The addressee of the Purana were the masses. The Puranas are full of Cock and Bull stories (?) on the surface only to feed the imagination of common folk. The Western scholars opine that that the Ramayana and the Mahabharata were oral that is they were sung day after day at the village fair or at a street square or at a courtyard of a temple. So if even after 900 years after the Buddha’s demise or Mmayanaahaparinibbana they heard Sanskrit Ramayana at village courtyards. One doubts whether the Buddha spoken in the language of the common men or Pali. So far as my knowledge goes there there is little secular literature in pali and there is hardly any harking back to the times of the Buddha or prior to Buddha or presently after even for centuries in Pali literature. So what was Pali ?.
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In my opinion Pali was a dialect of the then Sanskrit language It was in currency only in the Nepal valleys and the Buddha gave his sermons in it and made it a language and literature. One might ask how could the Buddha be understood by the people of the neighbouring regions. In that case, well I am from Calcutta. Calcutta has its own dialect
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