International Conference on“Sanskrit in Asia” to celebrate

the Golden Jubilee of Her Royal Highness Princess Mahachakri Sirindhorn

Inaugural Session, Bangkok, June 23, 2005

THE SOUND PATTERN

of

SANSKRIT IN ASIA

An Unheralded Contribution by

Indian Brahmans and Buddhist Monks*

Frits Staal

Berkeley/Chiang Mai

C o n t e n t s

1. A Vedic Discovery, p.2

2. Indic Scripts of Asia, p.6

3. South, Southeast and Central Asia, p.7

4. East Asia, p.9

5. Arabic, p.10

6. Siddham, p.12

7. Conclusions, p.14

Acknowledgements, p.14

Select Bibliography, p. 17 ____________

* Subsequently published in Sanskrit Studies Central Journal. Journal of the Sanskrit

Studies Centre, Silpakorn University, 2 (2006) 193-2007.

2

Your Royal Highness, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen

1. A Vedic Discovery

It is a great privilege for me to be present here and discuss Sanskrit in Asia on this special

occasion. I am sure I speak for all of us who participate in this conference and other

visitors, when I say that we are grateful to Your Royal Highness who is not only taking

time from more pressing duties, but who is also concerned with many languages other

than Sanskrit. I believe they include in alphabetic order Chinese, English, French,

German, Khmer, Latin and Pali, not to mention Thai, which comes modestly at the end of

this list because I have followed the order of letters of the English ABC. I shall begin my

own inquiry with late Vedic, which is close to Classical Sanskrit and comes even later

than Sanskrit and Thai because “V” comes after “S” an d “T” in all the Near Eastern and

European alphabets that I shall oppose to the sound pattern of Sanskrit. For I believe with

Plato that if we look at two opposites, side by side, and rub them against each other, “we

may cause justice to blaze out as from the two kindling sticks” (Republic IV 435 a 1-2) –

the Greek equivalent of agnimanthana in the Vedic fire ritual.

Classical Indian linguists adopted a synchronistic perspective because they did not regard

language as subject to change. We now know that language evolves in a manner that is

not altogether different from the evolution of the species. Roughly speaking, Old-Khmer

evolved into Cambodian, Latin into Italian and French and Sanskrit into Hindi and

Marathi. The Vedic language went through three stages which are known as Early,

Middle and Late Vedic. Throughout the long period of their evolution, from about 1700

to 500 BCE, Vedic Indians spoke Vedic by definition, composed Vedic verse and prose,

and transmitted these compositions to future generations through recitation. It was an

exclusively oral tradition.

Toward the end of the Vedic period and at the western extremity of Vedic India, in

Koåala or Videha, – not far in time and place from the Buddha‟s birth – reciters of the

3

Veda made a major discovery (Figure 1). They found that the consonants of a language

are produced by constricting the vocal tract at a particular point along its stationary

portion -- the palate or upper lip. If we move from the larynx or throat to the lips, we

pronounce ka, ca, øa, ta, pa. Each of these syllables may be unvoiced or voiced, provided

with more or less breath, which may be made to pass through the nasal cavity as well.

Thus we produce, in the case of ka, the sequence ka, kha, ga, gha, òa; and similarly for

the other four consonantal stops. The two directions are combined in the two-dimensional

square or varga that is depicted here. In order to complete the picture, a few other

syllables have to be added along with semi-vowels and vowels.

The Vedic system of the sounds of language exhibits and embodies what is nowadays

called phonetics, but is close to phonology which studies features of those same sounds

as parts of a system. The system exhibits what I refer to as the sound pattern of Vedic,

Sanskrit or language. I do not imply that it is the same for all languages, but most of the

sounds of human speech may be accommodated in some such scheme. During the Late

Figure 1. The Vedic System of the Sounds of Language

4

Vedic period, the Vedic scheme was expounded in the Åikæâ, the Prâtiåâkhya and other

compositions.

As far as I know, the Vedic discovery of the sound pattern of language was made only

once. Modern linguistics uses distinctive features, but they would not exist if the sound

pattern of language had not been discovered earlier; by two-and-a-half millennia, as it

happens. One intermediary was Pâñini who composed his grammar one or two centuries

after the Vedic discovery. His grammar incorporated it, but his system was different. The

reason is not that the Vedic pattern is different from that of Sanskrit. There are

differences between the two and Pâñini referred to some of them by rules that are marked

chandasi, “in the Veda.” But Pâñini composed an entirely new type of grammar for the

spoken language of his day, thereby laying the foundation for Classical Sanskrit. It

inspired not only many other grammars for Sanskrit, Prakrit and other languages,

including Jaina and Buddhist works, but the great tradition of Sanskrit grammarians from

Pataõjali to Nâgojîbhaøøa as well as modern linguistics. It is Nâgojîbhaøøa who ended his

Paribhâæenduåekhara with what became a famous saying: “grammarians rejoice over the

saving of half a syllable as over the birth of a son” (ardhamâtrâlâghavena putrotsavaä

manyante vaiyâkarañâï).

The Vedic system of sounds that preceded Pâñini is nothing new to you. Every literate

Indian knows it, and I would venture to guess that, among literate people, more than 50%

understand it in Southeast Asia, less than 50% in East Asia, and perhaps a handful of

linguists if you look west of South Asia. You may be surprised by my guess, but please

note that I have in the mean time shifted my language and refer now to literate people

which is something the Vedic Indians were not.

Looking back we detect a paradox. The discovery of the sound pattern of Sanskrit was

not made despite the absence of writing, but because of it. The reason is simple: the

discoverers were not hampered by any written alphabet. Writing was invented or

5

introduced later. The resulting syllabaries were naturally arranged in accordance with the

earlier and superior, but orally-based system. That system was rational, because it

reflected the places of articulation in their natural order; and practical, especially for

languages in which syllables consist of a consonant followed by a vowel. Japanese is

such a language and Sanskrit to some extent. So are many of the languages of the Near

East and of Europe but their alphabets are neither rational, nor practical. They blocked

insight into the nature of language and served as obstacles to the development of

linguistics.

Literacy takes us to another instructive contrast that is socio-economic. We have, on the

one hand, the difficult grammar of Pâñini, a work of genius that rightly became famous

but was studied by a small elite of specialists, in India, other Asian countries, Europe and

the Americas. There is, on the other hand, the Vedic system, a discovery that had a much

wider appeal which is due to its rationality and practicality both. It was beneficial to

priests of the court and the temple, Buddhist monks, astrologers-cum-astronomers and

many others whose writing skills were used in turn by royalty and other rulers, land

owners, bookkeepers, artisans, etc., thus affecting larger segments of society. It appealed

moreover to practical people who liked to work with a writing system that was not just

prestigious but natural and effective – at least in principle and initially, before some of

the writing systems began to exhibit labyrinthine qualities.

The languages and inscriptions of South East Asia support these socio-economic

generalities. The Sanskrit inscriptions from Cambodia contain words that are not found in

Sanskrit dictionaries. One of them is lekhin which refers to a scribe or secretary. We also

find abhyantaralekhin, “personal secretary” or, as Kamaleswar Bhattacharya translates it,

“secrétaire intime.” The Sanskrit root is likh, “scratch” or “write,” and in Indic Sanskrit

we come across derivatives such as lekha- “document,” lekhaka- “writer,” lekhana

“writing,” etc.; but not lekhin. In Old-Javanese, similar derivatives are at least apparent.

Thus we have lekita which means “written evidence” and is used in a court of law. It also

refers to “by-laws of the village.” It may come from Sanskrit lekhita “written” or “caused

to be written,” but may be connected with Javanese lukita which means “thought

6

expressed in words” or “literary composition” and may in turn be related to another term

that is certainly native: lukis “drawn with a pen.” All this evidence suggests that the

introduction of Sanskrit had something to do with writing.

Why are such simple facts not mentioned by specialists in writing systems? Because

students of scripts generally confine themselves to the shapes of letters and characters. It

is well known that Indic shapes were adapted in Central and Southeast Asia. But that is

only the least interesting part of the story as is demonstrated by the fact, that the Indian

system spread much further than the Indic shapes. The sound pattern of Sanskrit was

adopted and adapted in a large part of Asia - including Central Asia, Korea, Japan and,

momentarily, in a grammar of Arabic composed in Iran. I refer to adoption and

adaptation because, in most cases, the Indic system was not imitated slavishly but

adapted creatively to new languages and language structures.

Since our present enquiry is not concerned with shapes but with order, epigraphy -

another topic to which our guest of honor has devoted years of study – is of limited

assistance. The same holds for palaeography in the narrower sense. A typical example, de

Casparis‟ Indonesian Palaeography, subtitled A History of Writing in Indonesia, is still

the basic manual on the shapes of the characters but does not refer to their order even

once. I hope that epigraphists in Thailand, where that rare and valuable discipline still

flourishes, will look for order and take it into account when they find it.

2. Indic Scripts of Asia

Figure 2 provides a geographical overview of the Indic Scripts of Asia.

It shows at a glance that the Indian system together with the shapes of its syllables is

confined to South and Southeast Asia. The Indian system without the shapes was adopted

and adapted in Central Asia, Korea and Japan. Occasional uses of the system are found in

China and in Southwest Asia or the Near East.

7

Figure 2. Indic Scripts of Asia

3. South, Southeast and Central Asia

I start this brief overview with a mystery: the script of Kharoshthi, probably the earliest

Indic script, which was used in northwest India and spread to Central Asia from about the

fourth century BCE to the third century CE. The order of syllables starts with a ra pa

ca na la da ba èa æa . . . That order is unexplained and the script is called Arapacana

after the first five syllables. It possesses clearly Indic features: each syllable ends in a

short –a and diacritic signs are added when that short –a is replaced by another vowel.

The order of vowels, however, is not Indic but Aramaic: a e i o u and not a i u e o.

That order is also adopted by diacritics attached to consonants from top to bottom when

changing a into e, i, o and u.

The other early Indic script is Brahmi. It is the paradigm of the Vedic system. It

influenced, directly or indirectly, via Pallava or other medieval Indian scripts, all the

8

scripts of South and Southeast Asia that include (again in alphabetic order) Balinese,

Bengali, Burmese, Devanagari, Grantha, Gujrati, Gupta, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Khmer,

Lao, Malayalam, Nepali, Oriya, Pallava, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu and Thai.

The evidence for these influences is constituted by the scripts themselves. Textual

evidence for how the transmission occurred is less common. The same applies to the

evidence for Indian numerals. But there is circumstantial evidence, in both cases. It is

probable, for example, that one of the Indian brahmans who transmitted the Vedic

paradigm to Cambodia, was the South Indian who belonged, according to a seventh

century Cambodian inscription, to the Yajurvedic school of Taittirîya. The reason is that

among the Prâtiåâkhya compositions that explain the Vedic system, only the Taittirîya

Prâtiåâkhya depicts the Vedic square (varga) of Figure 1 in full.

I have excluded Javanese from the above enumeration because the order of its syllables

illustrates a different kind of principle from the Vedic and alphabetic both: hana caraka,

data sawala, padha jayanya, maga bathanga. This list is Indic in form, and Old Javanese

(Kawi) retains the Indic device of writing consonant clusters by putting one consonant

symbol below another. But the creators do not seem to have liked or understood the

rationale behind the Indic order. What they construed instead is a mnemonic jingle that

includes one occurrence of each of twenty of the twenty-two consonantal syllables of the

Javanese script. It has a meaning: “There were two emissaries, they began to fight, their

valor was equal, they both fell dead.”

The chief Central Asian varieties are Khotanese, Tibetan and „Phags-pa. The latter script

was created from the Tibetan by the lama of that name for the Mongol Emperor Qubilai

or “Kubla Khan” as an international script for his Asian Empire. Other Central Asian

scripts, such as Bactrian or Sogdian, do not concern us here because they were not Indic

but Aramaic in shape and order both.

The numbers of South, Southeast and Central Asian scripts that adopted the Indic order

is large. An attractive estimate occurs in the tenth chapter of the Lalitavistara, called

9

Lipiåâlâsaädaråanaparivarta, “the revolution of displays of the mansions of writing.” It

lists 64 different scripts that were mastered by the Bodhisattva. The title of the chapter is

reminiscent of the Buddha‟s own dharmacakrapravartana. It emphasizes instructively

that the carriers of the sound pattern of Sanskrit to other Asian regions were not only

Indian Brahmans but also, and in increasing numbers, Buddhist monks. It is explained at

least in part by the geographical facts with which I started: the discovery of the sound

pattern of language by Vedic reciters occurred close in place and time to the areas where

early Buddhism flourished. It was a feature of civilization that Buddhists carried across

Asia.

4. East Asia

The Chinese system of writing is so different from Vedic orality and all that it entailed,

that Indians had nothing to contribute. It caused confusion since Chinese Buddhists

believed that each Indic shape was independent and had its own meaning, like many

Chinese characters. There were a few exceptions. Hsieh Ling-yün (384-433 CE), poet

and calligrapher, assisted by Hui-ju, a Buddhist monk, composed a Sanskrit glossary in

Chinese transliteration in the Indian order. After the ninth century, rhyme tables were

composed for each tone in that same order.

The Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries of Japan adopted strokes from Chinese

characters, but reflect the Indic system which was gradually adapted to the sounds of

Japanese. An example from the Heian period is pa pi pu pe po, which became

subsequently fa fi fu fe fo, and has now reached the form ha hi fu he ho. It is a classic

illustration of the difference between creative adaptation and slavish imitation. But it did

not please everyone and a poem was composed in which all but one of the syllables were

used once. Their order is not phonetic but semantic. It is called Iroha after the first

syllables: iro ha nioedo chirinuru wo waga …and has been attributed to the famous

philosopher and calligrapher Kûkai or Kôbôdaishi to whom we will return. In English

translation, it says: “Colorful flowers are fragrant but they must fall. Who in this world

will live forever? Today cross over the deep mountains of life‟s illusions; and there will

10

be no more shallow dreaming, no more drunkenness.” It sounds better than the mnemonic

device used for Javanese but belongs to the same category.

The Korean Han-gul is the world‟s most perfect script. Even the shapes of its syllables

reflect the shapes of the mouth when producing sounds – as does, in English and other

European languages, only the shape of the letter “o,” which may be seen as a picture of

the rounding of the mouth. The perfection of the Korean order is due to the Indic but is

fully adapted to the sound pattern of Korean. Han-gul was developed in 1444 CE by a

committee of scholars, including Buddhist monks, appointed by the Emperor of Korea.

The committee report starts with the basic insight: “The sounds of our country‟s language

are different from those of China.”

5. Arabic

The case of Arabic deserves a separate lecture by an expert but I shall try to

summarize its most salient features. The order of letters in the standard

alphabet is based on their shapes (Figure 3). But al-Khalîl bin Aïmad, teacher of

Åibawayhi, author of the most famous grammar of Arabic, introduced in the eighth

century a new list in which he had re-arranged the letters, starting in the back of the

mouth with the „Ain followed by Ïâ, Hâ, Khâ, Ghain, Qâf, Kâf, etc. (same Figure 3). It

is referred to as the Kitâb al-„Ayn. Al-Khalîl was probably born in Basra, but he wrote his

grammar in Khorasan, the easternmost part of Iran which is the gateway to India.

Al-Khalîl‟s Arabic grammar was not adopted by the Arab world. There has been much

controversy about the question whether it was inspired by the Indic paradigm. Scholars

have argued that Arabic is very different from Sanskrit (it is), that there is no evidence

11

Figure 3. The Standard Arabic Alphabet and the Indian “Alphabet” of the Kitâb al-„Ayn

12

that al-Khalîl studied the Prâtiåâkhya literature or other Sanskrit treatises (true because

he didn‟t), that borrowing of an alien system without any of the details on which it rests is

almost unknown (?), that there were no contacts between Arab and Indian scholars at the

time of al-Khalîl (not true because there were such contacts in mathematics), and so on.

The argument, in brief, is based upon the assumption that borrowing must be what I have

called slavish imitation.

Having listened to me so far, you may already be inclined to conclude, that al-Khalîl‟s

grammar was inspired by the Indian paradigm. But we need a reason or, at least, a more

accurate account. Morris Halle (personal communication) provides precise evidence of

the influence of the Vedic discovery on al-Khalîl‟s grammar. Al-Khalîl‟s order of

consonants is basically a linearization of the two-dimensional array of Figure 1. Unless

he knew the Vedic order, he would have no reason to deviate from the traditional order of

Arabic consonants as depicted on the top of Figure 3. He furthermore extended the

system by adding the rear wall of the pharynx as a point of constriction. Put in more

general terms, it means this. In linguistics, as in mathematics, ideas that are part of an oral

tradition may be picked up by a brilliant scientist, who does not study a text, let alone

slavishly, but understands the subject. Al-Khalîl was such a man. He went as far as

performing experiments, for instance, by putting his fingers in his mouth. The ancient

Indians may have done it too. But superior qualities of the subject and the student are not

enough. The Indic system did not enter the Near East or Europe because of prejudice,

narrow-mindedness and plain ignorance.

6. Siddham

It would not be good to end my lecture on a negative note and so I have kept

the auspicious syllabary of Siddham for last. It will show that I have omitted from our

discussion a large area of patterned sound, that of mantras and dharañîs. The Siddham

syllabary was construed, in the Indic order, for the expression of these sacred syllables

and their export to East Asia. The number that was exported from India, sometimes in

13

exchange for other goods, probably exceeds that of any other commodity, although no

attention seems to have been paid to it by economic historians. Seekers, however, sought

solace in these treasures that were of easier access than the Sanskrit language itself,

which famous Chinese pilgrims had gone to India to learn, but which was never studied

seriously in China proper.

To illustrate the export of the Siddham, we return once more to the Japanese Buddhist

monk Kûkai or Kôbôdaishi, who was born in the eighth century. Kûkai went to China

and studied the Siddham script with Prajõa, a monk from Kashmir who was translating

Tantric texts. After his return to Japan, Kûkai built a monastery at Koyasan which

became the center of the Shingon sect. He taught his pupils mantras and dharañîs and

how to write them in the Siddham script. Figure 4 depicts a scroll from Koyasan with the

Siddham character A.

Figure 4. Siddham “A” from Koyasan

14

7. Conclusions

I derive five conclusions from our brief discussion. The first is that the sound pattern of

Sanskrit was adopted and adapted by many writing systems of Asia. The exporters were

Indian brahmans and Buddhist monks. The second is that the pattern that underlies the

system was not always understood. The third is that those Asian writing systems are

applications of a theory of language, just as airplanes are applications of the laws of

aerodynamics. The fourth, closely connected, is that a writing system is only as good as

the theory upon which it is based. (Since the accuracy of theories is measured in degrees,

absence of any theory points to probability zero.) My fifth and final conclusion is

hypothetical in character. If the sound pattern of Sanskrit had also reached the Near East

and Europe, there would not be so many clumsy alphabets around and the modern world

would have the benefit of rational and practical Indic syllabaries in addition to rational

and practical Indic numerals.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am deeply grateful to Dr. Samniang Leurmsai of the Sanskrit Studies Centre, Silpakorn

University, Bangkok, for inviting me to speak in the inaugural session on June 23, 2005,

of the International Conference on “Sanskrit in Asia” to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of

the Birth of Her Royal Highness Princess Mahachakri Sirindhorn.

When preparing this paper, I saw that Richard Salomon was about to address the 215th

meeting of the American Oriental Society at Philadelphia of March 20, 2005, on “On

Alphabetical Order in India, and Elsewhere.” I was unable to attend that meeting but I

wrote to Richard and he very kindly sent me a draft of his paper. It became obvious that

both of us shared an interest in the order of characters, and not only in their shapes like

many other students of scripts. It turned out also that both of us made use of the 1996

manual on The World‟s Writing Systems (WWS) by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright

(see Select Bibliography below), to which Richard had already contributed the section on

Brahmi and Kharosthi. I have learned much from Richard Salomon‟s contributions and

15

our subsequent correspondence. Our contributions are in some respects complementary

but the reader will note that there are differences between our approaches. My own

approach reflects the wider context of Staal 2005.

WWS itself calls for additional comment. It is learned and informative. It has been widely

praised, especially from the point of view of Semitic Linguistics (Kaye 2003). However,

its adherence to the International Phonetic Alphabet is baffling to the intended wide

audience and obscured further by the idiosyncratic terminologies of both editors and the

careless use of many other technical and semi-technical terms that are nowhere

explained. Even the concept of “syllabary” is regarded as a kind of alphabet; as in the

Oxford Dictionary, which declares that a syllabary serves “the purpose of an alphabet”. It

is not and does not and these verdicts are simply cultural constructs.

Truly fatal to the subject of WWS is its atomistic approach which, in many of its sections,

obliterates the intimate relationships that exist between the scripts they deal with. The

contributions by Christopher Court, Leonard van der Kuijp and Richard Salomon‟s own

are free from this defect, and William Bright recognizes that “the traditional order of

symbols in the Indian scripts is based primarily on articulatory phonetics, as originally

developed for Sanskrit by the ancient pandits” (page 384). But the 113 pages on South

and Southeast Asia in this tome of 922 pages, the only ones that study a writing system

that is rational and practical, are seriously misleading, not on the whole but as a whole.

That has, furthermore, a curious implication. If we omit some pages from the South and

South East Asian section that do not reflect the Indic system, and add a few on Korean

and Japanese that do, we are left with some 800 pages that are expressly devoted to the

description of irrationalities and impracticalities that are a disgrace to homo sapiens

though not the only one.

I can summarize my comments best by quoting from my own paper its fourth conclusion.

The editors seem to ignore the fact that their phonetic approach, which mirrors the Indic

system, lacks its fundamental insight: “a writing system is only as good as the theory

upon which it is based.”

16

Linguists will have noted that the expression “sound pattern” evokes Morris Halle‟s

“Sound Pattern of Russian” of 1959 and Chomsky and Halle‟s “Sound Pattern of

English” of 1968. What was meant there is clearly explained in the Preface to the second

book: “we are not, in this work, concerned exclusively or even primarily with the facts of

English as such. We are interested in these facts for the light they shed on linguistic

theory (on what, in an earlier period, would have been called universal grammar) and for

what they suggest about the nature of mental processes in general.” That Chomsky and

Halle‟s book is inspired by the Indic tradition is clear from its final rule, which is

identical with the final rule of Pâñini‟s grammar: “a a.”

In later publications, Noam Chomsky did not shy away from the expression “universal

grammar.” My present contribution is different from all these important works. It is only

a brief discussion, but it is concerned with applications, history and practicalities as well

as theory. I have tried to show how the Vedic discovery is based on a theory of language

that may be used in discussing the contributions of Sanskrit to Asian societies and to

civilization. These are ambitious efforts and some of the few steps I have taken may have

been unsteady. I hope that readers will render assistance in discussing, confirming,

refuting or amending what I have written.

Staal 2005 is concerned with the theory and development of language, natural as well as

artificial. It lists the publications on Arabic and Japanese that I have used for the present

paper also. Here I like again to express my indebtedness for guidance and references to

Professors Oscar von Hinüber, Richard C. Martin, Kees Versteegh, W.J. Boot and Michio

Yano. Special thanks go to Professor Morris Halle of the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology for a significant correction and important observation mentioned in the body

of the text. My final acknowledgments go to Edward M. Stadum and Peter

Vandemoortele for their help with the illustrations and powerpoints that were part of the

presentation.

17

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