coming to this fascinating lecture, I'm sure. It is the second event of this forum series of this year. And it's a huge pleasure to introduce Dr. Alon, who is chair of the Department of Indian and some continental studies at the University of Sydney in Australia. Mark is Australian, but he studied in the UK. And he actually did his BA before coming here with the very famous Yelvile M. de Jong, before coming in the UK and doing a PhD with Professor Kai R. Norman in Cambridge, the premier scholar of paleology. He did his PhD on paleo. And his PhD actually became his first monograph after the condiment's PhD in 95. He published it as a stygian function, the study of the ministry's stylistic pictures of the post-portions of the panhecanic of Suta tests and their mnemonic function. It's a long title. That's a very interesting book, published in Tokyo in 97. And then after actually teaching at SOAS for a year in 95, he quickly joined a small group, a small team in Seattle just after the discovery of the first treasure of 12 of Gandhari manuscripts that were preserved, are still preserved today in the British Library. And so Mark was a very close collaborator of Richard Solomon at Seattle. And with a few scholars, they basically set to mark an entire new field in Buddhist studies that of Gandhari studies. And as a result of this very intense engagement with difficult and fascinating fields, Mark had published Gandhari, the volume in the Gandhari Buddhist text series in 2001, with a book called Tri-Gandhari-Kothari-Gagamathai-Sutras, British Library Karoshti, Romans 12 and 14. And as a follow-up to this study of the British Library Karoshti collection, Mark had dedicated a lot of energy surveying another collection, the so-called senior collection. And this year's will be his much-expected forthcoming book called Ancient Buddhist Calls from Gandhara, the second volume, the Senior Karoshti Pragments Study and Catalog of the Senior Creditions of Karoshti Manuscript. So Mark is basically a Paris scholar that's turned a lot of attention to Gandhari manuscripts. And in recent years, he has also developed an interest in epigraphy and in the transmission here of Pali-communical scriptures, and especially looking particularly at the Kutodau-Pagoda study, transmitting a recension of the Pali canon in Mandalay. And today's talk is really a close vote of his interest in Pali and Gandhari scripture. And I look very much forward to wearing it, that's why it will be dealing with the subsidization of Pali Buddhist texts. Thanks. So just a bit more background to what Vincent said is that, so for my honors thesis, that's a fourth year thesis in Australia under Diyong, I translated the Sanskrit Savastivadan version of the Mahaparinivana Sutra that was transmitted in manuscripts from Central Asia and made a study of this. And I was really very interested in that. One reason I went to the ANU was to study Pali and was interested in Pali texts. That opened my eyes to the fact that there's multiple versions of these texts. And when you compare them, they're different, similar but different, right? So I'll be drawing on that work quite a lot today. And then I went to Cambridge to work with K.O. Norman. And that was really, that thesis was looking at some of the dominant stylistic features of early canonical texts. And what I was quite interested in is when you read Pali texts or early pseudo texts, they're very peculiar, high degree of repetition, use of formulas and other such things. So I wanted to understand what are these features doing? And particularly in the context of the fact that the early Buddhist tradition for many centuries was an oral tradition. So are they a reflection of the morality of the tradition? And then questions of such as, well, what models did the Buddhists have? What was their relationship to Brahmanical learning? How did they differ? How were they similar? And so on. I then started working on Gandhari manuscripts. So this has introduced yet another new corpus of material to work with. And say, publishing those three sutras, again, very much looking at, well, what is the Pali version of the stock formulas and descriptions and the diction of this text, the Pali compared to the Gandhari and Sanskrit. So what I'm going to look at today is really what these new Gandhari manuscripts tell us about the process of Sanskritization, the changes that happen in Buddhist texts. So although early Buddhist communities, including the early or most of the early Mahayana communities, started off using one or other of the Prakrit languages for the composition and transmission of their texts, at some as yet to be term and time, they started to use, or some communities started to use Sanskrit. Uncertain Vaskavan Hinuba puts it at the latest by the Chattarapa or Krishan period, that's sort of first, third century, some first, second centuries of the common era. And some Buddhist communities actually started composing a text, particularly that Bidharma treatises and so on, and then converting their canonical texts into Sanskrit. Others continued like the Theravadas of Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia continued transmitting them in Prakrit. Now there are, I won't go into the detail, but there's several possible reasons for that that have been proposed by scholars. For example, the beginning of the Christian era, Sanskrit increasingly took on the role of being the language of political and intellectual discourse in India and beyond its borders, perhaps under the increasing influence of Brahmins and court affairs, you know, Johannes Broncos and so on. You know, another possibility is that fewer people could understand the Prakrits, and that Sanskrit was a clearer medium for that transition and so on. There's counter arguments against that as well. You know, it's also possible that, so in that context, that the use of Sanskrit and Brahmi script, which goes hand in hand, so the new manuscripts I'm talking about Gandhari, Prakrit, transmitted in always in Kaurashti script. There's a connection between that and Sanskrit with Brahmi is closely connected. We in the new collections, we do actually get some Sanskrit texts in Kaurashti script, but it's an imperfect script for the transmission of Sanskrit. So it's possible that Sanskrit was regarded to be more precise vehicle for the transmission of texts, but again, if you read Broncos, counter argument would be, well, Buddhists have successfully commuted, transmitted the texts of centuries in Prakrit. What was wrong with that? So why suddenly change? His argument is different, but it could very well be the case that Buddhist authors started using Sanskrit, particularly for their Abhidharma and Shastra texts and the composition of these new works, because that was the vehicle mostly for that sort of discourse with Brahmins and others, and that that then influenced some communities to convert their canonical texts into Prakrit as well. Yet another possibility that's been raised is that some of the early Mahiyana authors were composing texts in Sanskrit again for various reasons and that these communities again to keep up with the Joneses and to remain competitive started using Sanskrit. So various possibilities, I won't go into that at the moment, but whatever the reasons, Buddhist communities have for the most part freely translated their texts into whatever language they felt was most appropriate for the audience, dialect or language, and for the propagation of their religion. And in the same vein, Buddhists have never been slow to use new technologies. They're supposed to have been the first to use writing in India. When that happened, while you count in Sri Lanka, first century BC, these new manuscripts date from first century BC onwards. Also, in the current period, it was the Buddhists who first produced electronic versions of Buddhist texts, the CD-Roms and so on. Whatever's available for the spread of the Dharma, we'll use it. So if Sanskrit is the best vehicle for that, then you'll start using it. So in this paper, I'd like to discuss some of the differences encountered when versions of what are essentially the same texts or passage are preserved in Prakrit and Sanskrit are compared and attempt to identify those changes that are likely to have happened as a result of Sanskritization and what differences were already happening in the transmission of Prakrit texts. And this is particularly in the light of these new Gandhari manuscripts from Afghanistan and Pakistan. So for the most part, I'll discuss the canonical Nakhayagama suitors, discourses and some verse texts because that's what interests me most and that's generally taken to be some of the earliest strata of Buddhist literature. Now, the main differences encountered when parallel versions of parallel texts, particularly canonical suitors or discourses and verses preserved in either of the Prakrit's, that's Pali, Gandhari, et cetera, or in Sanskrit or Chinese or Tibetan and or Tibetan are compared. These are some of the main differences you'll encounter and I won't read them out. We'll go through them as time progresses. And then I'd like to, in the first part of this talk, use as example that Mahaparinirvana Sutra that I worked on, comparing the Pali first with the Sanskrit version. Now, as you probably all know, that the Pali version blocks the Theravada school or more specifically the Mahagahara of a group within Sri Lanka, the Sanskrit version I was using was from Central Asian Manuscripts edited by Walshmita and that Savastivadana. There's also a version in the Sanga Beda Vastu which is Mulla Savastivadana, whatever these different schools represented. But it's transmitted either as a separate, an independent sutra within the long discourse collection to dig Agama, dig Indikaya or as part of the Vinaya narrative about the life of the Buddha. And if you don't know that the sutra depicts the last months of the Buddha's life, as he is moving from Rajgiri up towards Kushinara and dies there and you're encountering different individuals on the way and then his death, his cremation, distribution of his relics. So very important text in Buddhist tradition, very well illustrated and so on. And that's preserved in multiple versions. So you'll get, apart from the Pali, there's Gandhari fragments now, there's Sanskrit, various Sanskrit versions. There's four Chinese translations at least, I think, Tibetan translation. So again, this reflects its popularity. So the first thing you encounter when you compare these two texts is the Pali is two suitors and the Sanskrit is one sutra. Namely, there's a point at which the Buddha says to Ananda, I'm going, let's go to Kushinara to, that's where I'm gonna die.  You know, there's Visali in all these great towns, you can die and let's go there.  There's once this great king called Mahasudasana and he had 84,000 palaces and they were made with barrel. It's the most elaborate sutra. Pali, that's a separate text in the Sanskrit. That's fully incorporated within it, the text. So that's the first thing. Another common feature you'll find is whole episodes in one version, not found in the other version and vice versa. So in this Mahapannirana sutra, you have when the Buddha's about to die, the malas of the town of Kushinara come to visit him and he engages in the long discourse in interaction with him in the Sanskrit version but not in the Pali version. Or you'll also get different arrangement events. So in the Pali version, for example, when the Buddha's in Kushinara, the sultries in which he's lying between they flower out of season, he tells the monk Upavana not to stand in front of him because there's 84,000 gods wanting to see him and he talks about the four pilgrimage places, how to act towards women, how to treat remains of a Buddha for persons worthy of a stupa. Ananda then laments about his death. The Buddha praises Ananda and Ananda begs the Buddha not to die in this Hiktan, as I said, and you get just a reference to the Mahasudasana in the Pali. The malas of Kushinara come to pay respect. In the Sanskrit version, Ananda laments, and we don't get much of that earlier thing, Buddha praises Ananda and Ananda begs, the Buddha not to die in this Hiktan, you get the whole of the Mahasudasana sutra. The Buddha tells the monk Upavana not to stand in front of him so that came much earlier in the other version and so on, so these sorts of differences. Another major difference is different in the arrangement of information within the description of a rental concept. Also the inclusion or mission of information and information about the same event differing. So if we say look at the last words of the Buddha in these two texts, so what I have is P is Pali, Sanskrit, Sanskrit is SKT, Sanskrit of course. You've got the Pali translation, Sanskrit translation. So the Pali is fairly simple. Then the Bhagavad addressed the monks. I will now address you. It is the nature of formations to disappear, strive diligently. This was the last speech of the Tathagata, right? The Sanskrit is, but however, this is, however, is to be done by the Tathagata since he has compassion for later generations. Then the Bhagavad turning aside his upper road from his own body addressed the monks. Monks gaze upon the body of a Tathagata. Monks gaze closely upon the body of a Tathagata. What is the reason for this? It is because the sight of Tathagatas are a hut completely enlightened ones is difficult to gain as a flower and a fig tree. Monks, please be silent. It is the nature of all formations to disappear. This was then the last speech of the Buddha of the Tathagata. So you can see what's in bold in the Sanskrit was not in the Pali and vice versa. So the first thing is this long description of the Buddha exposing his 80 year old body and completely missing the Pali. What's that for? Is it because at the time of the redaction of this Savastivadam version that the Buddha was increasingly being exposed to deification and that this community wanted to emphasize it is just a human being and this is a man dying or what, right? But it's quite an important bit of information, difference in his speech and his acts. So there's also a tendency in Sanskrit to expand the lists, give more detailed descriptions and generally give more information. So for example, an important feature of Buddha's texts is particularly in the prosuta texts is a tendency to proliferate similar word elements and develop lists. So as we know, Buddha seems like much needed in literature full of lists, a full noble path, full noble truths and so we go on and then you also get a tendency, the Buddha doesn't just teach the monks, he teaches, instructs, serrals, encourages them, force synonymous verbs. You'll get five adjectives qualifying a noun and so we go on. So this is a very common feature of these earliest texts. This was the topic of my doctoral research. So then also within that, that those expanded lists say you've got a list of three semi-synonymous synonymous verbs is to, you always list the shortest first and then also there's sound and matricle patterns between those. So you look at this one here, which is the Pali, sothen and tapasa, majiti, mujiti, pamadama, pajiti, right? So you've got a list of three verbal phrase at the end, majiti, mujiti, pamadama, pajiti, right? So the syllables is majiti three, mujiti three, pamadama, that phrase, apajiti seven, right? This is the crescendo you're building up and then between it you've got sound similarities, ma, ma, ma, ma, right? And then pa, pa, and then you've got matricle similarities. So the first two verbs, majiti, mujiti, both long, short, short. So this builds up, I think, a rhythm to the material and facilitates memorization and recitation and there's also a question of what does, I didn't look at this in my doctoral thesis, but the possibility of reciting Buddha's texts like this as a meditative exercise induces certain, you both have to, there's other features like repetition and so on, but it's not totally unchanging repetition, so you have to be awake and these patterns, anyway, many different possibilities for it, but this is a common feature. So in these sorts of, these features within these prose texts, when you compare the Sanskrit versions, generally they're longer, they're expanded. If you've got four synonymous verbs in Pali, you've got six or seven in Sanskrit, right? And so on. So a good example is when the Mahalas come to visit the Buddha is about to die, Ananda introduces each of them, the head of the household of each of the Mahala groups and in the Pali it's with his sons, wives, retinue and friends, whereas in the Sanskrit it's with his sons, wives, male and female slaves, servants, laborers, friends, companions, relatives and kinsmen, right? So that's very typical. Now often what's an interesting feature is that fact is that when you compare the Pali in Sanskrit say that the expanded Sanskrit version is actually found elsewhere in the Pali, right? These little phrases. So it seems that the redactors of the Sanskrit are often drawing on a commentarial tradition or that elaborate expansion tradition to improve the texts. So this one here, again, when the ascetic Subbada, that's the last convert of the Buddha, comes to visit the Buddha. Ananda, thinking the Buddha's about to die, prevents him from doing so and says, you know, it's the wrong time. The Buddha overhears this conversation and the Pali is, the Bhagavad heard this conversation between the Venerable Ananda and the Wanderer Subbada. Whereas in the Sanskrit it's the same as all of that. However, he hears it with the divine ear purified surpassing the human. Now that phrase, extra phrase is found elsewhere in the Pali Canon, such as the Bhagavad heard the conversation between those monks with the divine ear element purified surpassing the human, right? So it's not as if it's completely new wording. So you'll also get differences in personal names. So where a sutra or an event happened. Now, you know, of course in Buddhism, you know, the Buddha was awakened in Bodh Gaya. He was, you know, he gave the first discourse, the Dhammachaka Bhavatana Sutta in the Deer Park. He died in Krishna, that's across the board, right? But many other other events, you find they're depicted at this disagreement about that where they actually occur. So this one here in this text, as the Buddha travels north, he visits these various villages on his way north and the text is sort of rather repetitive, you know, at this place, the Buddha addressed the monks and he talked about, you know, virtue and wisdom and so on. And the Pali here you can see has five place names and the Sanskrit has seven, is it one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. And it's expanded again to some agreement, some disagreement, right, in those names. You also get differences in words used, particularly synonyms and different word order. And then you get important differences in grammar and verbal tense and grammatical number. So the question is, when did these changes happen? To what extent are they connected with the process of the Sanskritization of the text? And until recently, the early Buddhist material or sutras particularly that we had at our disposal were the Pali texts and Theravada. We had some Prakrit texts, very few, such as the Prakrit Dhammapada. We had Sanskrit versions from Central Asia, Savastivadhan mostly, Sanskrit versions from the Gilgit region, Wallace Savastivadhan, whatever. Then we had, that's, you know, fifth, seventh century. Then we have Chinese, first Chinese translation, second century, AD onwards, and then you get Tibetan translation. So that's the material. So an example of an individual sutra passages preserved in other texts. Also we also get examples preserved in other texts such as the Divyavadana, the Mahavastu, of treatises and so on, commentaries. So what we've seen, as Vincent mentioned, is in the last 20 years, this huge number of manuscripts appearing from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Both in the Gandhari language transmitted in Khrushche script and Sanskrit language in Brahmi script. So this is, the region you're talking about is, you know, it centers on Peshwa ancient Gandhara, but Greater Gandhara is a term I think coined by Richard Solomon or maybe earlier Fussman to refer to the cultural region. So we're looking at a region in which, you know, the arts, literature, language, et cetera, is fairly homogenous. And, you know, just some of the examples. The first appear was this, the British Library Collection. We think about the first century of the common era found in this pot, the manuscripts found in this pot in a photograph in the Peshwa antiquities market. And here the manuscripts, they were conserved at the British Library and rolled. This is a manuscript, that book that Vincent mentioned that I published, the three sutras. So it's Birchbark, the writing goes from right to left, being Khrushche. This is another collection. I'm working on the senior collection. This was a pot it was found on. This is sort of a typical manuscript. They are often folded to be deposited in the pot. Excuse me. I had these carbon dated in Australia, that combined with the features of the inscription which have Khrushan features. Richard and Solomon and I dated to about 130 to 140 of the common era. So this is one of the sutras on the left, preserved between glass. And on the right, my reconstruction of the manuscript using infrared images, which are often easier to read. Many manuscripts also turned up in Bamiyan. So, you know, we know the Buddhas were blown up and, you know, refugees were sheltering in these caves, supposedly the story goes that a wall fell down or whatever happened. And big cache of manuscripts appeared in Gandhari Sanskrit, right? So this is such as this one, top one were published by Richard, Solomon and myself, a fragment of the Mahapayita Yadavana Sutra, the text I'm talking about now. Carbon dated three to fourth century. So it's palm leaf in this case. Now remember, Afghanistan's not palm country, so you're importing palm leaf up from Southern India. But there's also birch bark manuscripts. And then the bottom one, Lotus Sutra, sixth century, probably Bamiyan Sanskrit, right? Now, very quickly, the, now Gandhari was the, sorry, some of the features of this language, right? Gandhari, which is, you look at Sanskrit, all the constants are preserved clear as day, right? Sanskrit preserves most consonants, you lose some simplification of the phonology. You look at Gandhari, this is in the Flater stage. You know, commonly, consonants are starting to weaken or disappear.  And in this feature of this language is that the spelling was never standardized. So, the same word is spelled differently by different scribes, and even the same scribe spells in the same manuscript, the same word differently, right? So, dharma gets, dharma, dharma, dhammam, you know, drama, drama, and so on, right? That's a bit of a nightmare. And then you also get preserved different phonological development of the same word in the same text. So, you know, that, what you've got there is the attestation, so far in Gandhari, of that particle cha and or but, you know? So, cha, the vowel is palatalized, chi, you know, in this scribe's hand, some scribes, there's no difference between cha and ja, so it just alternates between cha and ja, and so you go on, right? So, here, right, you look at that, you think, oh, well, it's that particle here, but actually, the parallel in Pali will tell you it's cha and, so, you know, Pali Sanskrit parallel is indispensable. And then collapsing of some set phrases, like, you know, idam avoccha, idam avoccha, could turn up as idam, that verb that turns up as avachi avai oi ai, ai, ai, ooh, right? So, there we go, that's, and then also, you don't mark long vowels, you don't make geminence, that's double consonants. So, what in Gandhari is bala, could be Sanskrit bala strength or bala child, or what is kama in Gandhari, Kaurashti script. Of course, it's not Gandhari, the language, because the pronunciation would be different, but the writing of it in Kaurashti script. Kama, what could be karma, desire or karma, karman. And then also, there's a collapsing of the termination, so you can't tell the difference between nominative accusative and locative, say, you know, I'm fine because I deal with Suta texts and I've got Pali parallels.  So, this language used in greater Gandhara, you can see in gray, and also on the southern Silkroot in the Shanshan or Koraina kingdom, third, second, third century. They were Tokari and people, Iranian speakers, but they're using an Indian language as a administrative language. And then up in the northern Silkroot, and then also in Bhaktriya. And this language was used in script as a dominant language, it was the spoken language in Gandhara from about the third century BC. We have the first attestations of that in the inscriptions of Ashoka until about the third or fourth century of the Common Era. So, Richard Solomon, in his article, Gandhari Hybrid Sanskrit New Sources for the Study of the Sanskritization of Buddhist Literature, discussed examples of what appears to be the very earliest stages of Sanskritization found among the new Buddhist manuscripts from Afghanistan and Pakistan, most notably those from Bamiyan, in which Gandhari Prakrit texts are given this thin veneer of Sanskrit spelling inconsistently applied. But we also then get an overlap with the date of the first Sanskrit manuscripts, all right, as you'll see. So, this is a good example of the Bhadrakalpika Sutra from Bamiyan, carbon dated in Australia to 210 to 417. So, this is the late phase of Gandhari Kaurashti manuscripts. If you look at this, well, you know, here we got a term or word like Sanskrit shravakasya of the disciple. Well, the spelling is shravakasya. So, first of all, the normal reflex of shra is retroflex s in Gandhari. So, you can see the spellings there. Here, sava asa sava ga, right? It would be the standard Gandhari, it's Sanskritic spelling. Genitive singular ending sia, that's Sanskritic. However, right, inconsistent, it's prakrit ga fakha, right? So, and then you'll get a spelling like brahmano, which is standard Sanskrit spelling for this, where the normal Gandhari spelling would be brahmano, brahmano and so on. And this scribe, to write HM, which had never been attested in Gandhari before, at least to our knowledge, he either invented it or he, the exemplar invented it, right? So, you have to start inventing new ligatures to transmit this Sanskritized spelling. However, this feature is, you know, you start to get features, Sanskritic features in Pali itself, you know, such as the tva ending, which in prakrit is actually double T, long A, gets restored in Pali. Similarly, this cluster pr and the spelling brahmano same, which is Pali would be brahmano and so on. Or you look at, say, that ablative pronoun, Sanskrit tasmaat, proper Pali spelling kamhaa, but it's Sanskrit spelling tasmaa and so on. And so it goes on. When you look at a text like this, this is the Aastha Sahasrika Prajnaparamita manuscript from Bamiyan. This is the, dated by Laura Sanders on paleography, second half of the third century of the common era. Now, this text is the earliest, generally regarded to be the earliest strata of Mahayana literature. And this is the earliest Indian manuscript of this text. Now, if you look at some of the features of it, well, you know, what you're looking at here is, this is from this manuscript. This is from the standard edition, which based on more standard later Sanskrit manuscripts. So first of all, you know, ayam prajnaparamita, well, prajnaparamita is feminine, but it's using ayam. Now ayam is in Prakrit, it's both masculine and feminine, but it really should have restored ayam, but it didn't. Similarly, you know, it has this, that the prefix ava gets collapses in Prakrit to aw, and it didn't do that, whereas in the standard Sanskrit it does. Or you get something like opeti, which should be opeti, but the Prakrit spelling's retained. Or, you know, in Prakrit, the particle upi is loses its first syllable, it's p. And it's kept, the standard, it's kept those, whereas the standard Sanskrit one is upi and so on. So this shows that this manuscript, that last one I just showed you, is much more Sanskritic, but it's not perfectly so. So you can see this transitioning going on. Now the most basic and obvious changes that occur, if you want to, you know, convert a text from Prakrit to Sanskrit is, of course, to the adoption of Sanskrit phonology, that's the sound system morphology, the construction of words, syntax, the ordering of words, and you know, implement Sanskrit Sunday rules, you know, when the rules of sound changes that happen between words. So this is not the Bhaktivana Sutra, this is the Dhamma Chakrapavattana Sutra, the first discourse of the Buddha, and you see this phrase here, which in English is, and the pursuit of self-modification, which is painful, ignoble, and unbed official. And, you know, on the level of phonology, well, you know, here this is Pali, you've got a simulation of consonants, and you know, a vowel that separates consonants here, this is the Pali, this is the Mahavasthva Buddhist hybrid Sanskrit, and here you have, it's Sanskrit spelling, but this is Prakrit spelling, Sanskrit spelling, Sanskrit spelling, Sanskrit spelling, that's fine. But then we get to, and this is standard Sanskrit, you get to Sunday say, well, in Prakrit, you can end a word in a vowel and begin a word, next word in a vowel, Sanskrit, you can't do that, right? So this is Sanskrit, where you get a lesion, and in the Prakrit one, it tolerates, it still has the Prakrit feature, so that's sort of a middle stage in the Sanskritization of this text. And then an example of morphology would be that word we looked at before, where, you know, that ending Tva, absolute ending, you can't do that in Sanskrit, if you've got prefixes, you've got to have, you use Yaa, so the standard Sanskrit would be Upasamkramya, whereas Pali and Gandhari is like this. Now, translation to Sanskrit also involves replacing archaic, regional, or peculiar Prakritic words, or lexical items with those more appropriate to the target audience. For example, this word chigula, now chigula is a whole, and it occurs in, say, Pali sutras, or in Buddha's texts, there's this simile, you might know it, which is, the Buddha says this, at one point there was, this whole world was covered in one great ocean, and there's a yoke, which is a piece of wood between two oxen with one hole in it, and it's floating on this ocean. And there's a blind turtle that surfaces every hundred years. What's the likelihood of his putting his head through that hole? Well, it's not very much, and that's the likelihood of a Buddha appearing in the world, which is used, he uses to illustrate the fact that, I'm here, you're here, you're a human being, strife, right? So the Pali word is chigula. This is a non-Indo-Aryan word, right? Borrowed from the local Drudean language, probably. And Sanskrit versions replace that with chidra, another word for hole in the yoke. Well, in this Gandhari version I've worked on, the word is ekatarma, or you always yoga, and the word tārma, always tārdhman, when cast suffix. Now this tārdhman word is, it only appears in Sanskrit, in the atarvaveda, the śrata-śutra of the Kachayana, kattaka-guruhi-śutra, the bhaktya-javeda, and the śrata-pata-brahmana, and then after, all the commentaries on those texts, use chidra, commentary on it, right, on tārdhman, and you don't get it, right? So it looks like those who were, those Buddhist texts moved up into Gandhara from the Buddhist heartland of Magadharan, whatever, where the word was either chigal or chidra, probably. They replaced it with a local word, and that local word is a residue of when the Brahmans were more centered around Gandhara, right? So, but of course that sort of changing synonyms is very typical, and it could happen in the procrets. Now translating the procret verse into Sanskrit presents itself, presents its own set of peculiar problems, because of course, if you take a procret verse and you just cast it into Sanskrit, it's not gonna be metrical, right, it's a mess. So, you know, how'd they get around that well? You know, there's various levels of Sanskritization, but you know, the good Sanskrit verses, they change word order, they change synonyms, they add particles and grammatical features to facilitate proper meter. An example is say, Pali Dhammapada verse number seven, there's a procret version, there's a Gandhari procret version, there's a Sanskrit or Dhanavarga version, there's actually others as well. So this meter is Anastupta Sloka meter, six, usually it's four paddas, feet of eight syllables each, but you know, this has six. In English it's, and I will look at it in detail, contemplating pleasant things, being uncontrolled in the senses, not knowing moderation, food, lazy, lacking energy, him indeed, Mara the evil one overpowers, like the wind overpowers a great tree. So you look at the first two paddas, that is, in the procret, they're identical, right? That's P is Pali, procret is the procret Dhammapada, G is the Gandhari Dhammapada, Sanskrit is the Dhanavarga. So if you cast, this word Anopasin, you know, from Dhrush, then there's no such word as Anopasin in Sanskrit. So they replaced it with Anodarshinam, that's one extra syllable. So they Viharantam, which is, you know, they're dwelling sort of means not much, so they replaced it with instead Nithyan, permanently, right? And in this next padda you have, if you cast this unrestrained among the senses, then into Sanskrit it doesn't work, right? So what they did is, well, the use of locketive instead of instrument or instead of locketive, that's neither here nor there, but they introduced this chaapi, which is and also it means nothing, and it just separates the two words from the sundae coming together, right? And also you notice this padda has nine syllables, this hypermetric is very typical in Prakrit, tolerated, Sanskrit didn't like that, right? So it's got to be eight syllables. An example here, this is Bodjanam here is, you know, Amhi is a locketive ending that's come from the pronominal declension into the noun declension, standard Sanskrit should be Bodjane, right? You do that, you lose one syllable. So what do you do? Well, you just add chaapi, you know, gives you one syllable and separates the words, right? From the sundae, from eh and ah. And here now, this is a problem, lazy, lacking energy. Well, you know, it casts that into Sanskrit, then, you know, it just doesn't work metrically. So they kept this, but they changed the wording. That is, it's lowly or something like that among the wakeful as opposed to lazy, lacking energy. So that's actually a slightly more substantial change in the meaning. If we go to the last two paradas, then you go, well, here they're identical in the prakrit except the Gandhari lines up with the Sanskrit in saying not that Mara overcomes him, but Raga, passion, overcomes him. That's neither head nor there sort of thing, but it shows the complexity of the situation. This particle va in Pali in prakrit is eva, two syllables, like, well, if you put that into the Sanskrit standard of work. So what they did is they, the Sanskrit redactors dropped this prefix and used the prefix ah, which means the same thing, and sort of, that's the sort of typical difference that you will find. Another common feature of these verses is that, you know, to stop sundae happening, they will use this particle here. If you put hit between a word ending in a vowel and one beginning in a vowel, the I will go to Y, it means nothing, and it separates stop sundae happening. So this is a very common feature as you have here. Now, earlier I noted that when you compare, no, sorry, so clearly these, particularly this verse material, shows that these changes are happening in the Sanskrit, in the Sanskritization. The Sanskrit redactors had to modify their texts to make it work metrically. Sometimes it's really minor, right? But other times really does change the meaning. Whether it's significant doctrinally, that's something else. Now, earlier I noted that when you compare the Pali and Sanskrit versions of prose sutras, you see that there's a tendency for the Sanskrit to clarify obscure words or phrases and to articulate what is implicit in the Pali and generally modernize the reading. So a good to text, a good example is the formula used to depict a monk visiting the Buddha. So the Pali is then a certain monk approached the Bhagavad. Having approached, he paid homage to the Bhagavad and sat down to one side. The word paid homage to the Bhagavad is abhivadetva, right? Now, it's rather obscure what that means, but the, and clearly the Sanskrit redactors felt that that was the case. So they replaced it throughout all Sanskrit literature with many different schools, right? So with the phrase having honored vanditva, the feet of the Bhagavad with their head. Now to the early audience, when they heard abhivadetva, they knew what that meant. When a monk met the Buddha, he bowed down at his feet. But by the time this later period, it became obscure. So they're introducing this clarification of the meaning of the text. If you look at these two new, say, Gandhari examples, which is here you have the first one, which is the senior collection, and you have actually like the Sanskrit, right? So it lines up, but not quite. It's having paid homage to the feet of the Bhagavad. So there's no mention of head there. But in another prokhrat version of the, you do have that word, right? So that shows that this tendency to clarify, expand is happening in that, the prokhrat phase in the Gandhari. Now, sometimes we find contradictory forces at work in the Sanskrit versions, alongside a tendency, to proliferate similar word elements, to expand the text and so on. You find a tendency in some cases to actually contract it, right? Particularly in certain formulas. So this one here, which is the conversion formula now, very typically, you know, Buddha's text, the Buddha always, you know, outperforms his opponent and the opponent at the end. If he wants to become a layman, we'll say, you know, this formula is used. If he wants to become a monk, another formula will be used. But it's, in Pali, it's a wonderful Venerable Gautama. This is wonderful Venerable Gautama. So that's clearly by an ascetic speaking, the way he addresses the Buddha, just as Venerable Gautama, one would set upright what has been overturned or uncover what has been covered or show the path to one who is lost or bring an oil lamp into the darkness so that those with eyes might see forms. Even so, has the Venerable Gautama declared the Dhamma in various ways? I go to the Venerable Gautama as a refuge into the Dhamma and to the community of monks. May the Venerable Gautama accept me as a layman who has gone to him as a refuge from today onwards until my last breath.  But throughout all and some variation, but if you look throughout all of it, that version here is, I am successful Lord, I'm successful, I go to the Bhagavad as a refuge and I go to the Dhamma and the community of monks. May accept me as a layman who with faith, so that's different, has gone to you as a refuge from today onwards for as long as there is life until my last breath, right? So the first thing that strikes you is that very long list of similes is missing in all Sanskrit versions, right? And you wonder why it's quite, you know, that's contrary to this tendency wouldn't be noting of Sanskrit to expand. Now, if you look at some Gandhari versions that are turning up, well, the first is from the British Library Collection, the manuscript edited and you saw before. And here we have the long list of similes, but we have slightly different wording, which is the Mankarama declared, revealed and proclaimed the Dhamma, it's the same list of verbs, the Dhamma dark and bright, right? So different wording. But there's another Gandhari version from a slightly later, we think later manuscript, which has all that list of similes has disappeared, but we do, as we do in the first Gandhari version, and this, we do have this as long as there is life, and at least in this one, out of faith, right? So, this shows the complexity of the situation. The different, you know, the Pali similar to, and the Gandhari similar in some respects, but if the Gandhari paralleling the Sanskrit in other respects. So what you have here then is, the, with the first version, as I said, has the Pali and the one Gandhari version has this long list of similes, but the Gandhari is similar to the Sanskrit in having as long as there's life and going forth out of faith. And this feature, however, this, you know, that is going forth with faith, and as long as there is life, right? This is sort of implicit in the action, and what you find in the late Pali texts like this one here, which is, sorry, here, sorry, that's the Upadana, which is, you know, having heard the very sweet Dhamma with faith, sorry, having heard the very sweet Dhamma, with faith in the teaching of the Jinnah, I went to the Sugata as a refuge and honoured him for as long as there is life, right? There's some question about where this text comes from, maybe North India, but here's late Pali texts incorporating these same features. Now, another interesting example is the opening formulas of sutras, which I'm sure you're all very familiar with if you're, you know, early Buddhist texts, which is, say, the Pali is, thus have I heard at one time the Bhagavata stayed in Savati in the Jetavana in the Park of Anandapintika. There, the Bhagavata addressed the monks. Monks, venerable sir, those monks addressed, are centred to the Bhagavata. The Bhagavata said this. Now, in all the Sanskrit versions, it's this, which is, thus have I heard at one time the Bhagavata stayed in Savati in the Jetavana in the Park of Anandapintika. There, the Bhagavata addressed the monks. Now, if you look at some Gandhari versions that again have peered, then what you find like this one here is that that interchange between the, which describes interchange between the Buddha and his monks is still there, whereas the Sanskrit got rid of that long phrase, which is the Sanskrit. This whole long phrase, which is that dark one there, is missing in the Sanskrit versions, right? But in the Gandhari version, you actually do have it, except you're missing the interchange of vocatives. So, in the early Pali versions, it's omunks and then the monks were sent Bhagavata, right? And so what you're seeing then is the Gandhari showing signs of that abbreviation of contraction that you'll get as just a standard feature across the board within the Sanskrit. Now, what's quite interesting is that in Pali manuscripts, you often find the phrase, there the Bhagavata addressed the monks, monks, venerable sir, those monks are sent to the Bhagavata. The Bhagavata said this, which is what you're missing in the Sanskrit, abbreviated in Pali manuscripts, which is there the Bhagavata addressed the monks, right? Which is the very wording of the Sanskrit, which suggests that the shorter Sanskrit version of this standard formula may have resulted from the tendency to abbreviate this formula in the openings in manuscripts. And perhaps the conversion formula, which is of course the other end of a sutra, is another example of that. What you do is these, the standard opening, it's so formulaic and conclusion of sutras starts to get abbreviated by scribes and that then it just becomes standardized across the board within certain classes of text without memory of the more complex earlier version. And I think what we're looking at is maybe in the Gandhari version with the first movement in that direction is happening. So that's first century BC to onwards. So the abbreviation is starting happening there and this is the beginning of Buddhist manuscript culture. So it's possible that that type of feature, which seems contrary to the other trend within the Sanskrit process towards Sanskritization of expansion of wording is a result of the use of manuscripts of manuscript culture. Now another common feature of Pali sutra texts is the repetitive use of vocatives of address in dialogues and monologues and the frequent and repetitive employment of certain indeclinable such as Kaur, which is Sanskrit Kauru, means nothing, could mean indeed something like that, but you can't possibly translate it. So a good example would be this one here, Atta Kaur Bhagavata, then the Bhagavata said, did whatever, Tena Kaur Panna at that time. So you look here where you have a translation of that would be using Atta Kaur monks. This occurred to the Pasi Bodhisattva. With Kaur, the existence of what does existence come to be, by what is existence conditioned? Then Kaur monks through the careful attention, penetration through wisdom occurred to the Pasi Bodhisattva. When Kaur is clinging, existence comes to be, existence has clinging as its condition. And you also get so these quotative particles commonly in Pali texts. So what I think these features I think functioned as that's the vocatives and particles like Kaur as markers in the text, in an oral context, right? So first of all, the vocatives are telling you who is speaking, an audience who is speaking, right? If the text is Bhagavata, you know that, or Bhante, then you know that it's a monk speaking. If it's Bikavaya, it's the Buddha speaking. And Kaur I think always occurs as the second element or thereabouts of a new sentence, right? So Kaur marks the beginning of a new bit of information. And I think again, that's as I said, this is very much tied up with the orality of this material. Now, given that these features would have functioned as an oral context, as I would argue, therefore interesting that Sanskrit texts, or at least many of them, tend to emit vocatives and particles such as Kaur lo and the quotative particle iti, suggesting that they stem from a period when these elements were no longer felt to be appropriate or necessary. Now it turns out that this is a particular, is also a feature of these Gandhari manuscripts. So you look at this phrase here from the Srimanyi Pala Sutta, Pali hi atta kaur and the Pali and Sanskrit version missing it. And same with vocatives. This one here, the vocative O monks missing in the Gandhari and the Sanskrit. And it tends to emit the quotative particle at the end here. Also a very common feature of the Gandhari. So in conclusion then, several of the differences between the Prakrit and Sanskrit versions of Buddhist texts outlined so far cannot be attributed to the Sanskritization process since some differences or the same differences are encountered when different Prakrit versions are compared, that is say the Pali and the Gandhari. This includes the emission or inclusion of episodes, differences in the ordering of events, different arrangement of information within the description of an event or concept, the use of different words to relay the same idea, differences in grammar. But others clearly occurred within that process as a result of Sanskritization, in particular those with reference to verse. Of the features that appear most characteristic of Sanskrit versions, that is the tendency to expand lists to give more detailed descriptions and generally give more information, the tendency to clarify or gloss obscure words or phrase and articulate what is implicit in the text, so the Pali version, a tendency for individual words to be expanded through the addition of verbal prefixes, yet also the tendency to shorten some stock passages or formulas and to make certain passages more concise and reduce repetition. And the tendency to admit particles, evocatives, such as Kalu and Kaurthiti, the new Gandhari versions of sutras show that these tendencies were already underway when the twit texts were being transmitted in Prakrit, that is Gandhari Prakrit, at least by the first century of the common era, if not the first century BC, from when the earliest of these manuscript states, and that's about two centuries prior to what we see when we start to see Buddhist manuscripts in the Bambamian region at least, starting to take being converted to Sanskrit as we witnessed by those Gandhari fragments. This is at least in terms of, so in other words, sorry, in terms of the development of the diction, the Gandhari texts tend to appear to be later than the Pali, but earlier than the Sanskrit. They sit in, they're not as complex as quite in the details and some of the features are Sanskrit, but they're certainly well on the way to that. However, although these developments began in the period of the transmission of these texts in Prakrit, I'm inclined to think that the act of translating texts into Sanskrit, which in the Northwest appeared to have been started around the first century or the third century, second century of the common era, if not earlier, this conversion to Sanskrit would have given Buddhist communities yet another opportunity to improve the texts, that is, to clarify what is obscure, expand the wording, embellishing the descriptions and so on. So no problem here when we're assessing this material is that we don't have the full, the witnesses to this transmission. We have Pali, who knows what date is, probably Priya Shorkan for the early Sutras, Gandhari beginning first century BC, Sanskrit, who knows quite where that fits. We don't have all of the phases from all regions witnessing, so we're guessing in some ways, but we get a rough idea. Now, the differences encountered between parallel versions of early Buddhist Sutra texts and verses, some of which I've discussed here, raised many important issues concerning the composition and transmission of early, particularly Agama Sutras, Buddhist texts and factors that enabled and contributed to such changes occurring in these texts, whether by design or through the mechanics of transmission and these are texts after all that were preserving, transmitting the word of the teacher, the Buddha and of his disciples. So some of these important questions would be, what is the attitude, what are these issues tell us about the attitudes Buddhist communities must have had towards the words and forms of the texts they were transmitting, what allowed them to change wording, right? Their concept of textual authority and the notion of what constitutes Buddha Vachana, the word of the Buddha and the training of the authors of the transmitters of this material and their oral and literary skills and also how this contrasted with say, the Brahmanical tradition, the Brahmanical tradition of learning. Now these are all very interesting and very big questions and I won't go into them here, that's another paper. I'd rather what I'd like to do is comment on the status of Pali texts in the light of this. So in the early period of Western encounter with Buddhism, that is from about the mid-1870s onwards, Pali canonical texts, as you may know, came to be regarded in some quarters as the oldest and most authentic records of the Buddha's teaching, a claim which of course is maintained by the Theravada community itself up to the present day has been throughout the history. Now this was due to the fact that Pali can preserved in Theravada lands, which came to be known through mostly through British rule of colonial Ceylon Burma, was the only complete cannon representative of the early period preserved in Indian language and because the Pali language itself and the contents of the texts were clearly very old and therefore likely to have been close to the languages used by the Buddha. This was the argument. Now the late 20th century saw this argument, this position being mostly abandoned in most academic circles at least, not completely but generally. Now although Pali canonical pseudo texts or Pali early texts generally an extremely important, invaluable and indispensable source, and undoubtedly go back to a very early period, it can be claimed that they are more superior and more authentic than any of the other numerous parallel texts transmitted by the many Buddhist communities that flourished at various times throughout Asia, although unfortunately a small portion fragment of these argument texts has survived. Nonetheless, although this is the case, a detailed study of the diction of Pali, Gandhari, Sanskrit texts tells shows that the Pali texts tend to be more conservative, right? Descriptions are briefer, lists are shorter, the wording less expanded than the Gandhari and Sanskrit, plots less complex and so on, right? I therefore think that we can say that in certain aspects of the wording and the structure of these texts, at least Pali suitors are earlier, which is in keeping with the language being earlier than the other versions, Gandhari, Buddhist, Sanskrit, Buddhist, Sanskrit. Though of course we cannot thereby say that the information they give the course of events, that is what event comes first and so on, the words they attribute to the Buddha and so on are likely to be more original. Yes, that's the end, thanks. Thank you very much for this fascinating lecture, bringing in a lot of materials and also raising some very important questions that are at the core of quite a bit of debates in recent decades, and sometimes yes, we have too much to do in the city too, be busy killing the fathers and burying the old theories without taking too much on the implication that's new narratives and the complication that they skew out narratives and take. I'm sure the room is quite full, so I'm sure there will be quite a bit of discussions and questions if I might just take the privilege of the chair. I belong to, let's say, a parampa that was very early contested the primacy of Pali. Levy was very vocal about the kind of problematic focus of the certain German English on to Pali. In many respects he was wrong, in many respects he was also white, for example, scholars like him were pioneers in mining terrain that of Chinese translations, for example, that now are showing that in many instances we can, through Chinese, not access the diction level, but are still an idea of the kind of complex formation of given sutras and the work, for example, of our friend, Anna, is showing a lot in that respect. One of the other issues that are still, so it's still, of course we should not, it's a mistake to, in my opinion, to under-represent the importance of Pali, what maybe we should cultivate our historical imagination to is that to be aware of the amount of what is missing. And in particular in the presentation of the situation of kind of textual transmission as there is Pali, there is Prakrit, especially Gandhari, and there is Sanskrit, it's overall what we are, but there are actually various voices behind this. So for example, the Padna d'Armapada seems to point to a particular cemetery, a transmission that is now mined by scholars like Peter Skidding and Nikhov, and there is quite a bit emerging there, and that points to a fairly early Prakrit, and that shows that in many respects we are lining with Pali, and to preach for my own Mahasangika chattel, if I may. In Bamiyan there are some very interesting fragments of early Buddhist agamas from the 4th century just after the shift from Karoshti to Brahmi, that showed that the church language of this particular circle that was very prominent in Bamiyan transmitted a version of the canon that was still very much Prakritic, and for example that included a lot of this, for example the ko, had not yet been translated into Kalu, and still remained in many respects. So I think there are at least five voices if we are looking at linear transmission, and even if these voices are partly, yeah partly, they are half heard because they are just one or few texts that are present. And so I wanted to ask you, so these were some general comments that I've always known, I wanted to ask you if you could include within your, maybe within the discussion also this kind of apparent paradox that we are having Pali texts that in many respects look in terms of addiction, in terms of what they keep of the oral transmission older than other texts that are available to us in this form, and the extremely long process of actual written transmission of Pali texts, and since you are working on early canon, what you make of this and how this might have influenced, for example, if not the dictionary, at least the orthography, and the phonology of Pali as in the process of its transmission, of textual transmission and the conversion from early Brahmi scripts into more complex Brahmi scripts. So what did the impact of the use of script in writing have on Pali? On Pali itself, yes. Look, you probably refer you to K.R. Norman's, my teacher's chapter on writing and the impact, right? So this, I believe in Pali you get many instances of say the Sanskritization where they got it wrong, like the suffix tra, the agent noun suffix, and is it a past participle or is it an agent noun? Transmission of Brahmi, well, the first use of Brahmi doesn't mark long vowels, right? Doesn't mark geminates. So all scripts in India were created to transmit procrets. Procret is used as administrative malanguage of shaka, of Buddhist groups, Jain groups, until first, second century of the common era. And then this shift starts to happen and there's big debate about that, right? So that, the earlier phase of Brahmi to mark long vowels and geminates resulted in errors, right? So when you get an exemplar and you've just got one T, what is it, right? How do we restore, how do we think of it in a word? And that's particularly in the manuscript transmission when you're reading as opposed to hearing and it's a living language or an understanding, right? So I think there was definitely errors starting to be happening in that use of writing and the imperfect use of writing. And when they were starting to then say shift to the script which did mark long vowels and geminates and you really had to put it down, then they had to make a choice and to push that further, well, the Sanskrit authors, when they were faced with a procret text and you often get in Buddhist Pali texts, this deliberate ambiguity in punning, you couldn't do that. You've got to choose one or the other and they chose one and they got it right or wrong. Well, actually there's no right or wrong because so was a punning on that, right? So definitely, yeah, probably so. What struck me as all this is that when you look at like epigraphical variants of Pali to boom boom boom, or expression of Pani Nuba, early Pali, co-dactions of Pali scriptures that we find in for example early inscription from Burma, et cetera, the orthographies looks very irregular in many respects. And to some extent, well the oddities that we observe in reading Gondari manuscripts, if we are only these to look at Pali, we would say well, the Pali was not fixed and there was no room. So I wonder how this might be performed the way we reflect about it. So you're getting at that, well Pali, the orthography seemed to have been fixed in a fairly early period. Well, no, that's why I wasn't thinking at the reverse actually, at the reverse. So there are a number of features that show that for example, even when the length is written, if you look at the kind of cluster of Pali looking texts collected to the Terial lineage transmitted in Nagarjuna Kanda, even when they're used, when they start using the Boral marker, they are extremely irregular on that aspect. So it seems that, and they are attributed to monks who are quite prominent figures, et cetera, it still seems that in many respects, the tradition is, let's say, alive and as long as we edit and polish as we are used to Pali texts. And also that it's showing that the monks who are doing that, it's completely, they're fluent in the language. It's just a prompt, the writing too, like the Gandhari, I said that what you write as Khamma would be in Gandhari's, in Khrushche script, you don't know whether that's Khamma or Karma, right? But in reciting it and reading it, the monks would know exactly what it is from the context. In some transmissions, maybe that there's a de-forcing from it. But normally, you could do English, I believe there's sort of experiments on that, where you just drop out all the vowels in English and you can read it because you're a fluent reading the speaker. But it's just hooping on that one. If you connect that to orality then it's kind of contradictory because you, on one hand, the orality markers have dropped. Yes. But still it's in Gandhari, it's... Well, they're dropping, falling out. Exactly. So it kind of contradicts that in a way. Yes. Look, I don't quite know how to answer that. So was it the case that, is it in the recitation of the texts? Just a more general question would be, how does orality fit into these different categories? Yes. Is, for example, the Pali version also were the Pali retaining thing. Yes. Longer, also because they used orality at the site for a longer time. Yeah. Look, you know, there's... In a sense, for this manuscript culture, what is Gandhari? Yeah. Well, it's what we're looking at the beginning of manuscript culture, it seems. And that's, you know, is the features that I say, it's a lack of the core particle and so on, lack of vocatives. Is that really, is that just the scribes tending to abbreviate, right? But if you recited the text, you would recite it in full. Or is it actually, they were stopping to recite with the vocatives in it. My inclination is to think that when they recite, they recite in full. So even in Pali, you take, say, the standard, you know, manuscripts of Agama texts, you'll have the beginning of suitors just abbreviated, right? If you see, if you go to the British Library and you'll have anthologies of personal monks who've collected a couple of suitors here and there and a bit of vinyar and abhidharma, there's the full shebangs there, right? For recitation.  And it'll have the full conclusion and then all the rest won't, but the last one will have the full, so this is a manuscript, the scribal thing, because manuscripts are expensive, you know, time-consuming to write. So I think there is, there's a difference between manuscript representation and the actual recitation, right? And there's also, there's a problem we face in, we don't really know what these manuscripts were for, right, there's the Gandhari ones in this case, so the senior collection I'm working on is found in, you saw the second example of a pot and this seemed to be, it's all by the same scribe, it seemed to have been produced by the donor who's mentioned on the inscription on the pot as a pious act, right, for his mother and father. And so he's commissioned a collection of suitors, it's an anthology, to be written in and buried, right? So is it the case that a suitor that is written out by a scribe for that purpose, is the full version, contracted version, or, you know, does it really, for him, so what is, you know, and what we're also finding is say, among these Richard Solomon-Rodin article on this, which is, there's, we may, we're finding many manuscripts which only have the beginning of a suitor and not the rest and first we thought, oh well, the remaining, because you, a Gandhari manuscript may be this long and then you write on the next manuscript and they're separate scrolls and, you know, you just didn't, the others haven't survived, but the pattern seemed to be there, that you're, what looks like is, scribes were writing the beginning of texts as representative of the whole, so they're ritual manuscripts. Right. So there's, you know, these complex things going on between written versions and recitation versions and even within recitation, you've got a version of, say, the Satipatanasuta, Majiminika version is so long, Diginika version is longer because they've added another bit, right? So on one occasion, the monks would have recited a longer version for the audience and this is, you know, I think typical in many oral contexts where you vary the nature of the text you're reciting according to the audience and expectations in the occasion. Well, I just want to ask about Satipatization. Yes. Your teacher, K.R. Norman, he has written a few times that in the Pali calendar would have happened when they wrote it down in the first century. You see, it seems a bit early to me. Yeah. Because you have the standard epigraphic, you have epigraphic or hybrid Sanskrit and then full Sanskrit. Yes. And epigraphy. So that seems to be a better model on when it is found in the Gandhari manuscripts. That's the gradual Satipatization. Yes, it's gradual and piecemeal and also, you know, we're just looking from one region. So those texts that are showing Sanskritization from one place, Bamiyan. But we are actually finding some Karashti manuscripts that are writing Sanskrit and they don't mark long vowels, they don't mark jaminates. It's an imperfect medium for transmitting Sanskrit. But you can tell from all features that it's Sanskrit that they're writing. What date are you working on? So there's one in the Ingo Strauts working on a collection from Bajau. I think they're second century. There's a Rajaniti text, it's not a Buddhist text and it gives account of how a king should act and that's the feature show that I think it's about second century. The dating of this stuff is problematic. You know, you date it on paleography, shape of letters. We do some carbon dating. Carbon dates, as you saw, the dates are big, right? Often two centuries. And then you've got to try and, you know, combine these various features in the case of the senior collection. We were lucky enough that it had an inscription on this pot which had, according to Richard Solomon, Kushan features and it referred to the year 12 and he argued that it's the date of the year of a Kanishka. Well, as you know, the year of Kanishka is a real big problem but adopting Harry Folk's year of the session at 2.127, that leaves you with 130 to 140. There's lots of ifs, right? But, you know, what these manuscripts are witnessing is, you know, what we think of the earliest are British library material, some of the earliest and some of the carbon dates on some of the other collections are returning BC, first century BC dates, which don't show Sanskrit features but those that return late carbon dates, second century, third century are showing Sanskrit features, right? So that's, and then they happen to be found or at least the Bamiyan material at the same place where the earliest Sanskrit manuscripts are like the Ashtashashrika, second century, third century, right? And so it looks like you're witnessing in that region at least the transition from use of Sanskrit to a Prakritu Sanskrit and Konroshti to Brahmi. Inga Strauch's written an article not long ago on the why did Brahmi replace Sanskrit, Konroshti, right? And it's a lot to do with Brahmins and, you know, the Brahmins, because Brahmi was created for Prakrit, it was imperfect for Sanskrit, but the Brahmins adopted it to faithfully transmit Sanskrit, which made it a much more powerful tool, right? So that with, along with other pressures, or perhaps influences from Brahmins, resulted in the shift towards Sanskrit, yeah. Bamiyan is very interesting for this because there are some cases of palimpsest in which you had a palimpsest that was Matsuda, I don't know if you've published them. I don't know. So you had Konroshti leaves that were erased and Brahmi must be done for them. Again, in the context in which in the 4th century you see the attempt by the Ulekan community to really try and put together the in their kind of form of Sanskrit as Prakrit adopting a particular format, a particular language that is here very much heterogeneous in many respects. And so, and you have earlier, a third century, you know, Gaushki. And I've also seen, not long ago, a manuscript which has Karushhti, Gandhari on one side and Brahmi, Kushan, Brahmi, Sanskrit on the other side, yeah. No question. You have still some time now? Yeah. Yeah. Just well, well, fill the gap, but you know, something I didn't look at much is the way in, you know, the way which in Sanskrit versions you often get more complex narratives, right? So I showed you one example from the Samana Pala Sutra, Samanya Pala Sutra, which is this is, the context is King Ajata Satu. Now, you know the story of him. He had backed Devadatta to usurp the Buddha from the, as leader, and he had killed his father, Bimbisara, who was a follower of the Buddha, right? So he, the sutra depicts him sitting in the court on a full moon night and he says, who, you know, what should I do on this full moon night? Or which minister or whatever should I, what, which monk or Brahmin should I visit? And in the Pali version, it's the simplest. Six ministers say, you should visit this, you know, the six rival teachers of the Buddha's day, right?  He says, why are you silent? And he says, well, the Buddha's sitting, you know, not far away, let's go visit him. So the king goes off to visit him on the way he, you know, because Jivika said there's 1,250 monks, you can't hear them. So he thinks Jivika's leading to him, to his ruin. And he's got fear and dread. He meets the Buddha and then he asks him, what's the results? What's the benefits of living the ascetic life? And the Buddha gives this long discourse, which, you know, shows that his monks have a better time, you know, all these things. Well, I'm working on a Gandhari manuscript this in the senior collection, which just preserves the introductory narrative. And even though it's in Gandhari Prakrit and dating to 130 to 140, it's the most complex narrative structure. And it matches the narrative structure in the Dharmagupta Chinese translation. And this is a further argument for why this is a Dharmagupta collection. That is, the narrative goes, he's sitting among his courtiers and he says, what should I do in this night?  And the prince says, well, let's go off and bash up our neighbors with the army. And the head of the army says, well, let's parade around the city wall with the army. And then finally, you get the standard that the ministers and, you know, describe each of the heretical teachers and then Jivaka, but in this case, each of the ministers is named and the prince, they're all named, right? And then on the way, the description of the, his fear and dread is more complex with the elephants and the women. And then at the Sutta stops when he meets the Buddha and he says, well, which is the Buddha? And he meets the Buddha and he says, well, he sees all the monks calm and the Buddha calm, he says, I wish my son was as calm as this. Well, it turns out Udayi Badra kills him later. So, you know, this is, so that's an interesting feature because here's a very early manuscript, right? Which has the most complex narrative structure. Now, you know, you could just straight out say, well, this is later, you know, maybe that's too simplistic. Maybe for that telling of that text, it was appropriate for that audience to tell a more complex story, right? Don't know. But it's a repeating feature that the Pali is simpler on all of these levels. But again, as Vincent said, you know, Analeo has done a lot of work recently on comparing the, you know, all versions. And, you know, it's not so straightforward. The Pali shows later developments or errors in, you know, doing omissions and all sorts. So, that's why I think you could say, well, in terms of some elements of diction and structure and particularly narrative portions, the Pali is the most conservative. Yeah. That's not the same as saying it preserves the earliest copy. No, and actually, I haven't done this in detail. What all of the examples I've given today, except the verses, are from the narrative portions of prose texts, right? Now, this is light on doctrine, right? You know, the last words, the last actions of the Buddha, that's pretty significant, right? But in terms of, say, the description of the four Brahma Viharas or the four exertions, Pahanas in Pali, you know, Pahanas in Gandhari, Pahanas in Sanskrit, well, they're very similar, right? So, it's possible, and I need to do much more work on that. Is it the case that the narrative prose portions were more open to change than the core doctrines, right? You know, just, you know, another aside, which is that the other project that Vincent said I'm working on, which is with a team from Australia where working in the Kudador Pagoda in Northern Burma. And this was in Second Last King of Burma, Minden, 1860, 68, had the whole of the Pali can carved on 729 marble slabs. That's either Fifth Council and it's pre-Western influence.  The Burmese didn't like that. So, they liked the Sanskrit as they reduced it to eight. They, the Burmese, you've done a lot of work on this, working on the Tripitika project in Thailand. You know that the Burmese version, Six Council, is often, you know, it just improves things, gets rid of difficult readings and whatever, right? That's a really interesting feature, I think, of their, you know, the most conservative tradition being willing to, you know, it's not changing the word, it's just making it better. Of course, this is a better reading, right? There's errors that were in the text, so I'm going to improve them. And I think that in the, you know, it'd be interesting and I'd need to do more work on this, that only some portions were more liable to those sorts of improvements. Core doctrines, like the description of Fallen Noble Truths, less so. And on this number two, we will probably give it with, thanking you very much for... Yeah.