For those who are interested... The preaching and the spreading of the religion is a very different thing from the elaboration of those speculative principles from which the religion was deduced. In the one case, the appeal would be to the many; in the other to the few. And whilst I am satisfied that the Buddhists as practical reformers addressed themselves to the people, and as propagandists used the vulgar tongue, I think those philosophical dogmata which formed the basis of the popular creed, were enounced, defended, and systematized in Sanskrit. I never alleged that the Buddhists had eschewed the Prakrits, I only denied the allegation that they had eschewed the Sanskrit; and I endeavoured at the same time, to reconcile their use of both, by drawing a distinction between the means employed by their philosophers to establish the principles of their religion, and the means employed by their missionaries to propagate the religion itself. (Brian Houghton Hodgson, 1801-1894)
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 06:48:18 +0000
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