Gandhari language

Gāndhārī is an early Middle Indo-Aryan language – a Prakrit – with unique features that distinguish it from all other known Prakrits. Phonetically, it maintained all three Old Indo-Aryan sibilants – s, ś and ṣ – as distinct sounds where they fell together as [s] in other Prakrits, a change that is considered one of the earliest Middle Indo-Aryan shifts.[1] Gāndhārī also preserves certain Old Indo-Aryan consonant clusters, mostly those involving v and r.[2] In addition, intervocalic Old Indo-Aryan th and dh are written early on with a special letter (noted by scholars as an underlined s, [s]), which later is used interchangeably with s, suggesting an early change to a sound, likely the voiced dental fricative ð, and a later shift to z and then a plain s.[3]

The Middle Prakrits typically weakened th to dh, which later shifted to h.[4] Kharoṣṭhī does not render the distinction between short and long vowels, so the details of that feature are not known.[5]

Linguistic evidence links some groups of the Dardic languages with Gandhari.[6][7][8] The Kohistani languages, now all being displaced from their original homelands, were once more widespread in the region and most likely descend from the ancient dialects of the region of Gandhara.[9][10] The last to disappear was Tirahi, still spoken some years ago in a few villages in the vicinity of Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, by descendants of migrants expelled from Tirah by the Afridi Pashtuns in the 19th century.[11] Georg Morgenstierne claimed that Tirahi is "probably the remnant of a dialect group extending from Tirah through the Peshawar district into Swat and Dir".[12] Nowadays, it must be entirely extinct and the region is now dominated by Iranian languages brought in by later migrants, such as Pashto.[11] Among the modern day Indo-Aryan languages still spoken today, Torwali shows the closest linguistic affinity possible to Niya, a dialect of Gāndhārī.[10][13]

Initial identification of a distinct language occurred through study of one of the Buddhist āgamas, the Dīrghāgama, which had been translated into Chinese by Buddhayaśas (Chinese: 佛陀耶舍) and Zhu Fonian (Chinese: 竺佛念).

The now dominant hypothesis on the propagation of Buddhism in Central Asia goes back to 1932 when E. Waldschmidt remarked that the names quoted in the Chinese Dīrghāgama (T. 1), which had been translated by the avowedly Dharmaguptaka monk Buddhayaśas (who also translated the Dharmaguptakavinaya), were not rendered from Sanskrit, but from a then undetermined Prākrit also found in the Khotan Dharmapada. In 1946, Bailey identified this Prākrit, which he named Gāndhārī, as corresponding to the language of most Kharoṣṭhī inscriptions from Northwestern India.

Since this time, a consensus has grown in scholarship which sees the first wave of Buddhist missionary work as associated with Gāndhārī and the Kharoṣṭhī script, and tentatively with the Dharmaguptaka sect.

Available evidence also indicates that the first Buddhist missions to Khotan were carried out by the Dharmaguptaka sect, and used a Kharoṣṭhī-written Gāndhārī. However, there is evidence that other sects and traditions of Buddhism also used Gāndhārī, and evidence that the Dharmaguptaka sect also used Sanskrit at times.

It is true that most manuscripts in Gāndhārī belong to the Dharmaguptakas, but virtually all schools — inclusive Mahāyāna — used some Gāndhārī. Von Hinüber (1982b and 1983) has pointed out incompletely Sanskritised Gāndhārī words in works heretofore ascribed to the Sarvāstivādins and drew the conclusion that either the sectarian attribution had to be revised, or the tacit dogma "Gāndhārī equals Dharmaguptaka" is wrong. Conversely, Dharmaguptakas also resorted to Sanskrit.[22]

Starting in the first century of the common era, there was a large trend toward a type of Gāndhārī which was heavily Sanskritized.[22]

Until 1994, the only Gāndhāri manuscript available to the scholars was a birch bark manuscript of a Buddhist text, the Dharmapāda, discovered at Kohmāri Mazār near Hotan in Xinjiang in 1893 CE. From 1994 on, a large number of fragmentary manuscripts of Buddhist texts, seventy-seven altogether,[23] were discovered in eastern Afghanistan and Western Pakistan. These include:[24]

• 29 fragments of birch-bark scrolls of British Library collection consisting of parts of the Dharmapada, Anavatapta Gāthā, the Rhinoceros Sūtra, Sangitiparyaya and a collection of sutras from the Ekottara Āgama.
• 129 fragments of palm leaf folios of Schøyen Collection, 27 fragments of palm-leaf folios of Hirayama collection and 18 fragments of palm leaf folios of Hayashidera collection consisting of the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra and the Bhadrakalpikā Sūtra.
• 24 birch-bark scrolls of Senior collection consists of mostly different sutras and the Anavatapta Gāthā.
• 8 fragments of a single birch-bark scroll and 2 small fragments of another scroll of University of Washington collection consisting of probably an Abhidharma text or other scholastic commentaries.

Mahayana Buddhist Pure Land sūtras were brought from Gandhāra to China as early as 147 CE, when the Kushan monk Lokakṣema began translating the first Buddhist sutras into Chinese.[25][26] The earliest of these translations show evidence of having been translated from Gāndhārī.[27] It is also known that manuscripts in the Kharoṣṭhī script existed in China during this period.[28]

• Gandhari.org Complete Corpus, Catalog, Bibliography and Dictionary of Gāndhārī texts
• Gippert, Jost. "TITUS Texts: Gandhari Dharmapada: Frame". titus.uni-frankfurt.de.

• Pre-Islamic scripts in Afghanistan