i 4 SANSKRIT, PRAKRIT, AND APABHRANQA
versation in polite society use both Sanskrit and the vernacular of his country {degabhdsa). Hiuen Tsang tells us in the seventh century that Buddhist disputants used officially Sanskrit in their debates ; in his Upamitibhavaprapaiicakatha the Jain Siddharsi (a. d. 906) gives as his reason for preferring Sanskrit for this allegory of human life that persons of culture despise any other form of speech, and claims that his Sanskrit is so simple as to be understood even by those who preferred Prakrit. The writing of Sanskrit poems which even women and children — of course of the higher classes — can understand is contemplated by Bhamaha in his treatise on poetics (c. A.D. 700). Bilhana (a. D. 1060) would have us believe that the women even of his homeland, Kashmir, were able to appreciate Sanskrit and Prakrit as well as their mother tongue (janmabhasa). The famous collection of tales known as the Pancatantra owes its origin in theory in part, according to one later version, to the importance of instructing princes in Sanskrit as well as in the conduct of affairs.
There were, of course, spheres in which Sanskrit was at first rejected, beyond all in the early literatures of Jainism and Buddhism, which were probably couched in an old form of what became known as Ardhamagadhl Piakrit. As has been shown, 1 however, the question was early raised, if we may trust the Buddhist tradition, whether Sanskrit should not serve as the medium to preserve the Master's instruction, a notice which bears emphatic testimony to the predominance of Sanskrit as a literary medium. In both cases, however, Sanskrit finally won its way, and first Buddhists, then Jains, rendered great services both to Sanskrit literature and grammar.
The Buddhist revolt against Sanskrit had, however, one important result. The edicts of Acoka, in which he impressed on his subjects throughout his vast realm the duty of practising virtue, were inevitably couched in Prakrit, not Sanskrit, and the epigraphic tradition thus established died hard. But it had to contend with facts ; inscriptions were intended to be intelligible, and in the long run it proved that Sanskrit was the speech which had the best chance of appealing to those who could read inscriptions. In the second century B. c. traces of the influence
1 Keith, IHQ. i. 501 f.
