In which language did Buddha teach? Why?
Answers
He taught his teaching in Prakrit or Pali as people from all the castes understood that language and he believed in one common language.
Answer:
Pali
Explanation:
Many people will say ‘Pali’ because that is the language of the oldest Buddhist writings that we have. But Pali was spoken in the western part of India, in a region known at the time as Avanti, while the Buddha lived in the northern/eastern region known as Magadha. We do not know with one hundred percent certainty, but it is likely that he spoke a variant of Magadhi. This language is quite similar to Pali. Both are known as Prakrits, or ‘natural’ languages, in contrast with the ‘refined’ Sanskrit that was, by the Buddha’s time, used almost exclusively in Brahmanical religious settings (mostly Vedic rituals). Modern northern Indian languages like Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali and so on are descended from the Prakrits. He certainly taught in the language of the common people of his time, and not in Sanskrit, for reasons that others have given. But that language was probably not Pali. His teachings were translated into Pali (and probably other languages as well that are long since lost) for the same reason: to communicate to the people of the time. For an analogy, Pali and Magadhi are about as similar to (or different from) one another as Spanish and Italian.