The panel aims to explore how early South Asian Buddhists utilized languages, embraced, and critiqued Brahmanical language theories, developed their own theories of language, and achieved literary innovations through multilingualism. We will examine the practical and theoretical aspects of language as understood by the early South Asian Buddhists. Individual presentations will encompass topics such as the stage of fluid Middle Indo-Aryan languages and their role in the formation of Buddhist canons. We will reconsider the fluidity of the MIA texts and the process of linguistic standardization in light of intellectual reflections on the nature of language in commentarial and scholastic texts, as well as associated knowledge of languages (Abhidharma, grammar, etymology, etc.) Additionally, we will seek to understand how regional and transregional languages functioned in their cultural historical contexts, allowing the textual traditions to establish transregional connections and contribute to the formation of local literary, religious, and political identities.
One topic that has long sustained the interest of Buddhist studies scholars and historians is the advent of writing in South Asia and the early written transmission of Buddhist literature. Now that we have a large body of evidence from the Gandhāran Buddhist literary tradition, which provides the earliest extant material witnesses of Buddhist manuscripts, we can begin to ask new questions about a Gandharan scribal or literary culture. What might the regional forces have been just before and after the turn of the common era that led Buddhists to write down their texts in Gandhara? What role did Gandhara’s unique language and script (Gāndhārī/Kharoṣṭhī) play in developing its own scribal culture? Given the important role of language in the identity of different Buddhist communities, can we identify in Gandharan Buddhist materials anything like a Gandhari Buddhist language politics?
I aim to explore Yogācāra texts reflecting the Buddhist history of Sanskritization. In the northern Abhidharma and Yogācāra literature, the term vyañjana means alphabet syllable or letter for constituting expressions of Buddhist teachings. Commentators on the Abhidharmasamuccaya (AS) state that vyañjana consists of 42 arapacana syllables regarded as originally formulated in the region of Gandhāra. Following the definition of vyañjana in AS, however, the Yogācārabhūmi explains 48 alphabet syllables used for formulating Sanskrit expressions. This change reveals the Sanskritization and the Brahmanization that Yogācāra confronted and accepted. Yogācāras modified their attitude toward Sanskrit and adjusted the Buddhist terminology in accordance with the vocabulary in the Sanskrit grammar. Moreover, Yogācāra did not limit their curriculum to the Buddhist doctrine and discipline but included Sanskrit grammar, mathematics, and astronomy of the Brahman tradition. My presentation will show that the examination of Yogācāra literature helps us widen our knowledge of Sanskritization in the Buddhist tradition. Furthermore, I will also argue that Indian Yogācāra commentators in 6th C.E. were aware of this Sanskritizaiton earlier Yogācāra confronted and documented this awareness.
The Vedic knowledge form of semantic derivation is an indigenous commentarial method widely embraced across the Buddhist and Brahmanical traditions. These religious traditions utilized this method to elucidate their sacred texts, investing significant effort in reconfiguring the explanations to support their religious theory and practice. This paper delves into the diverse explanations found within the Gandhari commentaries, Pali texts, and Yaska’s Nirukta. It highlights how Buddhist texts in South Asia inherited these interpretations and showed traces of early sources in the Middle Indic forms. In the instance where a noun can be explained in a way that contradicts its current contextual usage, Buddhist commentators elaborated extensively in their commentaries to reconcile such contradictions. The study demonstrates that Buddhist semantic derivation has a longstanding tradition predating the early commentaries, consistently aligns with an underlying Buddhist ideological framework, and reflects an underlying understanding of the stable relationship between sound and its referent.
Across Buddhist literary traditions, texts are often rewritten and repurposed. Multiple tellings of stories appear in a range of forms, excerpts of certain texts are interpolated into others, editors expand and contract sources, and translations abound. This paper asks what Buddhists are doing when they engage in such practices, and with that, what revisions can reveal about South Asian Buddhist theories of language. A close, comparative reading of three related texts serves as the basis for exploring a few of the ways Theravāda Buddhists have utilized language creatively, both to bring entirely new texts into being by altering the language of earlier texts, and also to re-imagine and re-present other texts by engaging with language’s surplus of meaning.
| Roy Tzohar | roytzo@tauex.tau.ac.il | View |