Dr Sarath Obeysekera

This is a fascinating historical question, and historians have debated it for a long time.

According to the traditional Sri Lankan chronicle, the Mahavamsa, Mahinda Thera, the son (or, according to some traditions, brother) of Ashoka, arrived in Sri Lanka during the reign of Devanampiya Tissa around the 3rd century BCE.

The chronicle records that Mahinda first tested the king’s intelligence with a series of riddles before preaching the Dhamma. But it does not explicitly state the language they spoke.

Most scholars consider three possibilities:

• An early Middle Indo-Aryan language (Magadhi or a closely related Prakrit). This is the most likely. The Mauryan Empire used Prakrit languages for administration, as seen in Ashoka’s rock edicts. Mahinda would almost certainly have spoken one or more Prakrit dialects.
• An early form of Sinhala (Proto-Sinhala). The settlers who founded the Anuradhapura kingdom had North Indian linguistic roots. Their language had evolved locally but still belonged to the Indo-Aryan family. Mahinda’s Prakrit may have been sufficiently similar for educated people like King Devanampiya Tissa to understand, especially with some adaptation.
• Pali? Probably not as a spoken language. While Pali became the canonical language of the Theravada Buddhist scriptures, many scholars believe it functioned primarily as a literary and liturgical language rather than the everyday spoken language of Mahinda.

There is another interesting clue. The earliest Brahmi inscriptions of Sri Lanka, dating from shortly after Mahinda’s arrival, are written in a Prakrit very similar to the language of Ashoka’s inscriptions, although with local characteristics. This suggests that the linguistic gap between Mahinda and the Sri Lankan elite was probably not very large.

So the most plausible answer is that Mahinda preached in a Prakrit dialect closely related to Magadhi, perhaps adapting his speech to the local Prakrit spoken in Sri Lanka. The Dhamma was then transmitted orally before eventually being written down in Pali centuries later.

This also raises an intriguing question: How much of what we now call Pali Buddhism” reflects the language Mahinda actually spoke, and how much reflects later standardization by the Sri Lankan Sangha? That remains an active area of historical and linguistic research.

Regards

Dr Sarath Obeysekera