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What the Buddha Thought

Murray Eiland interviews Richard Gombrich, eminent scholar of Buddhism, Pāli, and Sanskrit

You went to school with Michael Coulson (writer of Teach Yourself Sanskrit), and ended up as a Professor of Sanskrit. You are therefore the perfect person to ask, what are the main differences between Sanskrit and Pāli, and can one language be appreciated as ‘easier’ than another?

The fact that historical linguists call Sanskrit ‘Old Indo-Aryan’, and Pāli a form of ‘Middle IndoAryan’, immediately gives the game away. Middle Indo-Aryan languages are derived from Sanskrit, just as what we call the Romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, etc.) are derived from Latin. In the Indo-Aryan case we are dealing with a longer time span, and the evidence for the languages is more uneven. The oldest evidence for Sanskrit, the Rg Veda, cannot be accurately dated but comes from the second millennium BC and is many centuries older than the use of writing. Pāli, probably the oldest of the surviving forms of Middle Indo-Aryan, comes from the fifth and fourth centuries BC. The main Pāli texts were probably written down sporadically rather late in the first millennium BC, and systematically in the first century BC. The oldest physical survivals of both languages are inscriptions on stone: those of the edicts of the Emperor Asoka,

Richard Gombrich photographed recently in Oxford.

The Spitzer Manuscript, folio 383 fragment (recto above, verso below), written on both sides of a palm leaf. The oldest surviving philosophical manuscript in Sanskrit, discovered in 1906 in the Ming-oi, Kizil Caves, in China during the third Turfan expedition headed by the German archaeologist and explorer Albert Grünwedel, AD 80-230, Berlin State Library.
Photo: Sara Welch, CC BY-SA 4.0.

which are not Pāli but very close to it, date from the middle of the third century BC; the first in Sanskrit are first century BC; there are hardly any surviving Sanskrit inscriptions from before the second century AD.

Pāli was used to record the earliest Buddhist scriptures and ancillary works such as commentaries, and the order of magnitude is the equivalent of a few hundred modern volumes; by contrast Sanskrit volumes would number hundreds of thousands: the language has been used for a vast variety of texts and purposes until today, though much less in about the last three centuries. Covering so many centuries and such a range of subject matter and literary genres, Sanskrit has a vocabulary many times as large as that of Pāli. Time, topic and genre mean that there are several varieties of Sanskrit (Vedic, epic Sanskrit, classical poetry, Buddhist Sanskrit, Jain Sanskrit, etc.), so that a student will often be well advised to concentrate on learning the particular kind of Sanskrit relevant to her interests.

Pāli uses a smaller range of phonemes than does Sanskrit; but more important is that Pāli greatly simplifies the grammar of Sanskrit (much as French, for example, simplifies the grammar of Latin). Pāli is thus far easier to learn than Sanskrit. In the West there is a tradition of teaching Sanskrit first and then showing how Pāli is derived from it, but this is no more sensible than teaching French by first teaching Latin.

Sir Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994), one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, famously rejected traditional models of the scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. He suggests a scientific theory cannot be proven, but it can be falsified. Do you think history follows similar rules?

When Popper argued that a scientific theory cannot be proven, he meant that we can never be sure that it will not be falsified in the future. It can be falsified empirically by new evidence, or by argument, showing a flaw in the reasoning. This applies to all theories, not just to the natural sciences, but also to theories about the past or about our daily lives! We must also remember that refutations are themselves theories and as such may later be refuted.

Some scholars now suggest that the Buddha is a figure composed from folklore, and not firmly based on a single historical person. What are your thoughts?

When asked to pontificate on academic matters, I normally try to achieve a tone of judicious calm; but there are moments when I think it better to express my feelings, despite knowing that this may invite ridicule. There are quite a few things about Buddhism that I do not fully understand, and many more on which I have a view but would not be surprised or distressed if it turned out that I had better change my mind. But the thesis that there was no such historical person as the Buddha, or that we have no access to what that person thought or said, is in quite the opposite category. I am at a loss if confronted with those views, and cannot understand how anybody of average intelligence can hold them. Leaving out of account those who for some reason have no access to the texts in particular, to the Pāli Canon - I can only deduce that they are just too lazy or feckless to read those texts, or to acquaint themselves with the historical circumstances in which they were recorded. One might just as well propose that there was no such person as Plato and the coherence of the ideas ascribed to him (and/or Socrates) is a pure fluke.

As I wrote in What the Buddha Thought (194), ‘I am reminded of the blindfolded monkeys whose random efforts somehow produce a typescript of the complete
works of Shakespeare.’ To those not satisfied by my invective, I recommend the slim but admirable volume, ‘The Authenticity of the Early Buddhist Texts’ by Bhikkhu Sujato and Bhikkhu Brahmali, first published in 2014 as a supplementary volume to the Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies (JOCBS), and since reprinted by various publishers, and Alexander Wynne’s article ‘Did the Buddha exist?’ in vol. 16 (May 2019) of the JOCBS Journal.

In 1988 a symposium, ‘The Dating of the Historical Buddha’, in Gottingen, Germany, the dates of his death ranged form 486-261 BC. You suggest that the date is around 404 BC . Why do you support this date?

I published a long article on the Buddha’s dates giving full details of my reasoning: ‘Dating the Buddha: a red herring revealed’ in 1992. The discovery which formed the basis of my argument came from careful study of the Dipavamsa, a Pāli chronicle composed in Sri Lanka. This chronicle gives a lot of information about the lineage of senior masters of the Vinaya (the monastic discipline), but some of this appeared to be inconsistent. I showed that a simple emendation of the text restored it to consistency, so that it yielded valuable information. I also showed that in those days the year varied in length; this introduced ambiguity into the chronology, but only within calculable limits.

There are a number of theories about how Pāli originated, and in your book you suggest that the Buddha spoke something like what we know as Pāli. Does this suggest that the variability in the language represents a number of different religious schools already had their own traditions, but shared a more or less common core language?

The Pāli Canon contains valuable information about several other religious traditions contemporaneous with the Buddha; but this has nothing to do with the character of Pāli. At that time writing was not yet in use. The Buddha spent the best part of fifty years as an itinerant preacher wandering over a large part of north-eastern India; the Canon provides information about where he went. As he moved, the dialect of his audiences must have

Burmese-Pāli manuscript copy of the Buddhist text Mahaniddesa, with a medium square script, nineteenth century. Photo: the Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0.

differed, so in order to communicate with them he must have modified his own speech and understood a range of dialects.

Do you think that the historical Buddha had a distinctive style of exposition, and if we can assume that it is preserved in the Pāli Canon?

As soon as one is familiar with a range of Indian religion texts it becomes obvious that in the Pāli Canon the style of exposition presented in the sermons attributed to the Buddha was quite distinctive. To attribute this distinctive style to another speaker is absurdly farfetched, so surely it must represent the Buddha’s own style. I give specific details in my book.

Countries that now practice the Theravādan tradition due to climate and history - have produced few old Pāli manuscripts. The oldest manuscripts are from the late fifteenth century, and there is little material before the eighteenth century. With that in mind, are there more early Buddhist texts waiting to be discovered on pages written in the last several centuries?

We must clearly distinguish between texts and copies of texts, such as manuscripts or printed books. It is not clear that Theravādin countries produced very few manuscripts in ancient times; what is abundantly clear is that virtually all manuscripts were written on palm leaves, and palm leaves do not survive well in that climate. We know that few new Pāli texts were composed after about the middle of the first millennium AD , and there is no reason to suppose that the rate of production must have increased more recently.

Do the Gandhāran manuscripts of the second century AD suggest that the canonical suttas were established by then? Before that, is anyone sure what texts were established as Canon at the First Buddhist Council (c. 400 BC)?

Most of the Gandhāran manuscripts to which you refer contain versions, in a different dialect of Middle Indo-Aryan, of texts found in the Pāli Canon. The most obvious difference lies in the sequence of the texts; this does not affect their meaning. The tradition has it that very many specified texts, which form a high proportion of the Canon, were communally recited shortly after the Buddha’s death. The tradition also holds that the whole Pāli Canon was committed to writing in Sri Lanka late in the first century BC. Between these two events, the communal recitation (known as the First Council) and the committal of the whole Canon to writing - a period of nearly four centuries - the following probably occurred: the texts underwent some changes, partly
through mistakes and partly by intentional editing, including some additions and subtractions; some texts were translated into other dialects (though probably a lot of this occurred later); here and there some texts were written down; and most or all of the Canon was provided with commentaries, which themselves underwent similar processes of change. Unfortunately our evidence is very scanty and we cannot fill in many of the blanks.

Your book notes that Vedic texts were largely preserved orally, which restricted their use to a certain caste that could devote up to thirty-seven years to memorise a portion of them (102). At the same time your book notes that a monk can learn the Buddha’s words in their own dialect. However, there is a problem with translated texts. If a text is not written in Pāli, how can we assume that it is associated with the Buddha?

This question contains some inaccuracies. Firstly, as can be seen from what is written above, Vedic texts were not ‘largely’ preserved orally, but entirely so, and this went on long after writing was in use for other purposes, because the brahmins generally did not want non-brahmins to have any access to the texts. They were preserved by

Buddha Shakyamuni, brass with coloured pigments, twelfth century. Tibet. Height: 39.4 cm . © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Zimmerman Family Collection, Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace, Oscar L. Tang, Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang and Annette de la Renta Gifts, 2012, Inv. 2012.458. Photo: CC0 1.0.

memorisation: the education of brahmin boys consisted of learning texts by heart for prescribed periods which could be as long as thirty-six (not thirty-seven) years, though only a small minority went so far. By the way, those who know Indian society well do not call brahmins a ‘caste’; they are rather a group of castes whom the orthodox consider to stand at the head of the social hierarchy. The latter part of the question is a bit confused. As explained, the Buddha evidently knew and taught in a range of dialects, and Pāli must have emerged as an amalgam of these. When the texts were memorised, they were communally recited, so they had to be uniform, and that uniformity became stabilised as the Pāli version. The versions in other dialects, almost all of which have been lost, must have emerged after the Buddha’s death. They were originally oral, not written.

Perhaps one of the most commonly used concepts adapted from Buddhism is karma, typically defined as the sum of a person’s actions, past and present, that determine one’s fate. What are your thoughts?

I am afraid that this definition of karma is totally wrong. Karma is the topic to which my book What the Buddha Thought, devotes by far the most attention (forty-eight references in the index). My treatment of it begins on page vii,

Buddha Amoghasiddhi with Eight Bodhisattvas, distemper on cloth, c. 1200-1250. Central Tibet. Height: 68.9 cm .
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art,

Purchase, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Philanthropic Fund Gift, 1991, Inv. 1991.74. Photo: CC0 1.0.
the first page of the Preface, where I write, ‘[The Buddha’s] theory of karma is logically central to his thought. Karma is a process, not a thing; moreover, it is neither random nor wholly determined.’ In chapter 1 I have a lot more to say about it, starting with the Buddha’s dictum, ‘It is intention that I call karma’ (7). Then the section headed ‘Karma as Personal Continuity’ (11ff) begins by saying that the karma doctrine ‘is a kind of lynch-pin which holds the rest of the basic tenets together by providing the perfect example of what they mean.’ This section leads into the section headed ‘Individual Autonomy and Responsibility’, which begins on page 13, and shows, inter alia, that there is a logical continuum between the moral actions of a man in the world and the meditations of a recluse (14). I then discuss how and why the Buddha makes people ‘responsible for their own decisions’ (15). Chapter 2 is titled ‘More about Karma, and its Social Context.’ Last but not least, the final chapter (13) on 194-198 reformulates and summarises my exposition of karma.

From the earliest Buddhist texts can you suggest how visual art was perceived? What role do you think visual arts played in the spread of Buddhism?

Permanent shrines or temples only began to be created after the Buddha’s day. They may well have been decorated by religious art - we don’t know. Of other uses of art in the first centuries after the Buddha we likewise know next to nothing.

Buddhist thought has made a sizable impact on western philosophy. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) spring to mind. Did these philosophers understand what the Buddha thought?

I am no expert on Nietzsche or Husserl, but I doubt that either of them shared the Buddha’s view of morality as being purely a matter of intention, to say nothing of his other basic arguments. Your point that too few texts were available to them is however well taken. If we consider how the great modern thinkers have treated the Buddha, it may be that Max Weber is the scholar whom we would do best to discuss: he had extremely perceptive things to say about early Buddhism, but unfortunately most of his conclusions are vitiated by the limitations of his access to the original material.

Richard Gombrich is the Emeritus Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford and a member of the Oriental Institute and Balliol College.

Further reading: Gombrich, F. R. (2009). What the Buddha Thought, first edition, Sheffield (corrected edition, 2013).

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