The weakness of ancient Indian literature

Nothing definite is known about Pāṇini's life, not even the century he lived in (he lived almost certainly after the 7th and before the 3rd century BC). According to tradition, he was born in Shalatula, near the Indus river, in Gandhara (now in Pakistan), and lived circa 520�460 BC. His grammar defines Classical Sanskrit, so that Pāṇini per definition lived at the end of the Vedic period: he notes a few special rules, marked chandasi ("in the hymns") to account for forms in the Vedic scriptures that had fallen out of use in the spoken language of his time, indicating that Vedic Sanskrit was already archaic, but still a comprehensible dialect.

An important hint for the dating of Pāṇini is the occurrence of the word yavanānī (in 4.1.49, either "Greek woman", or "Greek script"). There would have been no first-hand knowledge of Greeks in Gandhara before the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 330s BC, but it is likely that the name was known via Old Persian yauna, so that Pāṇini may well have lived as early as the time of Darius the Great (ruled 521 BC�485/6 BC).

It is not known whether Pāṇini himself used writing for the composition of his work. Some people argue that a work of such complexity would have been impossible to compile without written notes, while others allow for the possibility that he might have composed it with the help of a group of students whose memories served him as 'notepads'. Writing first reappears in India (since the Indus script) in the form of the Brāhmī script from at least the 6th-5th century BC, so it is also possible that he would have known and used a writing system (although these early instances of writing are from Tamil Nadu in Southern India, quite distant from Gandhara; the presence of the Brāhmī script in Northern India prior to the 3rd century BC is uncertain).

The Kharoṣṭhī script, also known as the Gāndhārī script, is an ancient abugida (a kind of script) used by the Gandhara culture of historic northwest Indian subcontinent to write the Gāndhārī and Sanskrit languages (the Gandhara kingdom was located along the present-day border between Afghanistan and Pakistan between the Indus River and the Khyber Pass). It was in use from the 4th century BC until it died out in its homeland around the 3rd century AD. It was also in use along the Silk Road where there is some evidence it may have survived until the 7th century in the remote way stations of Khotan and Niya.

Scholars are not in agreement as to whether the Kharoṣṭhī script evolved gradually, or was the work of a mindful inventor. An analysis of the script forms shows a clear dependency on the Aramaic alphabet but with extensive modifications to support the sounds found in Indic languages. One model is that the Aramaic script arrived with the Achaemenid conquest of the region in 500 BC and evolved over the next 200+ years to reach its final form by the 3rd century BC. However, no intermediate forms have yet been found to confirm this evolutionary model, and rock and coins inscriptions from the 3rd century BC onward show a unified and mature form.

The study of the Kharoṣṭhī script was recently invigorated by the discovery of the Gandharan Buddhist Texts, a set of birch-bark manuscripts written in Kharoṣṭhī, discovered near the Afghanistan city of Hadda just west of the Khyber Pass. The manuscripts were donated to the British Library in 1994. The entire set of manuscripts are dated to the 1st century AD, making them the oldest Buddhist manuscripts in existence.

The major conclusion shared by the studies of Fussman, von Hin�ber, and Falk is that at least the Br�hm� script, and possibly also Kharo.s.th�, originated in the Mauryan period and not earlier. Although they disagree in specifics, especially with regard to the date of the development of Br�hm�, all three agree that Kharo.s.th�, which was a regional script of the far northwest, was older than the pan-Indian Br�hm� and influenced its formation. The three authors share a sharp skepticism about alleged literary evidence for writing in pre-Ashokan India, and are inclined to interpret the situation empirically, on the grounds of what we definitely know, rather than speculating on what might have been. They are inclined to take the absence of incontrovertible evidence for early writing as an indication that it did not exist, rather than, as have earlier writers, adding up the bits of inconclusive hints and theoretical possibilities to reconstruct a hypothetical pre-history for the early scripts.

Among the four studies discussed here, only Kenneth R. Norman's article on "The Development of Writing in India and its Effect upon the P�li Canon" follows a more traditional path. He analyzes certain patterns of textual variation in Pali texts (e.g. hatthivattika / hattivatika , pp.239--40, and samaya / sam�ja , p.241) which seem to reflect an early redaction in a script which did not represent geminate consonants or differentiate vowel length, and identifies this script as an early prototype of Br�hm� used in Magadha in pre-Mauryan times (p.243). Norman finds it "difficult to accept that Br�hm� was devised as a single complete writing system at one and the same time during the reign of Candragupta" (p.245), [8] and considers it "even less likely that Br�hm� was invented at the time of Ashoka for the specific purpose of writing his inscriptions" (p.246). His objections to what may be referred to as the "invention theory" of the origin of Br�hm� mainly concern the irregularities and inconsistencies of the graphic system, for instance inconsistencies in the formation of the graphs for aspirate consonants, some of which are clearly based on the corresponding non-aspirates (e.g. � .ta and � .tha ) while others (e.g. � ta and � tha [not cited by Norman]) are not so derivable. Such patterns lead Norman to conclude that Br�hm� " evolved [my emphasis] in a haphazard way, with some of its ak.sara s being borrowed from some other source" (p.245).

But von Hin�ber in Der Beginn der Schrift... interprets the patterns of textual variation in Pali which underlie Norman's theory quite differently, noting that geminate consonants were still not regularly noted in Indian inscriptions of the 1st century BC when the Pali texts were presumably first written down (p.64), and that long � was often left unindicated in early Br�hm� inscriptions from Sri Lanka (p.66). Von Hin�ber's arguments are persuasive if we can assume that the orthographic standards of early inscriptions also prevailed in contemporary (i.e. pre-Christian era) religious or literary texts in manuscript form. However, although we do not have any manuscripts this old, it is not impossible that stricter orthographic standards, including the notation of geminates, might have applied in them, in contrast to the standards of inscriptions which at this period were often still treated quite casually in terms of orthography and layout. Nonetheless, it must be conceded that Norman's arguments rest on a largely hypothetical basis and that underlying orthographic inconsistencies reflected in much later manuscripts of the Pali canon are hardly cogent grounds for the reconstruction of a proto-Br�hm� of the pre-Mauryan era. Norman's position is essentially an affirmation of the more moderate version of the old school of thought, which places the origin of Br�hm� in or around the 5th century BC. But his arguments for such a position, like the those of others to be discussed below, are cast into doubt by the three other new studies.