What Tongue did the Buddha speak ?

Dr. Robert Law, M.D.

Introduction

This is not an easy question to answer as the Buddha lived more than 2500 years ago before the age of dictaphones and tape-recorders. However we do have some clues if we look at the Buddhist literature that has survived to this date.

Once upon a time……..

Once upon a time, there was this Nepalase prince called Siddhartha Gautama…….. . Most stories about the Buddha start with something like this, and most people would assume that the Buddha spoke “Indian”. In fact there is really no such thing as the Indian language. Even up to this day in India there are hundreds of Indian dialects. The constitution of the Union of India recognized Hindi (which probably evolved as late as circa 1000 A.D. from Indo-Aryan dialects heavily influenced by Sanskrit), and English as the official languages, but each state in India can have its own co-official language.

When the Aryan (a group of people from Central Asia) entered Northern India circa 1750 BCE, they brought with them their culture and their language. As time went on, these people became the ruling class and their civilization became the dominant one, although they must have been very much influenced by the local people that they encountered. Now, the language used by the aristocrats, the ruling class, would be what we can refer to as the Vedic language. The word Vedic came from the word Veda, ‘the knowledge’, which are hymns sung to the gods, and which are still recited unchanged in Hindu rituals today (1). In time, the language evolved to become what we now known as Sanskrit.

At the time of the Buddha, the “official language” would be Sanskrit. It would be used by the high priests (the Brahmins) and the aristocrats. However, most of the common people would be talking in local dialects known as the Prakrits. And because of the relative geographical isolation of the various “small countries”( more like tribes) within India, the dialects within a few hundred miles may already be very different, although they would all be descendants of Sanskrit. This is very much like the dialects in China. As a comparison, one may note that the dialect in Guangzhou in southern China is very much different from the one in Fujian which is only a few hundred miles away, although the written form would be the same for both of them except for some special words that are unique to each dialect. 

It must be noted that these local dialects in ancient India would not have written forms because most of the common people were illiterate in those days without books and any mass media. The written form of Sanskrit would be confined to the Brahmins and the aristocrats. However, if one really wanted to commit the dialects to written form, one could use the Sanskrit alphabets and phonetics and write them down.

The life of a language

All languages have a life of their own. A language, especially one that has no written form and is merely spoken in a certain place at a certain time, may be so changed as to become unintelligible to people living in the same place several hundred years later. This is because an actively spoken language will be modified by outside influence and people’s innovations as to new usage and vocabularies. Thus the so-called “middle English” spoken in England in the 12th century is vastly different from modern English and it can be expected that , another 1000 years from now, the English spoken in England will be very different from the English spoken today in Piccadilly, London. On the other hand, a language will only be able to remain unchanged only if there is no body actively using it in everyday life. It would than become the domain of scholars. Examples of such languages are Latin , Sanskrit and Pali. This is rather paradoxical: a dead language( no one using it) will remain alive, albeit among a small group of people who study it as an object of curiosity. Whereas, a living language( with many people using it) will continue to evolve and change to sometimes beyond recognition( especially the spoken form).

What the Buddha actually spoke

As Siddhartha Gautama was born a prince of the Sakya tribe, it can be safely assumed that he may be relatively well educated and that he might be able to read and write Sanskrit. His followers, however, would mostly be illiterate and he would have to communicate with them in the local dialects, the Prakrits. Some people labeled the language that the Buddha used as the Ardhamagadhi language (2) after the Magadha Empire which encompassed all the areas the Buddha would have resided in. It is doubtful whether this label was actually used at the time of the Buddha, and may just be a label used by latter day scholars.

After the parinibbāna (non-Buddhist may use the word “death”) of the Buddha, his teachings were collated in the oral tradition and passed from one generation to another. This is in line with the religious traditions at the time. According to the Sri Lankan chronicles, these teachings were subsequently transmitted to Sri Lanka at the time of King Asoka in India (around 250 years after the parinibbāna of the Buddha) where these teachings were preserved in the Pāli language (3) which was the spoken language used in Northern India at the time of King Asoka.

Around the time of the 1st century BCE, the monks in Sri Lanka decided to commit the Buddha’s teachings to writing and wrote them down on ola leaves. But since Pāli is just a spoken language , the only way one could write them down was to use the Sinhalese alphabets. Sinhalese, the language of the indigenous people of Sri Lanka, is itself an off-shoot of Sanskrit. That is why the Pāli Canon used words that are very similar to Sanskrit.

Finally, it should be noted that the so-called Pāli that we read in Buddhist books today are very indirect records of the scriptures. They are in fact romanised, i.e. using the English alphabet(with phonetic symbols) to transliterate from Sinhalese of the language spoken at the time of King Asoka. This is not to mention the changes that must have taken place among the various Prakrits during the time span of 250 years from the parinibbāna of the Buddha before the appearance of Pāli. One would really wonder if the Buddha should come alive today and we chant the English version of Pāli to him, how much he would really be able to understand what we are chanting about. Well, one would suppose that he already understand everything as he is already the “Enlightened One”!

Notes and Reference

Empires of the World---- A Language History of the World by Nichalas Ostler , Harper Perennial, London 2005, page 175.

Transformation and Healing by Thich Nhat Hanh , Parallax Press , Berkeley, California , 1990 ,page 25

The word “Pāli” actually mean “Text”. The ancient monks probably referred to these teachings as the “text”(and thus “Pāli”). In subsequent usage the term “Pāli” was used to denote the language of the text.