SO Quotations from original Sanscrit [Jan. 



The native works which the latter gentleman relies on are avowedly 

 Tibetan translations of my Sanscrit originals, and whoever will duly 

 reflect upon the dark and profound abstractions, and the infinite simally- 

 multiplied and microscopically-distinguished personifications of Bud- 

 dhism, may well doubt whether the language of Tibet does or can 

 adequately sustain the weight that has been laid upon it. 



Sanscrit, like its cognate Greek, may be characterised as a speech 

 '■' capable of giving a soul to the objects of sense, and body to the 

 abstractions of metaphysics." But, as the Tibetan language can have 

 no pretensions to a like power, those who are aware that the Sangatas 

 taxed the whole powers of the Sanscrit to embody in words their sys- 

 tem, will cautiously reserve, I apprehend, for the Bauddha books still 

 extant in the classical language of India, the title of original authorities. 

 From such works, which, though now found only in Nepal, were com- 

 posed in the plains of India before the dispersion of the sect, I have 

 drawn the accompanying extracts ; and though the merits of the 

 *' doing into English" may be small indeed, they will yet, I hope, be 

 borne up by the paramount and (as I suspect) unique authority and 

 originality of my " original authorities," a phrase which, by the way, 

 has been somewhat invidiously, as well as laxly used and applied in 

 certain quarters. 



received hypothesis is that the philosophers of Ayudhya and Magadha,(the acknow- 

 ledged founders of Buddhism) preferred the use of Sanscrit to that of Pracrit, 

 in the original exposition of their subtle system, appears to me as absurd as it 

 does probable that their successors, as Missionaries, resorted to Pracrit versions 

 of the original Sanscrit authorities, in propagating the system in the remotest 

 parts of the continent and in Ceylon. On this ground, I presume the Pracrit 

 works of Ceylon and Ava to be translations, not originals : — a presumption so 

 reasonable that nothing but the production from Ceylon or Ava of original 

 Pracrit works, comparable in importance with the Sanscrit books discovered in 

 Nepal, will suffice to shake it in my mind. Sir W. Jones I believe to be the 

 author of the assertion, that the Buddhists committed their system to high 

 Pracrit or Pali ; and so long at least as there were no Sanscrit works of the sect 

 forthcoming, the presumption was not wholly unreasonable. It is, however, so 

 now. And Sir W. Jones was not unaware that Magadha or Bihar was the 

 original head-quarters of Buddhism, nor that the best Sanscrit lexicon extant 

 was the work of a Bauddha ; nor that the Brdhmans themselves acknowledged 

 the pre-eminent literary merits of their heterodox adversaries. 



But for his Brahminical bias therefore, Sir William might have come at the 

 truth, that the Bauddha philosophers employed the classical language. 



Sir William was further aware, that the old Bauddha inscriptions of Gaya, 

 Sanchi, Carli, &c. are Sanscrit, not Pracrit. To me this last circumstance is 

 decisive against the hypothesis in question. Throughout Madhya Des and the 

 Upper Deccan, the numerous monuments of the Buddhists bear inscriptions in 

 Sansciit, and Sanscrit only. The Pali inscription at Gaya is recent, and avowedly 

 the work of Burmese. [It is chiefly Burmese, not Pali. — Ed.] 



