Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [113]
The religious distinction always had some linguistic implications, the Hindus favouring classical Sanskrit, while the Buddhists preferred the closely related but somewhat simpler Pali. As time wore on, there was also a tendency for Pali to be reclothed in archaic Sanskrit forms, giving rise to the particular style of Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit. Real learning, and creativity, in classical Sanskrit tended to be at its best in the Hindu areas, such as Champa, Cambodia, Java and Bali.
Despite the Buddha’s original urgings to his disciples to leave behind strict linguistic codes and work in any vernacular (sakayā niruttiyā) in order to get the message across, the Buddhist scriptures remained in Pali in South-East Asia, where—in contrast with China and Tibet—there was no major effort to translate them into local languages. Pali became an esoteric liturgical language, unknown to the general population, but apparently without adverse effects on the spread of Buddhism.
Nor was there any converse tendency to have Pali, or some form of Sanskrit, taken up as a language of general communication outside Buddhist liturgy and debate. There is no secular literature in Pali, even if the Jātaka tales, which nominally recount the past lives of the Buddha, are rather like such other story books as Aesop’s Fables, or its Indian equivalent, the Pañcatantra. And in South-East Asia, where Pali survives as a liturgical language, the local vernacular has nothing to do with it: Burmese, Thai, Khmer, Acehnese, Malay and Javanese are all unrelated to Pali, heavy as they are with loans from the Indian languages.
Buddhism has proved a faith of remarkable attractiveness from India outward to the north and east, and so Pali and Sanskrit are extremely well known in these vast areas. But they have remained no more than liturgical languages. As a result, Buddhism’s linguistic effects have been far weaker than those of Christianity or Islam. After all, Latin, the language of Western Christianity, provided the foundation for the growth of a common language in the monasteries and then the universities of Europe in this same period (AD 500-1500). Islam propagated Arabic all round North Africa, Arabia, Palestine and Mesopotamia, persisting up to the present day, both in unchanged form as an international lingua franca for the educated and, with local variations, as the basis of many vernaculars. There is no comparable linguistic union of Buddhists, in their daily languages.
As for how the language was used in this part of Sanskrit’s story, there is little to say. In Hinduism, the virtue implicit in the very sound of the Vedas had long since been separated from any need to understand their meaning. Now once again for the Buddhists, with the language no longer widely understood, but still widely heard in chants and ceremonial, its substance and sound began to be given a mystic value of their own. Sanskrit became for many a language of mantra, ‘incantation’ and maala, ‘circle, sacred diagram’. In medieval Japan, repeating namu amida butsu, a version of nama Amitabha Buddha, ‘Bowing to you, O Resplendent Enlightened One’, was the infallible means of reaching the Pure Land after death. And to this day millions of Tibetans chant om mai padme hum, ‘Hail the jewel in the lotus’, a mystical phrase from Tantric Buddhism, its original sexual imagery now quite forgotten.
More pragmatically, the technology and systems associated with writing and analysing Sanskrit provided the basis for literacy in other languages. In this way, sacred languages, unavailable for direct communication among people, could still go on inspiring developments in the