Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit (BHS) is a modern linguistic category applied to the language used in a class of Indian

Buddhist Buddhism ( , ), also known as Buddha Dharma and Dharmavinaya (), is an Indian religion or philosophical tradition based on teachings attributed to the Buddha. It originated in northern India as a -movement in the 5th century BCE, and ...

texts, such as the

Perfection of Wisdom A Tibetan painting with a Prajñāpāramitā sūtra at the center of the mandala Prajñāpāramitā ( sa, प्रज्ञापारमिता) means "the Perfection of Wisdom" or "Transcendental Knowledge" in Mahāyāna and Theravāda B ...

sutras. BHS is classified as a Middle Indo-Aryan language. It is sometimes called "Buddhist Sanskrit" or "Mixed Sanskrit".

Origin

Prior to this, Buddhist teachings are not known to have generally been recorded in the language of the Hindu elite. At the time of the Buddha, instruction in this language was restricted to Vedic study. While

Gautama Buddha Siddhartha Gautama, most commonly referred to as the Buddha, was a wandering ascetic and religious teacher who lived in South Asia during the 6th or 5th century BCE and founded Buddhism. According to Buddhist tradition, he was born in L ...

was probably familiar with what is now called Sanskrit, his teachings were apparently first promulgated in local languages. At one point he ruled against translating his teachings into Vedic, saying that to do so would be foolish—Vedic was by that time an archaic and obsolete language. After the work of the ancient Sanskrit philologist

Pāṇini , era = ;;6th–5th century BCE , region = Indian philosophy , main_interests = Grammar, linguistics , notable_works = ' ( Classical Sanskrit) , influenced= , notable_ideas= Descriptive linguistics (Devana ...

, Sanskrit became the pre-eminent language for literature and philosophy in India.

Buddhist monks A ''bhikkhu'' (Pali: भिक्खु, Sanskrit: भिक्षु, ''bhikṣu'') is an ordained male in Buddhist monasticism. Male and female monastics (" nun", ''bhikkhunī'', Sanskrit ''bhikṣuṇī'') are members of the Sangha (Buddhist ...

began to adapt the language they used to it while remaining under the influence of a linguistic tradition stemming from the proto-canonical

Prakrit The Prakrits (; sa, prākṛta; psu, 𑀧𑀸𑀉𑀤, ; pka, ) are a group of vernacular Middle Indo-Aryan languages that were used in the Indian subcontinent from around the 3rd century BCE to the 8th century CE. The term Prakrit is usu ...

of the early oral tradition.Edgerton, Franklin. ''The Prakrit Underlying Buddhistic Hybrid Sanskrit.'' Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, University of London, Vol. 8, No. 2/3, page 503. While there are widely differing theories regarding the relationship of this language to

Pali Pali () is a Middle Indo-Aryan liturgical language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is widely studied because it is the language of the Buddhist ''Pāli Canon'' or '' Tipiṭaka'' as well as the sacred language of '' Theravāda'' Buddh ...

, it is certain that Pāli is much closer to this language than Sanskrit is. According to

K. R. Norman Kenneth Roy Norman FBA (1925–2020) was a British philologist. He was Professor Emeritus of Indian Studies at the University of Cambridge, and was a leading authority on Pali and other Middle Indo-Aryan languages. Life Norman was educated at ...

, Pāli could also be considered a form of BHS. However, Franklin Edgerton states that Pāli is in essence a

Relation to Sanskrit and Pāli

In many places where BHS differs from Sanskrit it is closer to, or identical with, Pāli. Most extant BHS works were originally written in BHS, rather than being reworkings or translations of already existing works in Pāli or other languages. However, earlier works, mostly from the

Mahāsāṃghika The Mahāsāṃghika (Brahmi: 𑀫𑀳𑀸𑀲𑀸𑀁𑀖𑀺𑀓, "of the Great Sangha", ) was one of the early Buddhist schools. Interest in the origins of the Mahāsāṃghika school lies in the fact that their Vinaya recension appears in ...

school, use a form of "mixed Sanskrit" in which the original Prakrit has been incompletely Sanskritised, with the phonetic forms being changed to the Sanskrit versions, but the grammar of Prakrit being retained. For instance, Prakrit ''bhikkhussa'', the possessive singular of ''bhikkhu'' (monk, cognate with Sanskrit ''bhikṣu'') is converted not to ''bhikṣoḥ'' as in Sanskrit but mechanically changed to ''bhikṣusya''. The term owes its usage and definition largely to the scholarship of Franklin Edgerton. Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit is primarily studied in the modern world in order to study the Buddhist teachings that it records, and to study the development of Indo-Aryan languages. Compared to Pāli and Classical Sanskrit, comparatively little study has been made of Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, in part because of the fewer available writings, and in part because of the view of some scholars that BHS is not distinct enough from Sanskrit to comprise a separate linguistic category. Edgerton writes that a reader of a Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit text "will rarely encounter forms or expressions which are definitely ungrammatical, or at least more ungrammatical than, say, the Sanskrit of the epics, which also violates the strict rules of Pāṇini. Yet every paragraph will contain words and turns of expression which, while formally unobjectionable ... would never be used by any non-Buddhist writer." Edgerton holds that nearly all Buddhist works in Sanskrit, at least until a late period, belong to a continuous and broadly unitary linguistic tradition. The language of these works is separate from the tradition of Brahmanical Sanskrit, and goes back ultimately to a semi-Sanskritized form of the protocanonical Prakrit. The peculiar Buddhist vocabulary of BHS is evidence that BHS is subordinate to a separate linguistic tradition quite separate from standard Sanskrit (Edgerton finds other indications as well). The Buddhist writers who used standard Brahmanical Sanskrit were small in number. This group seems to have been made up of converts who received orthodox Brahmanical training in their youth before converting to Buddhism, such as Asvaghosa. Many Sanskrit words, or particular uses of Sanskrit words, are recorded only from Buddhist works. Pāli shares a large proportion of these words; in Edgerton's view, this seems to prove that most of them belong to the special vocabulary of the protocanonical Buddhist Prakrit.

Buddhist use of Classical Sanskrit

Not all Buddhist use Sanskrit as an hybrid form. Some translated works, such as by the

Sarvāstivādin The ''Sarvāstivāda'' ( Sanskrit and Pali: 𑀲𑀩𑁆𑀩𑀢𑁆𑀣𑀺𑀯𑀸𑀤, ) was one of the early Buddhist schools established around the reign of Ashoka (3rd century BCE).Westerhoff, The Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy ...

school, were completed in classical Sanskrit. There were also later works composed directly in Sanskrit and written in a simpler style than the classical literature, as well as works of ''kavya'' in the ornate classical style such as the Buddhacarita.

Parallels

The terms "Buddhist Hybrid Chinese" and "Buddhist Hybrid English" Paul J. Griffiths, ''Journal of the Pāli Text Society'', Volume XXIX, page 102 have been used to describe peculiar styles of language used in translations of Buddhist texts.

Encoding

The

IETF language tag An IETF BCP 47 language tag is a standardized code or tag that is used to identify human languages in the Internet. The tag structure has been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in ''Best Current Practice (BCP) 47''; the s ...

for Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit is .

References

External links

Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Dictionary (Franklin Edgerton)
{{Buddhism topics Hybrid Indo-Aryan languages Sanskrit Formal languages used for Indian scriptures