Gāndhārī

Abstract

The word Gāndhārī has been chosen to head this study as a term sufficiently wide in its scope to embrace the forms of the one Middle Indian dialect of the north-west of India, centred in the old Gāndhāra region, around modern Peshawar, and which we meet in most varied sources. Under this name I propose to include those inscriptions of Aśoka which are recorded at Shahbazgaṛhi and Mansehra in the Kharoṣṭhī script, the vehicle for the remains of much of this dialect: To be included also are the following sources: the Buddhist literary text, the Dharmapada found in Khotan, written likewise in Kharoṣṭhī, of which a new reading of the text available in facsimile is given in BSOAS 11. 488–512; the Kharoṣṭhī documents on wood, leather, and silk from Caḍ'ota (the Niya site) on the border of the ancient kingdom of Khotan, which represented the official language of the capital Krorayina, K 572, 512 lou-lan <ləu-lan (lou in a series with alternation of k and l) of the Shan-shan kingdom, and of one document, no. 661, dated in the reign of the Khotana maharaya rayatiraya hinajha dheva ṿijida-siṃha. With this more copious material must be grouped the scattered traces of the same Middle Indian dialect in Khotanese, Tibetan, Agnean, Kuchean, the earlier Chinese Buddhist transliterations, as, in particular, in the Dīrghāgama of the Dharmaguptaka ṡect and the remains in Sogdian, Uigur Turkish, and in Mongol (in living use), and also in Manchu texts. The modern Dardic languages Ṣiṇā, Khowar, Phalūᵛa and others represent the same type of Middle Indian. Much material in Chinese texts, for most of us hidden and inaccessible, remains to be gathered and sifted. The preliminary studies of P. Pelliot in Les noms propres dans les traductions chinoises du Milindapañha (JA 1914. 2. 379–419), of Fr. Weller in his paper Über den Aufbau des Pāṭikasuttanta (Asia Major 5. 1928), and of E. Waldschmidt in his Bruchstücke buddhistischer Sūtras aus dem zentralasiatischen Sanskritkanon I, 1932, have hardly realized the importance of this North-Western Prakrit.