ABSTRACT
In the third lecture I dealt with the way in which the early Buddhist texts were transmitted by an oral tradition, and I mentioned the difficulty I had in believing that the tradition could have come into effect within a very short time of the Buddha’s death, because this did not seem to leave time for the homogenisation of language, which would seem to have been necessary if the Buddha preached, as is generally accepted, in a number of dialects. In this lecture I want to talk about the philological information which we have about the form of the language which was used in the very early stages of Buddhism, and the way in which we can interpret philological material to give us some idea of the way in which Buddhism began to spread from the boundaries of its origin.
