Status Updates From Buddhism in the Shadow of B...

What an interesting read so far! The author was Professor of Sanskrit and Indian studies at the University of Lausanne but he actually started out reading Mathematics, Physics, and Astronomy.

"There are no political inscriptions in Sanskrit that precede the middle of the second century CE. Before that date, political inscriptions in northern India had always used Middle Indic languages. Why did this change? "

It may be worth repeating that the Middle Indic languages used or adopted by the Buddhists were not derived from Sanskrit, not even from the earliest form of Sanskrit we know, Ṛgvedic Sanskrit. The base dialect (or dialects) of Pāli, for example, was (were) in several points more archaic than Ṛgvedic Sanskrit. What, then, may have driven certain Buddhists to adopt the language of their most fearsome competitors?

"Whatever developments there have been in the area of astrology, astronomy and mathematics — which do not figure among the five sciences — are due to the efforts of brahmanical and jaina thinkers; for reasons that remain to be elucidated, the Buddhists did not participate."

This is turning out to be a most informative book.