A computational corpus study analyzes vocabulary relationships across eight layers of Bengali and Sanskrit devotional literature from the 8th to 19th centuries, quantifying the historical claim that Buddhist Vajrayana vocabulary was absorbed into the Shakta Tantra tradition. Using TF-IDF character n-gram vectorization on 75 texts, the research provides the first quantitative corroboration of this lexical transmission chain.
- Bridge Tara texts from the 12th century show a cosine similarity of 0.54 to Shakta Kali texts, an 8.5-fold contrast compared to the zero similarity found between Gitagovinda and Shakta Kali texts.
- Three Brihannilatantra Tara texts exhibit Shakta-to-Buddhist vocabulary ratios ranging from 2.0 to 4.0, providing measurable evidence of lexical transition.
- Ramprasad Sen's 18th-century Bengali Kali songs preserve Buddhist vocabulary residue, including 56 occurrences of the term Tara alongside 103 occurrences of Kali.
- The Vaishnava Bengali tradition contributes a parallel chain to modern Baul vocabulary with a similarity score of 0.29, slightly weaker than the Buddhist Sahajiya chain via Charyapada at 0.31.
These results offer the first quantitative multi-tradition corroboration of historically argued Buddhist-Shakta syncretism in Bengal, demonstrating that the observed vocabulary overlap is specific to this transmission chain rather than a generic property of Sanskrit devotional literature.