A note on the Jataka-13 by Ramesh

Be that as it may excuse my repetitions the Buddha spoke in Pali and he gave some 84000 sermons and they are enshrined in the Tripitaka or Tipitaka [Pali] and it is known as canonical literature of Pali language. Now one is apt to ask how come that such voluminous teachings of the Buddha could be recorded during a time as far back as 6th century BC. That opens another window in course of this discourse. Did they know how to write in the 6th century BC The extant evidence of earliest writing dates back to approximately 2nd century BC. So far as I know the Asokan edicts are the earliest evidence of writing in India. The scripts there are either Brahmi or Khorosti . This is singularly important to note. Now a days Devnagari script is employed to write Sanskrit or Pali. But the Devnagari script was unknown when Buddha spoke or when the Vedas were chanted. When vernacular languages appeared every region wrote Sanskrit in the regional script. Thus Sanskrit was written in Bengali script in Bengal and in Marathi script in Maharastra. When the Britishers started teaching at Fort William in Calcutta, they earmarked the Devnagari script for Sanskrit and Hindi. Here a little digression should be excused. Earlier both the Hindus and the Mohammadans used to write either in Urdu script or in the Devnagari script. It was the Fort William that taught the Muslim to write in Urdu script and Hindus to write in Devnagari script. Urdu and Hindi were not different languages. People belonging to same language could write in any of the aforesaid two scripts. Another window opens. Is not Urdu a different language from Hindi? The answer is both yes and no. They worked in the Mughal army and they had to pick up some commands from their Muslim bosses who spoke in Persian. Mind you Persian language is basically a language belonging to the Aryan brotherhood of languages such as Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin and English etc. Another window opens English, Bengali and so called Hindi or Punjabi are cognate languages because English words are derived from Sanskrit just as Bengali and Punjabi words are. For example compare Septem of
September with Sanskrit Saptam, Octo of October with Sanskrit Astam novem of November with Sankrit Navam Decem of December with Sanskrit Dasam. In fact earlier the year used to begin with March. Once again compare Sanskrit tri with three or duhitri with daughter, bhratar with brother pitar with Peter and Father, batika or house with vatican. Instances could be multiplied and thus English is not that strange a language for us and an English man is not a stranger to an Indian. By the by the Western scholars do not see eye to eye with us. They fancy that there was the Proto Indo European language from which the whole range of languages from Sanskrit to
Portuguese were derived. We will not discuss the issue at this moment. Let us go back to Urdu. Urdu could be said to be a kind of pidgin or a kind of Hindi dialect with a lot of Persian vocabulary and turns. And no literature leaped up from those who spoke Urdu. In fact the Islamic capital was Delhi and so the people in the vicinity of Delhi forged the pidgin called Urdu. When two or three languages are mixed it is
pidgin. For example there are more than 20 tribes among the Nagas in the Eastern India. Each tribe has its own language and the member of one tribe does not understand the language of another. Hence, a pidgin called Nagamese has been forged there so that it might act as the link language among the tribes. Nagamese has been made of different Naga dialects and Assamese. In South Africa there is Afrikaans that
originated as pidgin. Now our point is that the first Urdu literature was not forged by
those who spoke in Urdu. Because they did not know that they were speaking a new language. They lived in the neighbourhood of Delhi. When Muhammad bin Tughluk shifted the capital from Delhi to Daulatabad the South Indians who had no commerce with Hindi learnt Urdu with seriousness and it were they who scripted the first literature in Urdu. Let us return to the art of writing. Asoka himself was a Buddhist and
of course he got his edicts written in Pali. I believe till then Pali was but a dialect of Sanskrit. Asoka writes about himself--- Devanam piya piyadassee raja which in Sanskrit would be devanam prya priyaodarsee raja. But as because there is no extant evidence of writing in the pre Asokan era we can take it for granted that in the 6th century BC they did not know how to write. How come then they could recollect a
voluminous work like that of Tripitak that has 84000 sermons by the Buddha. Well if the Buddha showed up in the 6th century BC, the Vedas according to the Western scholars flowered in a time before 1500BC. And it contains at least 350000 letters. How is it that the Vedas lingered through the ages orally? In America if you go for shopping and buy 3K.g. of potato and 1Kg of mustard oil the shopkeeper can not tell you how much you have to pay if his computer is off. This is surprising to us Indians. Because we know how to work out addition and subtraction without a computer. But an American can wonder how an Indian does the feat without a calculator. Similarly in those days they could save in their memory lakhs of letters and thousands of lines. So whatever the Buddha said could have been saved in the memory of the then masterminds. That is not impossible. And when the Buddha passed away there was a conference at Rajagaha or Rajagriha. That is Rajgir now in Bihar. There the Buddhist saints met and it was there that Upali recounted the whole of Vinaya pitak. Anada Thera recounted the whole of Sutta pitak. And Kassapa recounted the whole ofAbhidhamma pitak . Thus the Buddha's teachings were codified in the three pitaks or the three baskets of knowledge known as Tripitaka. While the Vinaya pitak dwells on the dos and donts of the Buddhist monks and while Abhidhamma dwells on Buddist psychology the Sutta pitak contains discourses conducted by the Buddha on philosophical metaphysical and sundry other issues. There is untold wealth of the finest narrative and exquisite gathas or poetry in the Sutta pitaka. Sutta pitak has a number of divisions and one of them is Khuddaka nikaya. The latter once again has a number of divisions and the Jataka tales constitute one of those divisions if I can rightly remember.