Sanskrit in the West
Encyclopedia
The study of Sanskrit
in the Western world
began in the 17th century. Some of Bhartṛhari's poems were translated into Portuguese
in 1651. In 1779 a legal code
known as was translated by Nathaniel Brassey Halhed
from a Persian
translation, and published as A Code of Gentoo Laws
. In 1785 Charles Wilkins
published an English translation of the Bhagavad Gita
, which was the first time a Sanskrit book had been translated directly into a European language.
In 1786 Sir William Jones
, who had founded The Asiatic Society two years earlier, delivered the third annual discourse; in his often-cited "philologer" passage, he noted similarities between Sanskrit, Ancient Greek and Latin—an event which is often cited as the beginning of comparative linguistics
, Indo-European studies
, and Sanskrit philology.
This common source of the Indo-European languages
eventually came to be known as Proto-Indo-European
, following the work of Franz Bopp
and others.
In 1789 Jones published a translation of Kālidāsa
's The Recognition of Sakuntala. The translation captured the admiration of many, notably Goethe, who expressed his admiration for the Sanskrit play Shakuntala
:
Goethe went on to borrow a device from the play for his Faust, Part One.
In the introduction to The World as Will and Representation
, written in 1818, Arthur Schopenhauer
stated that "the access to [the Vedas
], opened to us through the Upanishads, is in my eyes the greatest advantage which this still young century enjoys over previous ones, because I believe that the influence of the Sanscrit literature will penetrate not less deeply than did the revival of Greek literature in the fifteenth century".
The Irish poet William Butler Yeats
was also inspired by Sanskrit literature. However, the discovery of the world of Sanskrit literature
moved beyond German and British scholars and intellectuals — Henry David Thoreau
was a sympathetic reader of the Bhagavad Gita
— and even beyond the humanities
. Ralph Waldo Emerson
was also influenced by Sanskrit literature. In the early days of the Periodic Table
, scientists referred to as yet undiscovered elements with the use of Sanskrit prefixes (see Mendeleev's predicted elements
). J. Robert Oppenheimer In 1933 met the Indologist Arthur W. Ryder
at Berkeley and learned Sanskrit. He read the Bhagavad Gita in the original language. Later he cited it as one of the most influential books to shape his philosophy of life.
The nineteenth century was a golden age of Western Sanskrit scholarship, and many of the giants of the field (Whitney
, Macdonnell
, Monier-Williams, Grassmann
) knew each other personally. Perhaps the most commonly known example of Sanskrit in the West was also the last gasp of its vogue. T. S. Eliot
, a student of Indian Philosophy
and of Sanskrit under Lanman
, ended The Waste Land
with Sanskrit: "Shantih Shantih Shantih"
.
liturgical language, and Sanskrit revival
attempts are underway amongst expatriate Hindu populations. Similarly, Sanskrit study is also popular amongst the many Western practitioners of Yoga, who find the language useful in understanding the Yoga Sutra.
Sanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
in the Western world
Western world
The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...
began in the 17th century. Some of Bhartṛhari's poems were translated into Portuguese
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
in 1651. In 1779 a legal code
Code (law)
A code is a type of legislation that purports to exhaustively cover a complete system of laws or a particular area of law as it existed at the time the code was enacted, by a process of codification. Though the process and motivations for codification are similar in common law and civil law...
known as was translated by Nathaniel Brassey Halhed
Nathaniel Brassey Halhed
Nathaniel Brassey Halhed was an English Orientalist and philologist. Halhed was born at Westminster. He was educated at Harrow, where he began his intimacy with Richard Brinsley Sheridan, which continued after he entered Christ Church, Oxford...
from a Persian
Persian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
translation, and published as A Code of Gentoo Laws
The Gentoo Code
The Gentoo Code is a legal code translated from Sanskrit to Persian by Brahmin scholars and then from Persian to English by Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, a British grammarian working for the East India Company...
. In 1785 Charles Wilkins
Charles Wilkins
Sir Charles Wilkins, KH, FRS , was an English typographer and Orientalist, notable as the first translator of Bhagavad Gita into English, and as the creator of the first Devanagari typeface....
published an English translation of the Bhagavad Gita
Bhagavad Gita
The ' , also more simply known as Gita, is a 700-verse Hindu scripture that is part of the ancient Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, but is frequently treated as a freestanding text, and in particular, as an Upanishad in its own right, one of the several books that constitute general Vedic tradition...
, which was the first time a Sanskrit book had been translated directly into a European language.
In 1786 Sir William Jones
William Jones (philologist)
Sir William Jones was an English philologist and scholar of ancient India, particularly known for his proposition of the existence of a relationship among Indo-European languages...
, who had founded The Asiatic Society two years earlier, delivered the third annual discourse; in his often-cited "philologer" passage, he noted similarities between Sanskrit, Ancient Greek and Latin—an event which is often cited as the beginning of comparative linguistics
Comparative linguistics
Comparative linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness....
, Indo-European studies
Indo-European studies
Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics dealing with Indo-European languages, both current and extinct. Its goal is to amass information about the hypothetical proto-language from which all of these languages are descended, a language dubbed Proto-Indo-European , and its speakers, the...
, and Sanskrit philology.
"The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family."
This common source of the Indo-European languages
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...
eventually came to be known as Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European language
The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...
, following the work of Franz Bopp
Franz Bopp
Franz Bopp was a German linguist known for extensive comparative work on Indo-European languages.-Biography:...
and others.
In 1789 Jones published a translation of Kālidāsa
Kalidasa
Kālidāsa was a renowned Classical Sanskrit writer, widely regarded as the greatest poet and dramatist in the Sanskrit language...
's The Recognition of Sakuntala. The translation captured the admiration of many, notably Goethe, who expressed his admiration for the Sanskrit play Shakuntala
Shakuntala
In Hindu mythology Shakuntala is the wife of Dushyanta and the mother of Emperor Bharata. Her story is told in the Mahabharata and dramatized by Kalidasa in his play Abhijñānaśākuntalam .-Etymology:Rishi Kanva found her in forest as a baby surrounded by Shakunta birds...
:
"Wouldst thou the young year's blossoms and the fruits of its decline
And all by which the soul is charmed, enraptured, feasted, fed,
Wouldst thou the earth and heaven itself in one sole name combine?
I name thee, O Sakuntala! and all at once is said."
Goethe went on to borrow a device from the play for his Faust, Part One.
In the introduction to The World as Will and Representation
The World as Will and Representation
The World as Will and Representation is the central work of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. The first edition was published in December 1818, and the second expanded edition in 1844. In 1948, an abridged version was edited by Thomas Mann....
, written in 1818, Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal...
stated that "the access to [the Vedas
Vedas
The Vedas are a large body of texts originating in ancient India. Composed in Vedic Sanskrit, the texts constitute the oldest layer of Sanskrit literature and the oldest scriptures of Hinduism....
], opened to us through the Upanishads, is in my eyes the greatest advantage which this still young century enjoys over previous ones, because I believe that the influence of the Sanscrit literature will penetrate not less deeply than did the revival of Greek literature in the fifteenth century".
The Irish poet William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...
was also inspired by Sanskrit literature. However, the discovery of the world of Sanskrit literature
Sanskrit literature
Literature in Sanskrit begins with the Vedas, and continues with the Sanskrit Epics of Iron Age India; the golden age of Classical Sanskrit literature dates to late Antiquity . Literary production saw a late bloom in the 11th century before declining after 1100 AD...
moved beyond German and British scholars and intellectuals — Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist...
was a sympathetic reader of the Bhagavad Gita
Bhagavad Gita
The ' , also more simply known as Gita, is a 700-verse Hindu scripture that is part of the ancient Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, but is frequently treated as a freestanding text, and in particular, as an Upanishad in its own right, one of the several books that constitute general Vedic tradition...
— and even beyond the humanities
Humanities
The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences....
. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century...
was also influenced by Sanskrit literature. In the early days of the Periodic Table
Periodic table
The periodic table of the chemical elements is a tabular display of the 118 known chemical elements organized by selected properties of their atomic structures. Elements are presented by increasing atomic number, the number of protons in an atom's atomic nucleus...
, scientists referred to as yet undiscovered elements with the use of Sanskrit prefixes (see Mendeleev's predicted elements
Mendeleev's predicted elements
Professor Dmitri Mendeleev published the first Periodic Table of the Atomic Elements in 1869 based on properties which appeared with some regularity as he laid out the elements from lightest to heaviest....
). J. Robert Oppenheimer In 1933 met the Indologist Arthur W. Ryder
Arthur W. Ryder
Arthur William Ryder was a professor of Sanskrit at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for translating a number of Sanskrit works into English, including the Panchatantra and the Bhagavad Gita. In the words of G. R. Noyes,-Life:Ryder was born on March 8, 1877 at Oberlin, Ohio...
at Berkeley and learned Sanskrit. He read the Bhagavad Gita in the original language. Later he cited it as one of the most influential books to shape his philosophy of life.
The nineteenth century was a golden age of Western Sanskrit scholarship, and many of the giants of the field (Whitney
William Dwight Whitney
William Dwight Whitney was an American linguist, philologist, and lexicographer who edited The Century Dictionary.-Life:William Dwight Whitney was born in Northampton, Massachusetts on February 9, 1827. His father was Josiah Dwight Whitney of the New England Dwight family...
, Macdonnell
Arthur Anthony Macdonell
Arthur Anthony Macdonell , 7th of Lochgarry, was a noted Sanskrit scholar.Macdonell was born in India and educated at Göttingen University, then matriculated in 1876 at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, gaining a classical exhibition and three scholarships...
, Monier-Williams, Grassmann
Hermann Grassmann
Hermann Günther Grassmann was a German polymath, renowned in his day as a linguist and now also admired as a mathematician. He was also a physicist, neohumanist, general scholar, and publisher...
) knew each other personally. Perhaps the most commonly known example of Sanskrit in the West was also the last gasp of its vogue. T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
, a student of Indian Philosophy
Hindu philosophy
Hindu philosophy is divided into six schools of thought, or , which accept the Vedas as supreme revealed scriptures. Three other schools do not accept the Vedas as authoritative...
and of Sanskrit under Lanman
Charles Rockwell Lanman
Charles Rockwell Lanman was an American scholar of the Sanskrit language.-Early Life and Education:Charles Rockwell Lanman was born in Norwich, Connecticut, the eighth of the nine children of Peter Lanman III and Catherine Lanman on July 8, 1850...
, ended The Waste Land
The Waste Land
The Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...
with Sanskrit: "Shantih Shantih Shantih"
Shanti Mantra
The Shanti Mantras or "Peace Mantras" are Hindu prayers for Peace from the Vedas.Generally they are recited at the beginning and end of religious rituals and discourses....
.
Current usage and study
Sanskrit is taught in many South Asia Studies and/or Linguistics departments in Western universities. In addition to this, it is also used during worship in Hindu temples in the West, being the HinduHindu
Hindu refers to an identity associated with the philosophical, religious and cultural systems that are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. As used in the Constitution of India, the word "Hindu" is also attributed to all persons professing any Indian religion...
liturgical language, and Sanskrit revival
Sanskrit revival
Sanskrit revival is the accumulation of attempts at reviving the Sanskrit language that have been undertaken.-History:In 1891 there was organized activity among the Theosophists in India promoting and participating in the revival of Sanskrit...
attempts are underway amongst expatriate Hindu populations. Similarly, Sanskrit study is also popular amongst the many Western practitioners of Yoga, who find the language useful in understanding the Yoga Sutra.
See also
- Hindu sacred texts
- Hinduism in the WestHinduism in the WestThe reception of Hinduism in the western world begins in the 19th century, at first at an academic level of religious studies and antquiarian interest in Sanskrit....
- International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration
- Sanskrit phonology
External links
- Snskrit for more about Sanskrit Language. Also as On Kalidasa's Shakuntala, and the Clay Sanskrit Library