Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [118]
One side of this story is like the survival of Hebrew: a holy tradition, built on recitation of texts in a language that no one spoke any longer, has preserved the language more or less intact. But the other side is like nothing else on earth: it is as if the Hebrew tradition of gematria, which assigned numerical values to letters and by so adding them gave mystically significant numbers to phrases, † had defined, in a set of equations, an alternative means of representing the whole Hebrew language, so preserving its grammar and pronunciation quite independently of what was written in the Torah and Talmud.
For all this, the attractiveness to outsiders of Sanskrit and the Indian culture it expressed remains elusive. I have questioned Indian friends about it, pointing out the apparently unreasonable readiness of Mon, Munda or Mongolian to accept Aryan culture, language and religion when presented to them without coercion. They point out how little was asked of converts, either to take up as new observance or to cast aside from their old ways. Offerings are made to deities, but explicit duties as an adherent of Hinduism or Buddhism are few. Hinduism can apparently find a place within it for all other faiths: old allegiances can simply be incorporated, as in the foundation myth of Funan. Mahayana Buddhism was as accommodating as Hinduism, with an eternity of universes and gods in its purview. Other forms of Buddhism were oriented in a completely different direction, giving guidance on ethics and personal enlightenment, but leaving old beliefs and allegiances undisturbed.
But this is purely the absence of an obstacle: it does not explain why in so many different contexts people have chosen to follow the Indian example rather than stick with their old ways. The decision to adopt the new culture transmitted in Sanskrit was no doubt often made by members of an elite, then enforced or induced in a wider population. The decision to adopt Buddhism may more often have been for individuals to make. But at whatever level the decision was made, the decision-makers must have felt they were taking a step towards a wider, more open world—opening links to the surmised wealth of India and the Western world, and to its ancient and elaborate wisdom.
The decision will not have been taken once and for all, nor with any prescience of the fundamental changes in Indo-China, China and the East that it would bring about. But by and large the decision, wherever taken, stuck. And the absence of any military inducement, either at the outset, or in the later years or centuries when both Indians and the converts were well aware each of the other, argues that the cultural assimilation was recognised somehow as good value, and well worth pursuing and developing.
Limiting weaknesses
And yet the human world of Sanskrit was not, and is not, without its disadvantages.
Militarily, it never created a strong defensible centre, tending to rely rather on natural barriers, which were periodically breached by invaders from the north-west. Socially, it remained conservative and stratified, preferring to theorise about why it was best for society to be closed and rigid, rather than to use its talents to innovate, militarily, politically or economically. In religion, Hinduism and Buddhism tended to create an other-worldly system of values, so undercutting practical concerns for loyalty and social cohesion, and compounding the fundamental weaknesses in defence and flexibility.
All these problems were implicit in the Sanskrit community. The creeper spread charmingly, but in time it tended to harden into an extremely intricate, and fairly unyielding, tangle of branches. In time, it would be pruned by unsympathetic hands.
We begin with the domains of war, diplomacy and government.
We have seen (from the record of inscriptions) that Sanskrit, at first a sacred language, established itself as the outward language for political statements only in the middle of the second century AD, 650 years after the grammarian Panini had