1837.] Note on the language of the Buddhist Scriptures. 683 



distinction between the means employed by their philosophers to 

 establish the principles of this religion, and the means employed by 

 their missionaries to propagate the religion itself. 



Joinville had argued that Buddhism was an original creed, older 

 than Brahmanism, because of the grossness of its leading tenets 

 which savour so much of ' flat atheism.' 



I answered that Buddhism was an innovation on the existing 

 creed, and that all the peculiarities of the religion of Sa'kya could be 

 best and only explained by advertence to shameful prior abuse of the 

 religious sanction, whence arose the characteristic Bauddha aversion to 

 gods and priests, and that enthusiastic self-reliance taught by Bud- 

 dhism in express opposition to the servile extant reference of all 

 things to heavenly and earthly mediation. Jones, again, had argued 

 that the Buddhists used only the Prakrit because the books of Ceylon 

 and Ava, (the only ones then forthcoming*,) were solely in that lan- 

 guage or dialect. I answered by producing a whole library of San- 

 skrit works in which the principles of Buddhism are more fully ex- 

 pounded than in all the legendary tomes of Ceylon and Ava ; I an- 

 swered, further, by pointing to the abstruse philosophy of Buddhism, to 

 the admitted pre-eminence, as scholars, of its expounders ; and to their 

 location in the most central and literary part of India (Behar and Oude). 

 With the Sanskrit at command ; I asked and ask again, why men so 

 placed and gifted, and having to defend their principles in the schools 

 against ripe scholars from all parts of India (for those were days o 

 high debate and of perpetual formal disputation in palaces and in clois- 

 ters) should be supposed to have resorted to a limited and feebler 

 organ when they had the universal and more powerful one equally 

 available ? The presumption that they did not thus postpone Sanskrit 

 to Prakrit is, in my judgment, worth a score of any inferences deduce- 

 able from monumental slabs, backed as this presumption is by the 

 Sanskrit records of Buddhism discovered here. Those records came 

 direct from the proximate head- quarters of Buddhism. And, if the 

 principles of this creed were not expounded and systematised in the 

 schools of India in Sanskrit, what are we to make of the Nepalese ori- 

 ginals and of the avowed Tibetan translations ? In my judgment the 

 extent and character of these works settle the question that the philo- 

 sophic founders of Buddhism used Sanskrit and Sanskrit only, to ex- 

 pound, defend and record the speculative principles of their system, 



* Sir W. Jones had, however, in his possession a Sanskrit copy of the Lai- 

 lita Vistara, and had noticed the personification of DivaNatura under the style 

 *f Arya Tara. 



