Gandhayukti in the Lalitavistara

Extract

Since the investigations of Oldenberg on the language of the Lalitavistara, it is no longer a useful question to ask whether the prose portions or the verses are the older. There is more than one layer of verse as well as of prose. Still less is it sufficient to describe it as “ a poem of unknown date and authorship, but probably composed in Nepāl, by some Buddhist poet who lived some time between six hundred and a thousand years after the birth of Buddha ”. As Oldenberg has shown, there is an older layer of verse in fairly good Sanskrit, which rests on passages in a dialect closely related to Pāli, and which was hence easily sanskritized. There are also the poems in so-called mixed Sanskrit, mixed just because they were once in a dialect that resisted all efforts to fit them with a proper Sanskrit dress, and still later are the verses which may have been originally composed in Sanskrit.