Scholars are divided on whether Buddhism rejected Sanskrit because it was seen to be associated with social ills the Buddha despised. But the language’s later revival is a fascinating story not fully told 

In his much discussed, panned as well as hailed book, Sanskrit: The language of the Gods in the World of Men, American Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock argues that the ancient language had fallen on hard times during the rise of the Buddhist era in India beginning with Gautama Buddha’s emergence — with many scholars, especially the Buddhist ones, discarding it in favour of languages such as Pali for their spiritual writing. Pollock goes on to say that Sanskrit could make a comeback only some 500 years later, albeit when the Buddhist influences were still significant. Moreover, the resurgence was significantly evident in the texts penned by Buddhist scholars. This is fascinating, because it opens up two million-dollar questions: Why did the Buddha and his followers discard SanskritIJ What prompted the revival of the language by and among the very community which had once turned its back on itIJ In sum, what was the reason for this love-hate relationshipIJ

Indeed, such was the robustness in the return of Sanskrit that the language continued to flourish through very adverse times even many centuries later, and during good parts of the Mughal rule (Audrey Truschke’s book, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court, offers a compelling, scholarly account of the high status the language enjoyed between the mid-16th and the mid-17th centuries, from the reigns of Akbar to Shah Jahan, to be disrupted only with Aurangzeb’s arrival).

Pollock has interesting insights to offer. They are interesting, because, whether we concur with them or not, they lead us to many tantalising possibilities all of which add to the richness of our understanding. But before we proceed, it must be noted that many scholars do not accept Pollock’s contention that Sanskrit had been virtually banished in the prime of the Buddhist period. Author and researcher Rajiv Malhotra, who has emerged as a serious challenger to the American Indologist’s global connect and ideas, discounts the claim in his recently published book, The Battle for Sanskrit: Is Sanskrit Political or SacredIJ Oppressive or liberatingIJ Dead or AliveIJ He says that “Pollock’s ideas are based on a cherished premise of Western Indologists that Buddha was opposed to the Vedas” (and by extension to Sanskrit). Malhotra quotes from Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Hinduism and Buddhism to drive home Coomaraswamy’s point that Buddha was not a repudiator but a “re-former of Vedic knowledge”. He goes further to state, “There is no core text attributed to the Buddha himself calling for a varna-free society. Nor did the Buddha make any outright denunciation of Brahmins.”

Malhotra argues that Pollock developed a “new chronology of Sanskrit history to support his claim that the Buddhists started a programme of detoxifying Sanskrit” of its Vedic influences and making it appropriate for kavya (or vyavaharika usage). The result, if one takes Pollock’s assertion, was that the Brahmins continued to practise their rituals in a marginalised way and bided their time to strike back.

There can be (and is) a contrary opinion, but Pollock’s contention cannot be brushed aside as being inconsequential, because it is supported by historical material. In his book, he has delved into evidence that demonstrates a certain level of waning of the influence of Sanskrit and its chief promoter, the Brahmin community, in Buddhism’s hey-day. Whether this was a repudiation of the Vedas, of Sanskrit, and of the so-called Brahmin-dominated social structure, or a mere recalibration of the system with the arrival of a new spiritual stream that Gautama Buddha symbolised and which took the shape of religion, is open to interpretation. On his part, Pollock is certain that the evidence he has, “suggests that at the semantic level, to start with, Buddhism sought to turn the old vaidika world upside down by the very levers that world provided”.

Pollock believes that Buddhism rejected Sanskrit in the course of its “confrontation with the socio-religious practises for which Sanskrit was the principal vehicle”. He quotes from a text on Buddhist monastic discipline, in which the Buddha himself is said to have directed certain monks who were unsure of the language path they must take: “You are not to put the Buddha’s words into (Vedic-Sanskrit) verse. To do this would be to commit an infraction. I authorise you, monks, to learn the Buddha’s words each in his own dialect.” The American Sanskritist then builds on this revelation to say that, “for the following four centuries or more the Buddha’s words would be redacted in a range of languages other than Sanskrit”.

While Pollock offers a variety of his own reasons for the Buddhists to have turned their backs on Sanskrit, he is unsure of why Sanskrit returned as the language of choice for them from the second century CE on. He speculates at one stage in the book that it could be because of the influence of the Brahmins who had converted to Buddhism but had held on to their deep-rooted Sanskritic culture. But he admits to being otherwise clueless, when he states, “What exactly prompted the Buddhists to abandon their hostility to the language after half a millennium  the first instance of giving up resistance to Sanskrit and giving into its power, a process that would be reenacted time and again in Indian history  and finally adopt it for scripture, philosophy, and a wider range of other textual forms, some of which they would help to invent, is a question for which no convincing arguments have yet been offered.”

And, much as Pollock holds on to the belief that Sanskrit had essentially been the ‘language of the gods’  more paramarthika sat than vyavaharika sat, to begin with  he cannot but acknowledge from the choice made by the Buddhist community, that the decision (to return to Sanskrit) “represented an astonishing expansion of the realm of Sanskrit, far beyond the vaidika sanctum to which it had been restricted for a millennium…”

We are then left with a clutch of possibilities for the Buddhists’ ‘return’ to the Sanskrit fold, none of which is definitive. It is possible that the Buddhist scholars realised the innate strength of the language and its unbreakable connect with the Indian cultural ethos, without which they could not effectively promote their faith. It is also possible that they did not find Sanskrit to be socially oppressive in the way they were led to believe in the early years of Buddhism and during the euphoria of the creation of a new social order that supposedly contrasted with Vedic-Sanskrit traditions. Whatever the reason, it appears that Sanskrit had in it what we today refer to as the ‘oomph factor’  a spirited vigour.