Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

The commentary tends to be focused at a fairly superficial level, for example the presence of gumnosophístai , or naked sages, and the fact that male and female students were on a par as disciples to the Śramans. Megasthenes apparently never understood that the Brahmans are in fact one of the ‘tribes’, i.e. castes, that he had distinguished; nor that ‘forest-dwellers’ (what his hosts would have called vanaprastha ) are not a species of Śraman, but rather those who have reached a certain period of life, whether Brahman or Śraman.

India remained the fabulous source of exotic products for the Greeks and beyond them the Romans. In fact, the truest elements of Sanskrit lore that they ever absorbed were the names of some of their favourite substances: canvas (Greek karpasos , ‘cotton’, from karpāsa ), ginger (Greek zingiber from śṛngavera , named after a town on the Ganges), pepper (Greek peperi from pippali , ‘berry’), sugar (Greek sakkharon from śarkarā , ‘grit’)— originally characterised by Alexander’s admiral Nearchus as honey coming from reeds without the aid of bees. [380]

Megasthenes’ work, which came to form Europe’s knowledge of India up until the Renaissance, was in some ways lacking in understanding, and never offered any appreciation of philosophy, language or literature. In one case, a sage joked that since the conversation took place through three interpreters, they were as likely to get a clear idea of the philosophy being expounded as to purify water by running it through mud. [381]

But this did not mean that the Greeks who lived closer in were similarly lacking. One Greek king of the Panjab, Menander (second century BC), in fact became immortalised for his penetrating interest in Buddhism in the form of the Pali classic Milinda-pañha , or ‘Questions of King Milinda’: ‘Many were the arts and sciences he knew—holy tradition and secular law; the Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika systems of philosophy; arithmetic, music; medicine; the four Vedas , the Purānas and the Itihāsas; astronomy, magic, causation and spells; the art of war; poetry; and property-conveyancing—in a word, the full nineteen.’ [382]

And another Indo-Greek of the same period, announcing himself as Heliodorus, Greek ambassador ( yonadūta ) from King Antialkidas, left an inscription in perfect Prakrit on a column still standing at Besnagar in Madhya Pradesh. It ends with the spiritual precept:

trīni amutapādāni…suanuṯhitāni

neyaṃti svagam dame cāga apramāda

Three steps to immortality, when correctly followed,

lead to heaven: control, generosity, attention.

By contrast with Greek writers, who were in India largely as traders, conquerors or representatives of power, the Chinese came as serious students of India’s culture, and particularly Buddhism: some evidently learnt Sanskrit (with Pali and Magadhi Prakrit) in depth during their stay. Their descriptions, therefore, have an authority and penetration that far exceed the Greek testimony; in many cases, they provide the best evidence we have for the details of Indian life at this time, the Indians themselves having always been remarkably unconcerned to set down straightforward descriptions of their own daily life.

The Chinese testimony comes from four pilgrims in search of authentic Buddhist scriptures, most of whom struggled past the Taklamakan desert and across the Hindu Kush to enter India through this northern route. They came at intervals of about a century. Each of them, besides bringing home quantities of Buddhist manuscripts which they then set about translating, went on to write a memoir after their return to China.

Fa-Xian ( ), the first whose tale has survived, travelled to India via the Hindu Kush from AD 400 to 414, returning by sea. For three of these years he was at Pataliputra, ‘learning to read the books in Sanskrit [761]and to converse in that language, and in copying the precepts’. [383](His comrade Do-Zhing was so impressed with the holy life of the Indian śramanas that he decided not to go home.) Fa-Xian then moved down the Ganges to another major city, Champa (near modern Bhagalpur), where he spent two more years, principally seeking to acquire Buddhist texts, [384]before an extremely eventful voyage home via ‘Ye-po-ti’ or Yava-dvīpa (Java). He says he had resided in central India for six years in all. [385]

In 518 Song-Yun ( ) came. He penetrated no farther than Nagarahāra (Jalalabad) and Puruṣapūra (Peshawar), at either end of the Khyber pass, which now links Afghanistan and Pakistan; and returned to China by the same route after three years.

Then, in 629, the most famous of them all, Xuan-Zang ( ), reached India by stealth (the Chinese border being closed at the time), and after a three-year journey stayed for ten years, mostly as a student at Nālandā university outside Pataliputra, but also undertaking a journey around most of the south of the subcontinent.

Xuan-Zang was followed, a generation later, in 671, by a pilgrim called Yi-Jing ( ), Yi-Jing travelled by sea from Canton, but he stopped at the Indianised kingdom of Śrī Vijaya (Palembang) in southern Sumatra for two years of Sanskrit study. (He wrote: ‘if a Chinese priest wishes to go to the west to understand and read there, he would be wise to spend a year or two in Fo-Shi [Vijaya], and practise the proper rules there; he might then go on to central India.’) He himself then proceeded to the university of Nalanda, where he studied for ten years. Afterwards, he returned by sea to Śrī Vijaya, where he spent most of his time until 695, organising the translation of Buddhist texts from Sanskrit into Chinese, and writing two memoirs: On eminent monks who sought the law in the West , and On the spiritual law, sent from the Southern Seas . [386]

India for them was the home of Buddhist enlightenment. But it was also a fascinating country in its own right. Their accounts of their time there are very largely taken up with travelogue, but Xuan-Zang is particularly detailed about the intellectual life he encountered, and to which he contributed, during his stay. He wrote:

The letters of their alphabet were arranged by Brahmādeva , and their forms have been handed down from the first till now. They are forty-seven in number, and are combined so as to form words according to the object, and according to the circumstances [viz. tenses, and local cases]: there are other forms [viz. inflexions] used. This alphabet has spread in different directions and formed diverse branches, according to the circumstances; therefore there have been slight modifications in the sounds of the words [viz. spoken language]; but in its great features there has been no change. Middle India preserves the original character of the language in its integrity. Here the pronunciation is soft and agreeable, and like the language of the Devas [viz. the gods [762]]. The pronunciation of the words is clear and pure, and fit as a model for all men. The people of the frontiers have contracted several erroneous modes of pronunciation; for according to the licentious habits of the people, so will be the corrupt nature of their language. [387]

Strictly speaking, Manu’s contemporary conception of Madhyadeśa (’midland’) would, as we have seen, have excluded Magadha and the region of the lower Ganges as too far to the east. But in practice we can infer from Xuan-Zang that in his day the speech of ‘Middle India’ included the language of Pataliputra, ancient capital of several Indian empires, and of Nalanda, even then the pre-eminent university in the land.