Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE SACRED LANGUAGE OF BUDDHISM. 45 in Buddhist writings) of the Pali. Yet, omitting this, there are other considerations of considerable weight which seem to- confirm his argument. Of these, the most important he derives from an examination of the Asoka rock-cut edicts, which furnish us with specimens of various dialects of India, all differing from the Pali: ?I. The dialect of Western India, as embodied in the Girnar inscription; 2. the dialect of North-West India, as found in the Kapur de Giri inscription; 3. the dialect of Eastern India, as found in the inscriptions of Dhauli; and 4. the Lat inscriptions. All of these distinguish themselves from Pali, principally in their phonetical character, e.g., there are no consonantal reduplications, which occur in Pali, as in the word Sadhamme for saddhame, sute for sutta. It is curious again to observe that the word Samgha is used in the Bhabra inscription instead of the Pali Sangha; the letter I is substituted for r, as laja for raja, aliya for ariya; and again, we find the neuter singular in e instead of a; from all which Minayef concludes that the Pali is clearly distinguished from all the dialects of these inscriptions. If this be so, it is questionable how far the assertion that the Sanscrit versions of the Buddhist Books were made from Pali only can be sustained; it would rather seem probable that there existed in India, after the use of writing became general, copies of these books in various dialects, and that the later Sanscrit versions were made not from one redaction only, but from such copies as happened to be in possession of the Pandits in Nepal, by whom these translations were made. This question of the origin and right place of the Pali language has been discussed lately in the valuable introduction to Dr. Olde...