Empires Of The Word Part 11

A major dissimilarity is the absence of any religious element in the American movement. There is nothing in it to set against the cult of Hindu deities, or the Buddha's Four n.o.ble Truths and n.o.ble Eightfold Path. This may be significant for the future of English, since we shall see that it was ultimately only religion, whether Hindu or Buddhist, which was to preserve any role for Sanskrit outside India. But with this one caveat, it seems more helpful than misleading to compare these two rising tides-of Indian culture in the early first millennium AD, and of American culture at the end of the second.

The rest of this chapter looks a little more deeply at what kind of language Sanskrit was, and how it came to be received so enthusiastically across southern and eastern Asia.

The character of Sanskrit.

durikta khalu guair udya.n.a.lata va.n.a.latabhi Left far behind indeed in virtues are the garden-creepers by the forest-creepers.

Kalidasa, akuntala Recognised, i. 17.

Intrinsic qualities.

Indian culture is unique in the world for its rigorous a.n.a.lysis of its own language, which it furthermore made the central discipline of its own culture. The Sanskrit word for grammar, vyakaraa, instead of being based, like the Greek grammatike, on some word for word or writing, just means a.n.a.lysis: so language is the subject for a.n.a.lysis par excellence.

Patanjali, a noted grammarian of the second century BC, wrote at the beginning of his work the Mahabhaya ('great commentary') that there were five reasons for studying grammar: to preserve the Vedas, to be able to modify formulae from the Vedas to fit a new situation, to fulfil a religious commitment, to learn the language as easily as possible, and to resolve doubts in textual interpretation.3 So it is clear that even at this stage, a good millennium after the composition of the Vedas, when the language had already changed quite considerably, enhancing the use of language for religious purposes was still felt to be the central point of grammar.

And religious uses have always loomed large in the figure that Sanskrit cuts in the world. Hindu liturgies have been intoned in the language over a continuous period of 3500 years, which is probably the age of the oldest hymns in the Rig Veda. The G.o.ds chosen to be the focus of wors.h.i.+p have changed over the millennia, from Agni ('Fire'), Savitri ('Sun'), Varuna and Rudra in the Vedas, to iva, Krishna, Ganesha and Kali (and many others) today, but some G.o.ds are still with us (notably Vishnu), and the language has changed very little. In fact, in the Rig Veda there is one hymn that is an invocation of Vac, speech itself. Here are two of its verses: The last words show a blending of s.e.xual and mystical imagery, often found in Sanskrit; but they also show that the skills of the linguist were early recognised. This is particularly interesting in that the discipline of grammar as it had been developed was an a.n.a.lysis not primarily of the religious language of the Vedas, but of a different, slightly simpler, and therefore presumably later, dialect. Paini, the original fifth-century BC doyen of Sanskrit grammar, has to give extra rules to generate the forms used in the Vedas (called chandas) from a base in ordinary Sanskrit (designated as bhaa-'speech'). (Panini probably lived in the academic community of Takasila, known to the Greeks as Taxila, near modern Rawalpindi in the extreme north-east of the subcontinent, now part of Pakistan.) Furthermore, the grammar that the tradition had defined was a vast system of abstract rules, made up of a set of pithy maxims (called sutras, literally 'threads') written in an artificial jargon. These sutras are like nothing so much as the rules in a computational grammar of a modern language, such as might be used in a machine translation system: without any mystical or ritual element, they apply according to abstract formal principles.*

Formulation in sutras became the key feature of Sanskrit academic texts, but using maxims in regular Sanskrit and not this complex meta-language. Whereas Western didactic texts until the modern era were formulated in some Greek tradition as a set of axioms and theorems (after Euclid), or more often as didactic verse (after Hesiod), the preferred approach in the Sanskrit tradition has been to encapsulate treatises as a series of memorable aphorisms, usually phrased as verse couplets. So much so that there is even a sutra to define the qualities of a good sutra: svalpakaram asandigdha saravad visvatomukham astobham anavadya ca sutra sutravido vidu brief, unambiguous, pithy, universal, non-superfluous and faultless the sutra known to the sutra-sages.

This approach was very much a part of another distinctive feature of Sanskrit linguistic culture, namely a strong ambivalence about the value of writing. Reliance on language in its written form was seen as crippling, and not giving true control over linguistic content. Hence this proverb: pustakastha tu ya vidya parahastagatam dhanam Knowledge in a book-money in another's hand.4 In this ancient India was like many cultures as widely divided as the Druids of Gaul in the first century BC5 and modern Guatemala (where Mayans remark that outsiders note things down not in order to remember them, but rather so as not to have to remember them).6 Even Socrates recalled a story that when the the G.o.d Thoth first offered the craft of writing to the king of Egypt, the king was not impressed: 'it will set forgetfulness in the minds of learners for lack of practice in memory'.7 The doyens of Indian learning took this undeniable side effect of book learning very much to heart.

Even though the language had undergone a full phonological a.n.a.lysis by the fifth century BC, which was even incorporated into the official order of letters in the alphabet, reliance on written texts for important (especially spiritually important) doc.u.ments was decried. Hence another saying: vedavikrayiaccaiva vedanacaiva duaka.

vedana lekhakascaiva tevai nirayagamina.

The sellers of the Vedas, the misreaders of the Vedas,

the writers of the Vedas, all go on the path to h.e.l.l.

By contrast the ideal was the rote learning of all the princ.i.p.al texts, through judicious use of mnemonic techniques. This learning then made possible true engagement with all aspects of them, including the composition of new texts and commentaries, which might indeed benefit from being written down.

The character of the language that received this attention has already been exhibited in the quotations. It was a typical ancient Indo-European language, with nouns, adjectives, p.r.o.nouns and verbs all highly inflected in a system that, although susceptible to elegant a.n.a.lysis (as Panini and the grammatical tradition demonstrated), was rife with special exceptions. Words tended to be polysyllabic, and their length was often increased by the propensity of the language to tolerate compounds of almost unlimited length, a feature of Sanskrit that became more extreme (in all genres of literature) as the centuries and millennia wore on.

The vocabulary is vast: there are over ten thousand nominal (i.e. nonverbal) roots in the traditional thesaurus for poets (Amarakoa, 'the Immortal Treasury', organised of course into sutras for memorisation) and, when verbs and compounds are allowed in, Monier Williams' 1899 dictionary runs to 180,000 entries.* This means that there are vast resources in near-synonyms: at an extreme, John Brough claims there are fifty synonyms for 'lotus', a favourite concept of Sanskrit poetry in both literal and metaphorical senses.9 Words tend to have multiple senses anyway: the most straightforward word for lotus, padma has eleven extra senses in the neuter gender (lotus-like ornament, form of a lotus, root of a lotus, coloured marks on the face and trunk of an elephant, an army formation, a trillion (10), lead, a tantric chakra, a mole on the body, a spot, part of a column) and eight more in the masculine (temple, quarter-elephant, species of serpent, Rama, a treasure of Kubera, a mode of s.e.xual enjoyment, a posture in meditation, a treasure connected with magic). These lexical resources are exploited to the full in Sanskrit poetry, which is gratuitously allusive and periphrastic, and addicted to slea or punning.

But we have already noted that a special characteristic of Sanskrit is a complicated system of word liaison. This is known as sandhi ('putting together'). It means that word boundaries are often effaced, and a single stream of syllables, as p.r.o.nounced or even written, becomes susceptible to multiple interpretations. The combined result of these two properties of Sanskrit is an opportunity for punning on an almost inconceivable scale. This opportunity was amply taken up in literary composition. The ultimate in this was achieved by the poet Kaviraja ('poet-king'), who in his Raghavapaaviya (twelfth century AD), set himself the task of retelling simultaneously the stories of both the great epics of India, the Ramayaa and Mahabharata, in ambiguous (and highly ornate) verses. In a way, this can be seen as a release of meaning from its expression in words, for it is difficult to conceive how the work could have been understood, in either of its senses, without active and detailed pre-knowledge by the audience of the tales being told. Author and audience share the stories, but are focused exclusively on the verbal details of their expression. This in practice forces not only the use of ambiguous terms, but an a.n.a.logy to be set up between the narrative flow of the two epics. So, to quote one couplet (vi.8): paracakra parikramann asokagahana gata:.

kanad iva ktartho 'bhun maheyidarsanena sa.

Going round the enemy's kingdom/forces, he came to a thicket of Asoka trees/the reverse of grief: in an instant as it were, his task was accomplished, by his sight of the daughter of the earth/the cows.

Here the first of the variant translations (in bold) of phrases applies to Hanuman seeking Sita, and the second (italicised) to Arjuna on a cattle-rustling expedition behind enemy lines. But to maintain a coherent narrative, most of the phrases still have an unambiguous translation.

In every sense of the word, then, Sanskrit is a luxuriant language. Sir William Jones, Chief Justice of India and founder of the Royal Asiatic Society, memorably described it in 1786: 'The Sanskrit language, whatever may be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either.'

Sanskrit in Indian life.

SOCIAL.

The question of who or what provided the model for the best Sanskrit has been answered in various ways over its long life. It was far more fraught than the question of the standard for Greek or Latin, since those languages did not carry the heavy theological overtones that have remained with Sanskrit throughout.

Originally, as we have seen, the focus was purely religious, and the promoted aim was to p.r.o.nounce and articulate the Vedas properly. What would now be seen as a matter of social and pious propriety was represented otherwise in ancient India. Intoning the Vedas, after all, was held to give supernatural power, and Patanjali gave an example of the potentially life-threatening nature of bad grammar: the demon Vritra performed a sacrifice to obtain a son who would be indra-satru, a killer of Indra, his sworn enemy among the G.o.ds. Unfortunately he accented it wrong, on the first rather than the last syllable, and so conjured up a son whom Indra would kill.10 Coming from Patanjali, this is an anecdote of the second century BC, showing that some features at least of the language defined by Panini's grammar had already ceased to be routine. Panini had lived in the fifth century in the extreme north-west of the Sanskrit- or Prakrit-speaking area. By Patanjali's time, this region had fallen under the control of mleccha* peoples, non-Hindu (and non-Sanskrit-speaking) foreigners, the Yavana (Greeks) and aka (Scythians speaking an Iranian language, comparable to Pashto) from the west and north.

The religious motives emphasised by Patanjali for ensuring one's Sanskrit was correct developed naturally, in India's hierarchical and theocratic society, into social markers, and indeed status symbols. Patanjali worries that there may be a circularity (itara-itara-asraya) in his natural wish to identify the best educated (sia) usage with what grammar prescribes: after all, how does the grammarian know what to prescribe? So he appeals to the usage of the Aryavarta, defined geographically: this turns out to be northern India, bounded by the Himalayas in the north and the Vindhya mountains in the south, and the Panjab in the west and Allahabad in the east.11 This was to remain the received view of the Aryan centre, although there are refinements to be found in the Manu Law Code, written perhaps seven hundred years later, about AD 500: Madhyadesa ('Mid Land') is identified with this definition- effectively modern Haryana and Uttar Pradesh-while the Aryavarta has expanded to encompa.s.s the whole of the north of the subcontinent; meanwhile, a small region round Delhi ('between the divine rivers Sarasvati and Dadvati'), identified as the Brahmavarta, has the supreme accolade: 'All men in the world should learn their proper behaviour from a Brahman born in that country.'12

POLITICAL.

Patanjali conveniently places the limits of Aryavarta more or less at the borders of the unga empire of which he was a citizen.13 This would not have been so convenient a century earlier, when the political world revolved around the vastly larger, but less centrally located, empire of the Mauryas. Its centre was Paaliputra (modern Patna), which is in eastern India beyond the confines of the then Aryavarta. Furthermore, it extended as far to the east as the Brahmaputra, as far to the north and west as the southern part of Afghanistan, and to the south it reached modern Mysore and the Nilgiri hills. These bounds are marked by monumental inscriptions, set up on pillars or carved into the living rock, placed by the greatest Maurya emperor Asoka ('grief-less'-or, as he preferred to called himself, Piyadasi, Sanskrit Priyadarsin, 'of friendly aspect'.) The role of politics in the early spread of Sanskrit across India remains obscure. Very likely, the process of military conquest and dynastic subordination in the third century BC spread not Sanskrit as such but the Magadhi Prakrit, which was the language of the Maurya court; Sanskrit would have taken up its position thereafter, establis.h.i.+ng itself here, and no doubt elsewhere, as the common language for educated discourse of all those who spoke some Indian Prakrit in day-to-day life. This has been its position in India ever since, although in the last millennium other languages, notably Persian (under the Mughals) and English (under the British), have entered the subcontinent and competed for this status as the prime language of education.

In fact, the kind of linguistic advance achieved by military conquest seems to have been particularly impermanent. There is a cl.u.s.ter of Asoka's edicts round Raichur, on the borders of modem Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh; but this is now the very heart of the area where Kannada and Telugu are spoken-both Dravidian languages unrelated to Magadhi, or indeed to Sanskrit. Later, a series of Aryan-speaking empires based on the lower Ganges (such as Asoka's) rose and fell: this happened in the second century BC, and the second and fifth centuries AD; after each fall Bihar, the area centred on the lower Ganges, relapsed into the (likewise unrelated) Munda language. It seems that the east and centre of India succ.u.mbed to the Aryan tendency only gradually, and fitfully: Bengal in the fourth century AD, Orissa in the seventh. Farther to the west, even in the fourteenth century, the official inscriptions of Maharara ('great kingdom') were still in Kannada; but it then became another totally Aryan-speaking area, with a language known as Marathi.* It appears that the social strata must have been speaking different languages for some time, with (in this case, at least) Aryan favoured much more by the lower orders.

Asoka's inscriptions, the earliest in a decipherably Aryan language to survive, are not in Sanskrit but Magadhi Prakrit; and this absence of Sanskrit from inscriptions, or rather its presence only for literary decoration while the guts of the message are given in Prakrit, continues for several centuries. It is not until two hundred years later that the first inscriptions in Sanskrit are found, farther west, in Ayodhya and Mathura (south of Delhi). There is a clear division of function between Sanskrit and Prakrit visible in these inscriptions, which contain both: Sanskrit is used for the verse, Prakrit for the prose dedications. Ultimately, Sanskrit did come to predominate, and indeed to be the exclusive language of inscriptions. But this tradition did not get fully established for another 250 years, starting in AD 150 with the rock inscriptions of a fairly minor king, Rudradaman, at Junagah ('Greek fort') on the western coast, in Gujarat.

Something of the same division of function between Sanskrit for high and Prakrit for everyday use is also shown by the language conventions of Sanskrit drama. Every play was multilingual, or multi-dialectal. From the sixth century AD, n.o.ble males speak in Sanskrit; ladies speak in auraseni (the Mathura Prakrit), but sing in Maharari; meanwhile, low characters are scripted in Magadhi (ironically, the descendant of the dialect that had had royal overtones, nine hundred years before). We can only suppose that intervening political reversals (e.g. the rise of the Satavahana kings in the Maharashtra area over the first centuries BC and AD) had a more or less permanent effect on the perceived status of the dialects.*

Rajasekhara, making recommendations C.AD 900 for the ideal poet, says that he should have servants fluent in Apabhrasa ('falling off, the quite generally used, but unflattering, term for later forms of auraseni Prakrit, on its way to becoming modern Hindi), maids in Magadhi and the like; but his wives should speak Sanskrit, or else 'Prakrit', which for him means Maharashtri, and his friends all languages.14 The social imperative for Sanskrit had become inescapable, despite the poet's own personal enthusiasm for his local Prakrit. But to a large extent, the status of the dialects seemed to have become fully detached from awareness of their local origins, or their history.

RELIGIOUS.

Interestingly, Magadhi had probably also been the dialect of Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, though about one millennium earlier. (His contemporary, Mahavira, the founder of Jainism, lived in the area too.) Magadha was also the area of the earliest Buddhist councils, which established the outlines of this faith for later generations. And Buddhism's most famous, and influential, early convert was King Asoka himself, another resident of Magadha, in its chief city, Paaliputra (modern Patna in the state of Bihar on the Ganges).

This geographical coincidence might have been expected to lead Buddhism to favour Magadhi. The Buddha had advised his monks to teach in their own language (sakaya niruttiya). His view here seems to have involved not only a respect for the vernacular, but also a positive belief that his caste, the warrior Katriya, was actually superior to the priestly Brahmaa with its Sanskrit a.s.sociations. This was part of his persuasive redefinition of the whole caste system and of what it was to be truly ariya (Aryan)-though this word is usually translated in Buddhist English as 'n.o.ble'-based on personal merit rather than birth.

But the monks did not in turn privilege the common speech of the Buddha himself and his region. Rather, they declared themselves in favour of any form of vernacular language. There are stories that this caused some unease among Brahman monks, who feared that the resulting slack grammar and p.r.o.nunciation would corrupt the sayings of the Buddha. However, in time a particular Prakrit did come to predominate: it was called Pali ('canonical') and was a mixed Prakrit. Despite the claims of the Buddhist tradition (which also claimed that this language had been spoken by the Buddha and was, for good measure, the original language of all beings, sabbasattana mulabhasa),* Pali was not predominantly Magadhi, but included many distinctively Western elements, reminiscent of auraseni: it must have arisen as a kind of Buddhist Aryan creole, by a process of compromise among monks speaking various Prakrits.

Later on, as the faith developed, and became more heavily inst.i.tutionalised, it increasingly adopted a grander style of language, in form closer to cla.s.sical Sanskrit, which is known as Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit. This typically involves taking the grammatical structures of Prakrit, which are much simpler and more a.n.a.lytic than those of Sanskrit, and reclothing the words in case markings and verb endings that are reminiscent of cla.s.sical Sanskrit, but quite often misapplied from the viewpoint of cla.s.sical grammar.

Overall, throughout Indian linguistic history, Sanskrit's status has tended to rise, both in secular and sacred use; the Maurya kings', and the Buddhists' and Jains', early preference for the vernacular all ultimately yielded to the respect in which Sanskrit was held. It has been recognised throughout as an artificial (saskta) language; but if anything this has increased its status, and its use has come to be seen as a linguistic touchstone for the quality of a text.

Outsiders' views.

It is interesting to compare briefly some external perceptions of Sanskrit, and of its role in society. There are two outsiders' traditions which have left records of their encounters: for the last three centuries BC, we have reports from the Greeks; and for the middle of the first millennium AD, from the Chinese to the north-east.

A glance at the map shows that, in an age of overland travel on foot, emissaries of both civilisations must have had to distinguish themselves in terms of determination even before they could reach the centres of Indian culture: Greece was over 5000 miles away (though Greek had been established as a lingua franca for most of that distance), while China, though closer as the crow flies, was in practice cut off not only by the Taklamakan desert but also by the mountains stretching from the Pamirs to the far Himalayas.

THE GREEKS.

The Greeks knew little about India until Alexander's campaigns brought them to its borders in 327 BC. Thereafter there were diplomatic exchanges between some of the great Indian rulers of the north and the Greek dynasts who controlled the east of what had been the Persian empire, the Seleucids. From 302 to 288 Megasthenes served as Seleucid amba.s.sador to King Chandragupta Maurya in Pataliputra (Patna), which he introduced to the Greek world as Palibothra. He left a discursive study of Indian ways, the Indika, which, taken together with some reports of Onesicritus and Nearchus, naval officers who had written memoirs of their service with Alexander, stood as the core of Greek knowledge of India until the end of the ancient world.

The Indika has not survived, but can be reconstructed substantially from the extensive quotations that figure in other authors, such as Strabo and Pliny, writing (in Italy) two centuries later. It contains little or nothing on the political or literary aspects of Indian life, but does contain an a.n.a.lysis of the caste system, identifying no fewer than seven distinct 'tribes' or 'lineages', which can be fairly well mapped on to the time-honoured four-way division into Brahmans (priests and philosophers), Kshatriyas (kings and warriors), Vaisyas (merchants) and udras (labourers). It also appears to note the prevalence of the cults of iva and Krishna, but the inference is indirect: in the usual Graeco-Roman way, it gives only the names of Greek G.o.ds which the author had identified with the Indian figures; so the Indians are said to have wors.h.i.+pped Heracles (since like Krishna he carried a club), and Dionysus (since like iva he was a.s.sociated with thriving vegetable life and with Mount Meru, whereas Dionysus had been born from Zeus's thigh, in Greek merou, and he was a pretty wild character, wors.h.i.+pped with music and dance).

Megasthenes does cope more explicitly with the more intellectual aspects of religions practised in the Maurya empire of his time, distinguis.h.i.+ng Brahmans (brakhmanai or bragmanai) and ramans (sarmanai) as different kinds of philosophers. ramaa is indeed a Sanskrit word sometimes used specifically for Buddhist monks, but there is no explicit mention of Buddhism, which would have been some two hundred years old at the time (having been founded in exactly the same region where Megasthenes was resident).

The commentary tends to be focused at a fairly superficial level, for example the presence of gumnosophistai, or naked sages, and the fact that male and female students were on a par as disciples to the ramans. Megasthenes apparently never understood that the Brahmans are in fact one of the 'tribes', i.e. castes, that he had distinguished; nor that 'forest-dwellers' (what his hosts would have called vanaprastha) are not a species of raman, but rather those who have reached a certain period of life, whether Brahman or raman.

India remained the fabulous source of exotic products for the Greeks and beyond them the Romans. In fact, the truest elements of Sanskrit lore that they ever absorbed were the names of some of their favourite substances: canvas (Greek karpasos, 'cotton', from karpasa), ginger (Greek zingiber from sngavera, named after a town on the Ganges), pepper (Greek peperi from pippali, 'berry'), sugar (Greek sakkharon from sarkara, 'grit')- originally characterised by Alexander's admiral Nearchus as honey coming from reeds without the aid of bees.15 Megasthenes' work, which came to form Europe's knowledge of India up until the Renaissance, was in some ways lacking in understanding, and never offered any appreciation of philosophy, language or literature. In one case, a sage joked that since the conversation took place through three interpreters, they were as likely to get a clear idea of the philosophy being expounded as to purify water by running it through mud.16 But this did not mean that the Greeks who lived closer in were similarly lacking. One Greek king of the Panjab, Menander (second century BC), in fact became immortalised for his penetrating interest in Buddhism in the form of the Pali cla.s.sic Milinda-panha, or 'Questions of King Milinda': 'Many were the arts and sciences he knew-holy tradition and secular law; the Sakhya, Yoga, Nyaya and Vaiseika systems of philosophy; arithmetic, music; medicine; the four Vedas, the Puranas and the Itihasas; astronomy, magic, causation and spells; the art of war; poetry; and property-conveyancing-in a word, the full nineteen.'17 And another Indo-Greek of the same period, announcing himself as Heliodorus, Greek amba.s.sador (yonaduta) from King Antialkidas, left an inscription in perfect Prakrit on a column still standing at Besnagar in Madhya Pradesh. It ends with the spiritual precept: trini amutapadani...suanuhitani.

neyati svagam dame caga apramada.

Three steps to immortality, when correctly followed,

lead to heaven: control, generosity, attention.

THE CHINESE.

By contrast with Greek writers, who were in India largely as traders, conquerors or representatives of power, the Chinese came as serious students of India's culture, and particularly Buddhism: some evidently learnt Sanskrit (with Pali and Magadhi Prakrit) in depth during their stay. Their descriptions, therefore, have an authority and penetration that far exceed the Greek testimony; in many cases, they provide the best evidence we have for the details of Indian life at this time, the Indians themselves having always been remarkably unconcerned to set down straightforward descriptions of their own daily life.

The Chinese testimony comes from four pilgrims in search of authentic Buddhist scriptures, most of whom struggled past the Taklamakan desert and across the Hindu Kush to enter India through this northern route. They came at intervals of about a century. Each of them, besides bringing home quant.i.ties of Buddhist ma.n.u.scripts which they then set about translating, went on to write a memoir after their return to China.

Fa-Xian (), the first whose tale has survived, travelled to India via the Hindu Kush from AD 400 to 414, returning by sea. For three of these years he was at Pataliputra, 'learning to read the books in Sanskrit* and to converse in that language, and in copying the precepts'.18 (His comrade Do-Zhing was so impressed with the holy life of the Indian sramanas that he decided not to go home.) Fa-Xian then moved down the Ganges to another major city, Champa (near modern Bhagalpur), where he spent two more years, princ.i.p.ally seeking to acquire Buddhist texts,19 before an extremely eventful voyage home via 'Ye-po-ti' or Yava-dvipa (Java). He says he had resided in central India for six years in all.20 In 518 Song-Yun () came. He penetrated no farther than Nagarahara (Jalalabad) and Puruapura (Peshawar), at either end of the Khyber pa.s.s, which now links Afghanistan and Pakistan; and returned to China by the same route after three years.

Then, in 629, the most famous of them all, Xuan-Zang (), reached India by stealth (the Chinese border being closed at the time), and after a three-year journey stayed for ten years, mostly as a student at Nalanda university outside Pataliputra, but also undertaking a journey around most of the south of the subcontinent.

Xuan-Zang was followed, a generation later, in 671, by a pilgrim called Yi-Jing (), Yi-Jing travelled by sea from Canton, but he stopped at the Indianised kingdom of ri Vijaya (Palembang) in southern Sumatra for two years of Sanskrit study. (He wrote: 'if a Chinese priest wishes to go to the west to understand and read there, he would be wise to spend a year or two in Fo-s.h.i.+ [Vijaya], and practise the proper rules there; he might then go on to central India.') He himself then proceeded to the university of Nalanda, where he studied for ten years. Afterwards, he returned by sea to ri Vijaya, where he spent most of his time until 695, organising the translation of Buddhist texts from Sanskrit into Chinese, and writing two memoirs: On eminent monks who sought the law in the West, and On the spiritual law, sent from the Southern Seas.21 India for them was the home of Buddhist enlightenment. But it was also a fascinating country in its own right. Their accounts of their time there are very largely taken up with travelogue, but Xuan-Zang is particularly detailed about the intellectual life he encountered, and to which he contributed, during his stay. He wrote: The letters of their alphabet were arranged by Brahmadeva, and their forms have been handed down from the first till now. They are forty-seven in number, and are combined so as to form words according to the object, and according to the circ.u.mstances [viz. tenses, and local cases]: there are other forms [viz. inflexions] used. This alphabet has spread in different directions and formed diverse branches, according to the circ.u.mstances; therefore there have been slight modifications in the sounds of the words [viz. spoken language]; but in its great features there has been no change. Middle India preserves the original character of the language in its integrity. Here the p.r.o.nunciation is soft and agreeable, and like the language of the Devas [viz. the G.o.ds*]. The p.r.o.nunciation of the words is clear and pure, and fit as a model for all men. The people of the frontiers have contracted several erroneous modes of p.r.o.nunciation; for according to the licentious habits of the people, so will be the corrupt nature of their language.22 Strictly speaking, Manu's contemporary conception of Madhyadesa ('midland') would, as we have seen, have excluded Magadha and the region of the lower Ganges as too far to the east. But in practice we can infer from Xuan-Zang that in his day the speech of 'Middle India' included the language of Pataliputra, ancient capital of several Indian empires, and of Nalanda, even then the pre-eminent university in the land.

The spread of Sanskrit.

Sanskrit in India.

Sanskrit first appears to us, as do most of its Indo-European sister languages, as the speech of conquering warriors, well capable of using horses and wheeled vehicles to establish domination over their neighbours, and turn them into serfs and subjects. The way of life is familiar from heroic poetry of Indo-European peoples in every direction: men who fight from chariots, speak forthrightly, and care for their own personal honour more than life itself. When, in the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata, Krishna advises Arjuna on his duty that day, he could be speaking to the Greek Achilles attacking Troy (a thousand years earlier), or the Irishman Cuchulainn standing against the hosts of Connacht (in a thousand years to come).

svadharmam api cavekya na vikampitum arhasi:

dharmyaddhi yuddhacchreyo 'nyat katriyasya na vidyate.