Theos-Talk Archives (December 1996 Message tt00041)

"Buddhist HYbrid Sanskrit" is a kind of catch-all category.  I
will try and give a clear exposition of it, particularly because
it is said that those who can't explain something simply to an
inquirer really don't understand that subject.  So here goes.

The Buddha may well have known classical Sanskrit, but certainly
didn't speak it to his disciples.  It was already a dead/dying
language for all practical purposes, except perhaps for courtly
drama, some poetry and of course Vedic/Upanishadic philosophy.
Almost no one spoke what we now call classical Sanskrit in the
5th century BCE on a daily basis except perhaps a tiny minority
of elite brahmins (males only).

However, a great many dialects had by that time descended from
the ancient Vedic Sanskrit, and they are variously grouped under
the heading "Prakrits." The dialect that the Buddha spoke, namely
Magadhi, is so called because his country of birth was the
ancient city-state of Magadha.  Many today assert that the "Pali"
language, which records the Theravada (southern) Buddhist
scriptures, is actually Magadhi itself, rather compressed and
stultified.  In any case, the Buddha and all those living at that
time in greater India spoke various dialects related to Sanskrit.
Some of these had southern Indian influence (proto-Tamil,
proto-Kannada, etc.) and others had Aramaic/Persian influence,
and other influences which need not detain us.

However, after the Buddha's death and several centuries had gone
by, classical Sanskrit rose among Buddhist circles as THE
language of learning, kind of like Latin rose as THE learned
language among Christians well after the fall of Rome.  Like the
Christian Latin Vulgate Bible, various Buddhist texts were then
re-written ("translated" we may say) into a classical Sanskrit.
This is called in linguistic circles "back-translation." Another
example of it would be Buddhist texts that originally came out of
China or Central Asia that were then back-translated into
Sanskrit in order to lend authenticity.

However, by the time these back-translations and revivals of
classical Sanskrit were taking place, a great deal of Sanskrit
learning had been lost among even most scholars.  Various
systematic "errors" crept in, if we will call them that,
influenced by dialects or sheer ignorance.  In short, the
"Sanskrit" that was used by these medieval (3rd-9th century CE)
Buddhist authors was not the classical Sanskrit standardized by
the great grammarian Panini (4th-3rd century BCE).

This rather odd "Sanskrit" used by the Buddhists had the
grammatical form and much of the vocabulary of ancient Sanskrit,
but is "hybrid" in the sense that much vocabulary is borrowed from
later, Prakrit dialects.  Roots of many verbs and nouns had
been forgotten or misunderstood, and so conjugation of verbs and
declension of nouns took strange turns.  The original meaning of
words had been lost in some cases, and were interpreted
incorrectly.  Words had "improper" endings.  Another way to look
at this however is to simply say it was another kind of Sanskrit,
rather than "wrong" or "bad" Sanskrit.

So medieval Buddhist ("Hybrid") Sanskrit is a kind of amalgam of
classical Sanskrit and 1,000 years of Prakrit dialects, and this
Hybrid Sanskrit isn't standardized either, it varies from place
to place.

Rich