Buddhist Sanskrit literature: A rich legacy to be revived in order to enhance Sanskrit Studies and Buddhist Studies in Sri Lanka
By: Ven. Jambugahapitiye Dhammaloka
Introduction
Sri Lanka has been renowned for Theravada Buddhism throughout the history. However, Buddhist Sanskrit literature, whose knowledge has shaped the intellectual thought of human beings for many centuries has not also been alien to Sri Lankan Buddhists. This literature was read, studied, and probably commented upon at some great seats of learning in Sri Lanka from time to time and it revived in the period of Buddhist renaissance under the colonial period and especially in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The modern academic study of Buddhist Sanskrit literature, as academic studies of other ancient literatures, began with collecting ancient manuscripts, preserving, and editing them, but it has been expanded through critical analysis to the extent where methodological innovation, digital transformation, institutional collaborations, and breakthrough findings have been made.
The history of Buddhist Sanskrit literature studies
The Buddhist Sanskrit literature of today represents sophisticated bodies of philosophy, poetry, narratives, and rituals preserved in critical editions, digital archives, and university libraries. But it should be remembered: just two hundred years ago, the very existence of this literature was, for most of the scholarly world, unknown. Until the 19th century, the study of Buddhism in Europe rested almost entirely on the Pāli Canon and on translations preserved in Chinese and Tibetan. The Sanskrit originals of Mahāyāna sūtras, Abhidharma treatises, tantric works, and other Buddhist treatises were thought to be largely lost. The story of how they came to light is very interesting. It is a result of curiosity of colonial encounters, and the birth of modern philology.
This story begins in the 1820s in the Kathmandu Valley. The British Resident in Nepal, Brian Houghton Hodgson (1801-1894), developed an unusual interest for a diplomat: that is Sanskrit manuscripts. While posted in Kathmandu, Hodgson encountered local Buddhist monks, particularly from the Newar community, who still preserved palm-leaf and paper manuscripts in monasteries. What Hodgson discovered was astonishing: hundreds of works in Sanskrit texts—from the Prajñāpāramitā to the Lalitavistara, fromthe Avataṃsaka to intricate śāstras—that European scholars had never seen in their original language. He began collecting and cataloguing them, sending copies to Calcutta, London, and Paris.
One of these collections landed on the desk of Eugène Burnouf (1801-1852) in Paris. Burnouf was already a pioneer in Sanskrit studies, and when he received these manuscripts, he realized that they were the key to understanding Mahāyāna Buddhism from within its own tradition. His monumental work Introduction à l’histoire du Bouddhisme indien (1844) did more than describe doctrines; it opened the door to Buddhist Sanskrit philology as a serious academic discipline.
In the decades that followed, the study of Buddhist Sanskrit literature moved from the curiosity of a few individuals into the programs of emerging Orientalist institutions. In Oxford, Max Müller (1823-1900) began editing texts in the Sacred Books of the East series (1879-1910), making them accessible to a growing audience of scholars. In India, the Asiatic Society of Bengal (Estd. 1784) undertook systematic cataloguing, with scholars like Rajendralal Mitra (1822-1891) preparing detailed inventories of Buddhist Sanskrit manuscripts.
This was also the period when philology that is the careful comparison of manuscript variants to reconstruct original readings became the standard approach. Scholars learned to read not just Sanskrit, but also the “Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit” forms preserved in these texts, where classical grammar mingled with Middle Indic forms inherited from earlier traditions.
The early 20th century brought a new dimension that is archaeology. Expeditions to Central Asia — Turfan, Kucha, Dunhuang — unearthed caches of Buddhist manuscripts preserved for over a millennium in desert climates. In the Gilgit region, entire bundles of palm-leaf manuscripts came to light, some dating back to the 5th or 6th century CE.These findings in fact, transformed the field. No longer was the study of Buddhist Sanskrit limited to later Nepalese copies. Now scholars could work with much older witnesses to the tradition, revealing textual histories and transmission patterns that had been invisible before. Figures like Louis de La Vallée Poussin (1869-1938) and Franklin Edgerton(1885-1963) developed specialized tools to edit and interpret these materials, further solidifying Buddhist Sanskrit studies as a global scholarly enterprise.
Afterwards, many scholars have contributed considerably to the study of Sanskrit Buddhist literature. Because of this contribution we have a better understand of Mahayana Buddhist tradition, its role in Chinese, Tibetan, and Japanese Buddhism. Some of these scholars were philological masters. Émile Senart (1847-1928), Hermann Oldenburg(1854-1920), Hermann Jacobi (1850-1937), Louis de La Vallée Poussin are among them. Friedrich W.K. Müller (1863-1930), Sylvain Lévi (1863-1935), Joseph Hackin (1886-1941), and Aurel Stein (1862-1943) were some of the early discoverers of manuscript treasures in the Central Asia. Thereafter, this has been immensely contributed by John de Jong, D.T. Suzuki, Alex Wayman, Ryuichi Abé, Jonathan Silk, Paul Harrison with many others. A few Sri Lankan scholars have also contributed to the scholarship of BuddhistSanskrit literature. Among them Ratna Handurukanda, Tissa Rajapatirana, Ven. Telwatte Rahula, Ven. Balangoda Anandamaitreya, and Ven. Walpola Rahula are outstandingamong others.
The current scholarship of the Buddhist Sanskrit literature
The current status of the scholarship of the Buddhist Sanskrit literature can be discussed under four main themes.
Methodological advances
Digital humanities
Institutional landscapes, and
Key recent findings.
Modern scholars are increasingly bridging classical philology with linguistics, manuscriptology, and historical studies. For instance, critical editions of Buddhist Sanskrit texts now employ both traditional stemmatic methods and advanced interrogation of textual variants—especially important in cases where multiple manuscript traditions diverge.Detailed paleographic analysis, often enhanced by multispectral imaging, is helping date previously ambiguous manuscripts and understand scribal practices. These insights contribute to tracing the movement and localization of Buddhist textual traditions. Some projects apply natural language processing (NLP) to Sanskrit corpora, enabling large-scale studies of stylistic patterns, intertextual references, and semantic networks within Buddhist literature. This allows scholars to uncover patterns that would be impractical to detect manually. There is a growing trend toward collaborative online platforms where multiple editors contribute critical insights and textual collations, fostering a more dynamic and transparent editorial process. These all are recent methodological advances.
As for digital humanities, Institutions are digitizing Buddhist manuscripts—both Pāli and Sanskrit—alongside cataloging metadata, paleographic notes, and regional provenance. Platforms now often integrate high-resolution scans with search tools across collections. Some digital humanities initiatives are building ontologies for Buddhist terms and concepts, enabling researchers to query themes—like "bodhicitta," "emptiness," or "dependent origination"—across textual collections. This opens new forms of cross-textual and comparative research. Several projects attract citizen scholars and volunteers to assist with transcription, annotation, or even translation. This democratizes the work while addressing resource constraints in rare text digitization. Visual tools help map relationships—between text and concepts, authors and schools, manuscripts and regions—making research more intuitive and revealing hidden connections in the data.
When it comes to institutional aids, leading institutions—such as the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the Berlin Manuscript Center, or monasteries collaborating with Western universities—provide infrastructure and expert scholarship for manuscript preservation, research, and training. Networks like the International Association for Buddhist Studies (IABS) and projects funded by UNESCO or national grants foster cross-border research, workshops, and thematic conferences on Buddhist Sanskrit literature.Universities across Asia, Europe, and North America offer programs integrating Buddhist languages with digital humanities training. Emerging hubs, centers, and societies often combine classical studies, information science, and religious studies. Increasingly, universities in India, Nepal, and Tibet are teaming up with Western institutions to digitize local manuscript collections—this includes training locals in preservation and metadata curation. Preferably, Sri Lankan universities should also do the same.
In recent years, previously unknown or fragmentary Sanskrit Buddhist texts have surfaced—from monastery troves in Nepal to private collections in India. Some of these shed light on hitherto obscure doctrines, ritual manuals, or commentarial traditions. Detailed comparison between Tibetan, Mongolian, and Sanskrit versions of canonical texts (e.g. Prajñāpāramitā sūtras) has revealed large-scale variant transmission patterns, suggesting lost lineages or doctrinal shifts. Integrating digital tools with traditional scholarship has led to discoveries such as unexpected textual parallels between Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna works, or thematic linkages across monastic lineages. Scholars using codicological data and linguistic analysis have proposed revised datings for certain commentaries or sutra versions, challenging long-held assumptions about their origins.
The Buddhist Sanskrit literature in Sri Lankan context
In this backdrop, it should be reconsidered one of the questions that is often asked ‘why Sanskrit is taught or why Sanskrit should be taught in Sri Lanka’. There are of course, a lot of answers to this question, but one of the major answers is that it is needed for understanding Buddhism. Then, the counter question would be to which extent Sanskrit is actually used in understanding Buddhism. As we discussed before, there is advanced improvement of studies on Sanskrit Buddhist literature world-wide. Many scholars read original texts in Sanskrit, commentaries on them, compare them with other scriptures in different languages like Pali, Tibetan, Mongolian, and Chinese. They prepare critical editions of texts, and critical translations of them and they preserve them in digital forms. In fact, there is a considerable amount of work being done in this regard around theworld.
In comparison to that, it is very important to think of how Sanskrit should be used in order to understand Buddhism. Needless to say, the first step is to read Sanskrit Buddhist Texts in Sanskrit not in translations. They should be read with their commentaries and sub commentaries. Especially, in universities research students are supposed to read the original texts in their original language which is Sanskrit or hybrid Sanskrit. Of course, there are many scholars and students who read these texts in their original language, but this number needs to be improved. Most of those who engage in research and studies in the scope of Buddhist Sanskrit literature need a rigorous training in language/s, philology, manuscriptology, and critical editing techniques. Further, they should be encouraged to engage in studious research. The issue here is that if one does not read the original texts, s/he always relies on someone else and someone else’s ideas which might be a distort; hence misleading. While reading a translation, it does not matter who has translated it, it is the readers’ responsibility as researchers to cross check them and revisit the texts.
Major challenges
In fact, there are many challenges in doing so in Sri Lankan context. Some of them are
Limited access to manuscripts and modern scholarship
Lack of linguistic training
Funding and collaboration, and
Modern scholarly and technological challenges.
We are in the 21st century. Even in the 21st century, these challenges remain.
Some manuscripts are held in private collections and are inaccessible. Others are digitized, but in low resolution or without proper metadata. While digital tools like the Digital Sanskrit Buddhist Canon and GRETIL have transformed the field, they can never fully replace direct manuscript study. New discoveries, critical editions, annotated translations, and research findings are usually published in high impact journals and by world-class publishers. Though they are indispensable in order to update ourselves with current knowledge, they are so expensive that they are almost unaffordable.
As mentioned before, it is very important to have a rigorous linguistic training. A single sūtra might have been composed in North India, copied in Nepal, translated into Tibetan, rendered into Chinese, and then preserved in a Central Asian cave. Each transmission introduced changes—some accidental, some deliberate. Understanding the text fully often means collating Sanskrit manuscripts with their Tibetan and Chinese translations, and then interpreting the differences. This is time-consuming and requires competence in multiple languages, as well as sensitivity to translation styles and doctrinal interpretation.
Buddhist Sanskrit is not uniform. Much of it is Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit—a blend of classical Sanskrit and Middle Indic forms. This means that a word may follow Pāṇinian grammar in one verse, and deviate from it in the very next line. On top of that, scribes sometimes adapted the language toward their own local speech forms, introducing regional vocabulary or phonetic spellings. Scholars must therefore, be comfortable navigating across multiple linguistic registers—Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Pāli—sometimes within a single text. Buddhist Sanskrit manuscripts come in many scripts—Devanāgarī, Newar, Śāradā, Gupta, and Tibetan among others. Each has its own paleographic challenges, and often the writing is faint, smudged, or damaged by insects and humidity.
Moreover, the interdisciplinary nature of Buddhist Sanskrit studies—combining philology, codicology, history, art history, and religious studies—demands collaboration across fields and often across continents. This requires funding, institutional support, and long-term commitment.
Summary
In short, the study of Buddhist Sanskrit texts is a journey through gaps, puzzles, and occasional dead ends. Nevertheless, these very challenges make the field so intellectually rewarding. Each manuscript leaf, each variant reading, each reconstructed passage brings us a step closer to understanding not only the texts themselves, but also the vibrant cultures that preserved and transformed them. Perhaps the greatest lesson is this: the history of Buddhist Sanskrit studies is itself a lesson in impermanence and rediscovery. Texts once thought lost were found in unexpected places; methods once thought complete had to evolve with new evidence. We stand today on the shoulders of those first explorers, editors, and translators—and just as they once opened a new chapter, it is now our task to continue writing it.
Bibliography:
Bronkhorst, Johannes, “Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit: The original language”, Aspects of Buddhist Sanskrit, Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, 1993.
Cousins, L.S., “The early development of Buddhist literature and language in India”, JOCBS, 2013 (5): 89-135.
Handurukanda, Ratna. (1994). “Orientalia in the University”, In Sri Lanka Journal of Humanities, (Vol. XVII & XVIII, pp.266-340). Peradeniya: University of Peradeniya.
Murthy, M. Srimannarayana, Methodology in Indological Research, Bharatiya Book Corporation, 2018.
Nair, R. Raman and Devi, L. Sulochana, Sanskrit Informatics, Center for Informatics Research and Development, 2011.
Nariman, G.K., Literary History of Sanskrit Buddhism, Indian Book Depot, 1923.
Websites:
Digital Sanskrit Buddhist Canon, Accessed August 20, 2025
Sutta central, Accessed August 20, 2025
GRETIL, Accessed August 20, 2025
(This is the keynote speech made by me at the International symposium (online) on Sanskrit Buddhist literature organized by the Buddhist and Pali University of Sri Lanka on the 27th of August, 2025.)