Coomaraswamy, Ananda Kentish: Buddha and the gospel of buddhism (London, 1916)

PART V : BUDDHIST ART

I. BUDDHIST LITERA TURE

Language and Writing
E may safely assume that Gautama’s teaching


was communicated to his disciples in Magadhi,
the spoken dialect of his native country. The

oldest contemporary documents of Buddhist literature,
the Edicts of Asoka, are written in a later form of the
sister dialect of Kosala.1 The Hinayana Buddhist scrip-
tures, the Theravada Canon or old Buddhist Bible, are
preserved to us only in the literary dialect known as Pali;
while the later Mahayana texts of the Mahayana are com-
piled to us in Sanskrit, and preserved in that form, or in
the early Chinese translations. Pali and Sanskrit in
Buddhist circles play the part which was taken by Latin
in the Christian Church of the Middle Ages. Pali is a
literary form based on Magadhi, gradually developed, and
perhaps only definitely fixed when the scriptures were first
written down in Ceylon about 80 b.c.
How can we speak of authentic scriptures which were not
put into writing until four centuries after the death of
the teacher whose words are recorded ? That is possible
in India, though not in Europe. In the time of Gautama,
a very long period of literary activity was already past,
and the same activity still continued. Vedic literature, in
particular, with the exception of the later Upanishads, was
already ancient, while the work of the great compilers of
epic poetry, and of the grammarians and lawmen, is only
1 The Edicts of Asoka, though veritable Buddhist literature, are not
included in the scriptural canon, and are here referred to in a separate
chapter, p. 180 seq.

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