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

Nevertheless, the quality of written Sanskrit that the natives acquired in this part of the world deviated hardly at all from that of India. We do not see strong ‘substrate influence’ in the texts written here. Talking of Cambodia, R. C. Majumdar remarks that its inscriptions, known from AD 475 to 1327, are generally ‘composed in beautiful and almost flawless kāvya —i.e. poetic—style, and some of them run to great lengths… Almost all the Sanskrit metres have been successfully used in these verses, and they exhibit a thorough acquaintance with the most developed rules and conventions of Sanskrit rhetoric and prosody.’ [399]The inscriptions are also full of learned, even witty, allusions to the Vedas and all the different branches of Indian learning, especially grammar.

Particularly accomplished was Queen Indradevi, consort of Jayavarman VII (who ruled in Cambodia 1181— c .1218): she was a pious Buddhist and taught the Buddhist nuns of three convents. She has left an inscription, in praise of her younger sister, another scholar, who had sadly died young: it runs to 102 verses in several different metres. [400]

Some of the literature written in Indo-China joined the canon of Sanskrit classics. Vararuci’s Sārasamuccaya (’collection of essences’) could be hard hitting: to show how views can differ, he evokes a woman’s breast—seen by her child, and by her husband; and then her dead body, seen first by an ascetic, then by her lover, and then by a dog. Later on, he prefigures Pascal’s wager in his advice to the atheist ( nāstika —literally the ‘isn’t-ist’): if there is no world after death, there is nothing to fear either way; but if there is, it will be the atheists who stand to suffer. [401]

Sanskrit texts apparently played an important role in the foundation of new Hindu cults, which might be founded to buttress newly independent states: so when Jayavarman freed Cambodia from Javanese control in the twelfth century, he invited a Brahman named Hiraṇyadāma (’Golden Cord’) to perform Tantric rites to guarantee this freedom, under its own ruler. The resulting cult of Devarāja (’god-king’) lasted for 250 years, explicitly based on four named śāstra texts. It could not have been done without Sanskrit, and the access to ancient wisdom that it implied.

The sense of numinous power infusing Sanskrit led on occasions to a sort of spiritual nostalgia. One king of Champa, Gangaraja, is said to have abdicated his throne so as to have the chance to give up the ghost on the banks of the Ganges. And, more public-spiritedly, there is evidence from an inscription put up at Vat Luong Kau in Laos that a king called Śrī Devanīka planned to set up a new Kurukṣetra at home as a substitute for the sheer holiness of the real Kurukṣetra north of Delhi. As the site of the Mahabharata’s great battle, it was peerless among shrines, but sadly inaccessible. He quotes the epic:

Pṛthivyāṃ Naimiṣam puṇyam antarīkṣe tu Puṣkaram Trāyānām api lokānām Kurukṣetram viśiṣyate.

On the earth the blessed Naimisha, in the ether Pushkara, But in the three worlds, Kurukshetra holds the crown. [402]

The long years of Indian influence came to an end only after a full millennium. A major jolt had already come in the thirteenth century, when the Mongols sacked Pagan and other Burmese kingdoms in the north. But it has been suggested by one of the leading scholars, not without nostalgia, that Indian civilisation was the victim of its own increasing popularity: ‘The underlying causes of this decline were the adoption of Indian civilization by an increasingly large number of natives who incorporated into it more and more of their original customs, and the gradual disappearance of a refined aristocracy, the guardian of Sanskrit culture.’ [403]

In any event, in the fifteenth century Vietnam expanded its influence into Champa, annexing permanently the south of Indo-China; and about the same time groups of mountain peoples, the Shan in Burma, and the Thai in Siam, established new kingdoms that thrust aside the old powers of Pagan and Angkor. Nonetheless, when founding their new capital, the Thai could not help calling it Ayutthaya, in direct tribute to the Hindu hero Rama’s residence, Ayodhya.

So far we have largely spoken of Sanskrit as a vehicle of Hinduism. And it seems that for the most part this is what it conveyed at first in South-East Asia. Fa-Xian, returning to China via Ye-po-ti ( Yava-dvīpa ) in the East Indies in the early fifth century AD, remarked: ‘in this country heretics and Brahmans flourish, but the law of Buddha is not much known’. [404]

To this day, Hinduism survives on the island of Bali, east of Java. However, elsewhere in South-East Asia the picture is now very different, Hinduism long ago replaced by Buddhism. This is the result of a long and complex, though not especially bloody, history of doctrinal contests between the two faiths. Hindu cults’ close associations with ruling dynasties ultimately worked against them, when those dynasties fell. But there was also competition among strains of Buddhism, Tantra , originally ‘the loom’ or ‘the framework’, Mahāyāna , ‘the great vehicle’ and Theravāda , ‘the docrine of the elders’. Theravada, buttressed by links with the Sinhala in Śri Lanka, ultimately triumphed in South-East Asia. Nevertheless, all these struggles took place against an unchallenged background of Indian learning.

Buddhist missionaries actually came very soon after the first Indian buccaneers and traders, if not along with them. Ceylonese chronicles tell of Aśoka sending two monks, Soṇa and Uttara , to Suvaṇṇabhūmi in the third century BC, [405]although the first archaeological records of Buddhist activity in South-East Asia (in the areas of modern Burma and Thailand) are from the fifth century AD. Hinduism was always a religion likely to appeal to kings and a ruling elite, but not voluntarily to the lower orders, the Śudras and outcastes, who are singularly downtrodden in the Hindu caste system; by contrast, Buddhism, with its egalitarian emphasis on personal quest for enlightenment, could in principle appeal much more widely. It seems likely that in the early days of Indian advance into the region both religions were represented; their complementary charms may even have served to back each other up, while promoting Indian culture among outsiders.

The religious distinction always had some linguistic implications, the Hindus favouring classical Sanskrit, while the Buddhists preferred the closely related but somewhat simpler Pali. As time wore on, there was also a tendency for Pali to be reclothed in archaic Sanskrit forms, giving rise to the particular style of Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit. Real learning, and creativity, in classical Sanskrit tended to be at its best in the Hindu areas, such as Champa, Cambodia, Java and Bali.

Despite the Buddha’s original urgings to his disciples to leave behind strict linguistic codes and work in any vernacular ( sakayā niruttiyā ) in order to get the message across, the Buddhist scriptures remained in Pali in South-East Asia, where—in contrast with China and Tibet—there was no major effort to translate them into local languages. Pali became an esoteric liturgical language, unknown to the general population, but apparently without adverse effects on the spread of Buddhism.

Nor was there any converse tendency to have Pali, or some form of Sanskrit, taken up as a language of general communication outside Buddhist liturgy and debate. There is no secular literature in Pali, even if the Jātaka tales, which nominally recount the past lives of the Buddha, are rather like such other story books as Aesop’s Fables, or its Indian equivalent, the Pañcatantra. And in South-East Asia, where Pali survives as a liturgical language, the local vernacular has nothing to do with it: Burmese, Thai, Khmer, Acehnese, Malay and Javanese are all unrelated to Pali, heavy as they are with loans from the Indian languages.