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’ or ‘cooked’, depending on whether they had begun to settle to civilised Chinese ways. Not that this multiplicity betokened any particular discernment or respect for the lesser breeds. Although the different words were part of the language, they were often lumped together, e.g. Róngdí, Yídí, or used undiscriminatingly. In fact, the monosyllabic blanket terms are supplemented with more specific terms for particular tribes. These were often written out, as a kind of Chinese private joke, with insulting characters, e.g. nú, ‘slave’, in Xiōngnú, and wō, ‘dwarf’, in Wōgŭo, ‘dwarf-realm’, i.e. Japan. With urbane malice, this chanced to be pronounced in Japanese identically with wa, ‘harmony’, the term the Japanese preferred when referring to themselves.

* The famous Chinese novels of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, notably Hongloumeng, “The Dream of the Red Chamber’, by Cao Xueqin, Sanguozhi Yanyo, ‘Romance of the Three Kingdoms’, by Luo Guanzhong, and Xiyouji, ‘Journey to the West’, by Wu Cheng-en, were all written in this dialect of Chinese.

† There were also a number of attempts to replace Chinese characters with a romanised script, but with the acknowledged difficulty of finding a system that could be neutral in terms of the different dialects, none succeeded in becoming anything more than an aid to learners and foreigners. The Pinyin romanisation used in this book represents standard Mandarin, and is now close to being an international standard. It was developed in collaboration with Russian scholars, and published officially in 1957.

5

Charming Like a Creeper: The Cultured Career of Sanskrit

bhāā praśastā sumano lateva

keām na cetāsy āvarjayati

Language, auspicious, charming, like a creeper, whose minds does it not win over?*

(sūkta—traditional maxim)

The story in brief

There is a persistent image of Sanskrit as a creeping plant, luxuriant and full blossomed. Over two thousand years it spread itself round the centres of Asian population: from north to south of the Indian subcontinent, and thence to South-East Asia and the East Indies, to the Tibetan plateau and to the Far East.

The word Sanskrit (saskta) means ‘composed’ or ‘synthesised’. It is a term for the language as formulated in the grammar books, contrasting it with its colloquial dialects, known as the Prakrits (prāta), the ‘naturals’. It also distinguishes it from an older form, sometimes called Vedic, known from its use in the Veda, ‘the knowledge’: these are hymns to the gods which appear to go back to the earliest days of the language as spoken in India, in the last centuries of the second millennium BC, but which are still recited unchanged in Hindu rituals today. Most of the modern languages of northern and central India are descendants of Sanskrit, developed versions of the Prakrits, much as the Romance languages developed from forms of vulgar Latin. But outside the Indian subcontinent, Sanskrit was never taken up as a popular language; it remained purely a medium of learned communication and sacred expression, strongest where the dominant religion had come from India.

Although it is religious tradition which has proved the most reliable preserver of Sanskrit in many an avatāra (’descent’, as of a divine being from heaven), and despite the heavy association, in the West today, of the language with transcendental spiritualism, Sanskrit was never just a liturgical language.

Even the Vedic corpus contains a joyous yet wry evocation of māūkā,1 ‘frogs’, doubly like the priestly caste of Brahmans: they take a vow of silence for a year (until the rainy season); and when they do pipe up ‘one of them repeats the speech of the other, as the learner does of his teacher’. It also brings us the wry self-pity of a compulsive gambler,2 enslaved to babhrava, ‘the browns’, the nuts then used as dice: rājā cid ebhyo nama it koti, ‘even a king bows before them...’ he excuses himself, going on: tasmai komi, ‘na dhanā ruadhmi’ daśāham prācīs, ‘tad tam vadāmi’. ‘I show him my empty palms: “I am not holding out on you—it’s the truth, I