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Updated: May 18, 2025
One very special peculiarity of the Hindu drama is that women, and persons of inferior rank, station, or caste are introduced as speaking the Prakrit or vulgarised Sanskrit, while the language of the higher and more educated classes is the classical Sanskrit of the present type.
The rest of the work marks a transitional stage in doctrine, just as its language is neither Prakrit or Sanskrit but some ancient vernacular brought into partial conformity with Sanskrit grammar. No Chinese translation is known. The Divyâvadâna is a collection of legends, part of which is known as the Asokâvadâna and gives an edifying life of that pious monarch.
THE LANGUAGE. Sanskrit is the literary language of the Hindus, and for two thousand years has served as the means of learned intercourse and composition. The name denotes cultivated or perfected, in distinction to the Prakrit or uncultivated, which sprang from it and was contemporary with it.
For this reason the priests of this religion prefer to write in the dialects used by the people, and indeed some of their principal works are written in Prakrit or in Pali. Among these are many legends, and chronicles, and books on theology and jurisprudence. The literary men of Buddhism are generally the priests, who receive different names in different countries.
The language of the canon is a variety of Prakrit , fairly ancient though more modern than Pali, and remarkable for its habit of omitting or softening consonants coming between two vowels, e.g. sûyam for sûtram, loo for loko . We cannot, however, conclude that it is the language in which the books were composed, for it is probable that the early Jains, rejecting Brahmanical notions of a revealed text, handed down their religious teaching in the vernacular and allowed its grammar and phonetics to follow the changes brought about by time.
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