Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (50 page)

A language that began as an Indo-European offshoot settled in a decidedly quiet corner of the world, the foothills of the Hindu Kush, spread as a vernacular all over the Indo-Gangetic plain, and as an elite language, borne by Hindu religion, to the rest of the Indian subcontinent. From there it spread eastward across the sea through trade, and became for a thousand years the cultural inspiration to a whole new subcontinent and archipelago. This was the autonomous growth of Sanskrit.

But one of the religions that had started in Sanskrit’s first millennium continued to grow through its second and third: Buddhism spread first with Sanskrit and the Prakrits across India and Indo-China. Then the religion showed that it could transcend its native state, its home in Indian culture. Moving northward and finally eastward, it won converts and flourished in Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Tibetan and Mongolian societies. Although the religion metamorphosed as it progressed across the world, Sanskrit and Pali travelled with it without significant change, as adjuncts to Buddhist higher learning wherever it took them. This was Sanskrit’s free ride, its vehicle Buddhism in all its many forms.

It is now time to consider what it was about Sanskrit which made it grow, and whether Buddhism itself may have owed something to this consummately charming form of human expression.

Sanskrit had many advantages. It was the language of a self-conscious elite, the Brahmans and Kshatriyas, who considered themselves entitled to dominate other peoples with whom they came into contact, and had the technical means to do so. Furthermore, their language was at the very centre of their own picture of their culture, since grammar was the queen of their sciences. Facility in Sanskrit was seen as the hallmark of civilised existence, of one’s place in the world as an
ārya
, but it was also something that was teachable, and was taught.

Beliefs about the true value of this knowledge gradually changed over the centuries, from the need to guarantee the cult of the gods, to maintenance of the social order, and then to enhancement of the patina of cultural appreciation.

Although some social forces promoted less elite forms of the language, both at a secular level (for example, in the practice of kings such as Aśoka) and in the spiritual world (for example, in the attitudes of the Buddha), they gradually lost out to the cultivated, self-conscious charm of the self-styled Perfected Language,
sa
sk
tā bhā
ā:
because of its elaborated descriptions and analyses of itself, it could always demonstrate what was best and why it was best. It thereby made itself irresistibly attractive to upwardly mobile institutions: Hindu kingdoms (such as that of Rudradaman) seeking wider recognition in India, Indo-Chinese dynasties (such as the
Śailendra
of Bnam) seeking to demonstrate their legitimacy, Buddhist schools wanting to endow their devotional texts with prestige.

The natural conservatism of institutions meant that their symbols would tend to ossify—witness the fate of the Pali language among the Buddhists, starting as an attempt at an unstuffy people’s lingua franca but ending up as just another classical language. India, with its caste system, was nothing if not a home of conservative institutions. Such conservatism always played into the hands of Sanskrit: it was defended through its own sutras as the unchanging linguistic standard, from which any change would mean decline and degradation.