romaka - Siddhánta.1 Their chief writer in the 6th century, Varáha-Mihira, 504 A.D., gives the Greek names of the planets side by side with their Indian appellations; and one of his works bears a Greek title, Horá-Sástra (pn). The Greek division of the heavens into zodiacal signs, decani, and degrees, enabled the Brahmans to cultivate astronomy in a scientific spirit; and they elaborated a new system of their own. They rectified the succession of the Sanskrit lunar mansions which had ceased to be in accordance with the actual facts, transferring the two last of the old order to the first two places in the new. astronomy, In certain points the Bráhmans advanced beyond Greek Best age of astronomy. Their fame spread throughout the West, and found Brahman entrance into the Chronicon Paschale (commenced about 330 A.D.; revised, under Heraclius, 610-641 A.D.). In the 8th and 9th centuries, the Arabs became their disciples, borrowed the lunar mansions in the revised order from the Hindus, and translated the Sanskrit astronomical treatises Siddhántas under the name of Sindhends. The Brahman astronomer of the 6th century, 6th century Varáha-Mihira, was followed by a famous sage, Brahma-gupta, A.D. in the 7th (664 A.D.); and by a succession of distinguished workers, ending with Bháskara, in the 12th (1150 A.D.). The Muhammadan conquest of India then put a stop to Third further independent progress. After the death of Bháskara, period; decay Indian astronomy gradually decayed, and owed any occasional under impulse of vitality to Arabic science. Hindu observers of Muhamnote arose at rare intervals. In the 18th century (1710-1735), rule Rájá Jai Singh II. constructed a set of observatories at his 1150-1800 capital Jaipur, and at Delhi, Benares, Muttra, and Ujjain. A.D. His observations enabled him to correct the astronomical tables Jai Singh's madan observatories, 1 That is, the Grecian Siddhánta. Another, the Paulisa-Siddhánta, is 1728. stated by Al Biruni to have been composed by Paulus al Yúnání, and is probably to be regarded, says Weber, as a translation of the Eiraywyń of Paulus Alexandrinus. But see Weber's own footnote, No. 277, p. 253, Hist. Ind. Lit. (1878). |