Sources for 'Early Mahayana'

[Huseng]

Of course it is a historical record, don't be daft — your assertion that it is an interpolation is entirely arbitrary.

No, it isn't. You've yet to identify where in the cannons this is, but even if we take your word for it, the scripture would be a product sometime well into the common era, centuries after the Buddha died. You believing them to be historical records is an act of faith.

Of course the points stands, because the same story is preserved in other canons.

Prove it.

It was set down in Sanskrit, from day one.

What is the earliest identifiable specimen of Sarvāstivāda literature and which language is it in?

No, I don't. Let's look at a map —— http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan ... 0_BCE).png

[/quote]

That is a hypothetical map from Wikipedia relating to a time period long long before Buddhism.

The Brahman heartland was centered around what is now UP and extended east towards what is now Bihar. The communities in what is now Sindh later on were not part of that Brahman heartland.

I never said either that Buddhists began using Sanskrit from the beginning, merely that a push to Sanskritize is evident from the beginning.

You're not proving anything. This is an academic forum, so let's be a bit more scholarly.

The Sarvastivadins wrote their canon down in Sanskrit, and this more than anything accounts for the widespread adoption of the Sarvastivada Abhidharma by most schools who were not connected with the proto-Theravada.

I agree that Buddhists eventually adopted Sanskirt as their lingua franca from the first few centuries of the CE onward, but your reasons for this are at best incomplete.

[Sherlock]

I am reading Sheldon Pollock's The Language of the GodsintheWorldofMen now.

He makes the interesting observation that it was the Saka barbarian invader kings who first started using Sanskrit in inscriptions. Before them, all kings whether Buddhist like Ashoka or his more Vaidika successors used Prakrits, even somewhat "forced" Prakrits. during this period Sanskrit seems to havebeen restricted for ritual use, any secular compositions including inscriptions were in Prakrits. The Buddhist useof Sanskrit is actually contemporaneous with more inscriptions in Sanskrit in general beimg !ade for secuilar purposes and might be related, although we cannot know for sure.

interestingly, it seems that Asvagosa, a Buddhist, originated the kavya form of poetry in Sanskrit.

in eaely Puranic literature, non-twice-born people using Sanskrit was a sign of decline, which probably actually indicatesthe state of affairs at the time.

Pollock notes that there is actually no evidence to prove that this use of Sanskrit came with a reassergence of Brahmanic influence at the expense of Buddhism and in fact evidence points to the contrary.