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184-601: Sama vedic Yajur vedic Atharva vedic Vaishnava puranas Shaiva puranas Shakta puranas The Swaminarayan Bhashyam ( Svāminārāyaṇabhāṣyam ) is a five-volume Sanskrit bhashya, or commentary, on the Prasthanatrayi ( Prasthānatrayī ) - the ten principal Upanishads ( Upaniṣads ), the Bhagavad Gita ( Bhagavadgītā ), and the Brahmasutras ( Brahmasūtras ) - which establishes

368-535: A "doctrine of liberation" taught by Hinduism, while Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) stated that the Bhagavad Gita teaches a universalist religion and the "essence of Hinduism" along with the "essence of all religions", rather than a private religion. Vivekananda 's (1863–1902) works contained numerous references to the Gita, such as his lectures on the four yogas – Bhakti, Jnana, Karma, and Raja. Through

552-648: A Master's in Sanskrit grammar (Vyakarana Acharya, Vyākaraṇācārya ). In 2005 he received a Ph.D. in Sanskrit for his comparative work on the Vachanamrut and Bhagavad Gita (Paramatma Pratyaksha Swarupa Yoga, Paramātmapratyakṣasvarūpayogaḥ ) from Karnataka University in 2005. In 2010, for the Swaminarayan Bhashyam, he was awarded a D.Litt. in Vedanta from Kavikulaguru Kalidas Sanskrit University and

736-557: A Ph.D. in Sanskrit from Karnataka University and was awarded a D.Litt and Mahamahopadhyaya honorific by Kavikulaguru Kalidas Sanskrit University in 2010 for the Swaminarayan Bhashyam. On 31 July 2017, the Shri Kashi Vidvat Parishad ( Śrī Kāśī Vidvat Pariṣad ), a council of specialists recognized throughout India for their expertise in Vedic literature, acknowledged Swaminarayan's darsana (view, philosophy) on

920-457: A couplet, thus the entire text consists of 1,400 lines. Each shloka has two-quarter verses with exactly eight syllables. Each of these quarters is further arranged into two metrical feet of four syllables each. The metered verse does not rhyme. While the shloka is the principal meter in the Gita, it does deploy other elements of Sanskrit prosody (which refers to one of the six Vedangas, or limbs of Vedic statues). At dramatic moments, it uses

1104-527: A dead language in the most common usage of the term. Pollock's notion of the "death of Sanskrit" remains in this unclear realm between academia and public opinion when he says that "most observers would agree that, in some crucial way, Sanskrit is dead." Bhagavad Gita The Bhagavad Gita ( / ˈ b ʌ ɡ ə v ə d ˈ ɡ iː t ɑː / ; Sanskrit : भगवद्गीता, IPA: [ˌbʱɐɡɐʋɐd ˈɡiːtɑː] , romanized :  bhagavad-gītā , lit.   'god's Song'), often referred to as

1288-500: A few parts can be put as late as 400 CE", states Fowler. The dating of the Gita is thus dependent on the uncertain dating of the Mahabharata . The actual dates of composition of the Gita remain unresolved. According to Arthur Basham, the context of the Bhagavad Gita suggests that it was composed in an era when the ethics of war were being questioned and renunciation to monastic life was becoming popular. Such an era emerged after

1472-433: A focus on Indian philosophies and Sanskrit. Though written in a number of different scripts, the dominant language of Hindu texts has been Sanskrit. It or a hybrid form of Sanskrit became the preferred language of Mahayana Buddhism scholarship; for example, one of the early and influential Buddhist philosophers, Nagarjuna (~200 CE), used Classical Sanskrit as the language for his texts. According to Renou, Sanskrit had

1656-534: A greater affinity for Ramanuja's philosophy compared to the philosophy of Shankara, in the Vachanamrut and other Swaminarayan texts, he delineates his own unique philosophy by presenting five eternal entities versus Ramanuja's three. In the Vachanamrut, Swaminarayan states, “from the Vedas, Purans, the itihas and the Smrutis, I have formed the principle that jiva, ishvar, maya, Brahma, and Parabrahma are all eternal.” In

1840-492: A harmony" between these three paths. It does this in a framework addressing the question of what constitutes the virtuous path that is necessary for spiritual liberation or release from the cycles of rebirth ( moksha ), incorporating various religious traditions, including philosophical ideas from the Upanishads samkhya yoga philosophy , and bhakti , incorporating bhakti into Vedanta . As such, it neutralizes

2024-591: A language competed with numerous, less exact vernacular Indian languages called Prakritic languages ( prākṛta - ). The term prakrta literally means "original, natural, normal, artless", states Franklin Southworth . The relationship between Prakrit and Sanskrit is found in Indian texts dated to the 1st millennium CE. Patañjali acknowledged that Prakrit is the first language, one instinctively adopted by every child with all its imperfections and later leads to

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2208-658: A limited role in the Theravada tradition (formerly known as the Hinayana) but the Prakrit works that have survived are of doubtful authenticity. Some of the canonical fragments of the early Buddhist traditions, discovered in the 20th century, suggest the early Buddhist traditions used an imperfect and reasonably good Sanskrit, sometimes with a Pali syntax, states Renou. The Mahāsāṃghika and Mahavastu, in their late Hinayana forms, used hybrid Sanskrit for their literature. Sanskrit

2392-454: A natural part of the earliest Vedic language, and that these developed in the centuries after the composition had been completed, and as a gradual unconscious process during the oral transmission by generations of reciters. The primary source for this argument is internal evidence of the text which betrays an instability of the phenomenon of retroflexion, with the same phrases having sandhi-induced retroflexion in some parts but not other. This

2576-479: A negative evidence to Pollock's hypothesis, but it is not positive evidence. A closer look at Sanskrit in the Indian history after the 12th century suggests that Sanskrit survived despite the odds. According to Hanneder, On a more public level the statement that Sanskrit is a dead language is misleading, for Sanskrit is quite obviously not as dead as other dead languages and the fact that it is spoken, written and read will probably convince most people that it cannot be

2760-546: A pan-Indo-Aryan accessibility to information and knowledge in the ancient and medieval times, in contrast to the Prakrit languages which were understood just regionally. It created a cultural bond across the subcontinent. As local languages and dialects evolved and diversified, Sanskrit served as the common language. It connected scholars from distant parts of South Asia such as Tamil Nadu and Kashmir, states Deshpande, as well as those from different fields of studies, though there must have been differences in its pronunciation given

2944-629: A privileged position amongst the three scriptures of the Prasthanatrayi as a primary source for Vedanta. The Sanskrit verb Upanishadyate ( Upaniṣadyate ) can be understood to mean “to attain or to know brahmavidya.” Thus, an Upanishad is a text by which the knowledge of Brahman can be attained or known, or brahmavidya ( brahmavidyā ), which is believed to be the knowledge intended and required for liberation. Although there are hundreds of Upanishads, there are ten principal Upanishads which are believed to focus on brahmavidya. The ten Upanishads central to

3128-522: A refined and standardized grammatical form that emerged in the mid-1st millennium BCE and was codified in the most comprehensive of ancient grammars, the Aṣṭādhyāyī ('Eight chapters') of Pāṇini . The greatest dramatist in Sanskrit, Kālidāsa , wrote in classical Sanskrit, and the foundations of modern arithmetic were first described in classical Sanskrit. The two major Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and

3312-486: A restrained language from which archaisms and unnecessary formal alternatives were excluded". The Classical form of the language simplified the sandhi rules but retained various aspects of the Vedic language, while adding rigor and flexibilities, so that it had sufficient means to express thoughts as well as being "capable of responding to the future increasing demands of an infinitely diversified literature", according to Renou. Pāṇini included numerous "optional rules" beyond

3496-556: A set of philosophical principles of Vedanta distinct to those of Ramanuja, Shankara, and previous commentators. However, he did not author any Sanskrit commentaries himself. When compared to the various schools of Vedanta, Swaminarayan's teachings were unique. However the commentaries produced in the 19th and 20th centuries that were attributed to his disciples—some of which were likely authored by Srivaisnava scholars—did not articulate Swaminarayan's distinct philosophy, instead relying heavily on Ramanuja's and Shankara's systems. A commentary on

3680-523: A significant status among smruti ( smṛti ) scriptures and therefore is known as the smruti-prasthana ( smṛtiprasthāna ). The third prasthana is the Brahmasutras ( Brahmasūtras ), authored by Badarayana Vyas ( Bādarāyaṇa Vyāsa ), which summarizes and systematizes the central themes found in the Upanishads. Badarayana structured the text into four chapters ( adhyāyas ) which discuss the nature of Brahman, Vedanta philosophy and other schools of thought, and

3864-439: A similar phonetic structure to Tamil. Hock et al. quoting George Hart state that there was influence of Old Tamil on Sanskrit. Hart compared Old Tamil and Classical Sanskrit to arrive at a conclusion that there was a common language from which these features both derived – "that both Tamil and Sanskrit derived their shared conventions, metres, and techniques from a common source, for it is clear that neither borrowed directly from

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4048-417: A statement of doubt (samshay, saṃśaya ) 3) an opposing view with reasons (purvapaksha, pūrvapakṣa ) 4) supporting claims with evidence (siddhanta, siddhānta ) and 5) the purpose of the discussion regarding that topic, prayojana. Finally, within the formal structure, the author must establish coherence across the text. Each consecutive chapter must be interrelated (sangati, saṅgati ) and should follow one of

4232-508: A warrior. Krishna persuades him to commence in battle, arguing that while following one's dharma, one should not consider oneself to be the agent of action, but attribute all of one's actions to God ( bhakti ). The Gita posits the existence of an individual self ( jivatman ) and the higher Godself (Krishna, Atman/Brahman) in every being; the Krishna-Arjuna dialogue has been interpreted as a metaphor for an everlasting dialogue between

4416-501: Is "intrinsically superior or inferior", rather they "converge in one and lead to the same goal". The Bhagavad Gita contains 18 chapters and 700 verses found in the Bhishma Parva of the epic Mahabharata. Because of differences in recensions , the verses of the Gita may be numbered in the full text of the Mahabharata as chapters 6.25–42 or as chapters 6.23–40. The number of verses in each chapter vary in some manuscripts of

4600-711: Is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages . It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late Bronze Age . Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism , the language of classical Hindu philosophy , and of historical texts of Buddhism and Jainism . It was a link language in ancient and medieval South Asia, and upon transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia, East Asia and Central Asia in

4784-624: Is a Brahmanical text that uses Shramanic and Yogic terminology to propagate the Brahmanic idea of living according to one's duty or dharma , in contrast to the ascetic ideal of liberation by avoiding all karma. According to Hiltebeitel, the Bhagavad Gita is the sealing achievement of the consolidation of Hinduism, merging Bhakti traditions with Mimamsa , Vedanta , and other knowledge based traditions. The Gita discusses and synthesizes sramana- and yoga-based renunciation, dharma-based householder life, and devotion-based theism, attempting "to forge

4968-516: Is akin to that of Latin and Ancient Greek in Europe. Sanskrit has significantly influenced most modern languages of the Indian subcontinent , particularly the languages of the northern, western, central and eastern Indian subcontinent. Sanskrit declined starting about and after the 13th century. This coincides with the beginning of Islamic invasions of South Asia to create, and thereafter expand

5152-615: Is also the traditional compiler of the Vedas and the Puranas , texts dated to be from different millennia. According to Alexus McLeod, a scholar of Philosophy and Asian Studies, it is "impossible to link the Bhagavad Gita to a single author", and it may be the work of many authors. This view is shared by the Indologist Arthur Basham , who states that there were three or more authors or compilers of Bhagavad Gita. This

5336-451: Is attained, according to him, by practicing the nine-fold bhakti of Krishna. Swaminarayan was born 3 April 1781 in the village of Chhapaiya in present-day Uttar Pradesh, India. He completed his study of Hindu texts at a young age. His early study allowed him to engage in scholastic debate at Varanasi at the age of 10. At the age of 11, he renounced his home and traveled for 7 years as a brahmachari ( brahmacāri , child yogi) before settling in

5520-579: Is attributed to Gopalanand Swami, these texts bear no resemblance to the other texts. While historically there are instances of the same commentator authoring multiple commentaries on a sacred text, the lack of similarity between the two sets of Brahmasutra commentaries calls this authorship into question. A comparative study of these Sanskrit commentaries reveals that while the Brahma Sutra Bhashya Ratnam does make reference to some unique features of Swaminarayan's Vedanta as described in

5704-658: Is disputed on account of the existence of two completely different sets of texts written in their name. One set of commentaries includes the Brahmasutra Bhashya Ratnam ( Brahmasūtrabhāṣyaratnam ) attributed to Muktanand Swami and the Vyasa Sutrartha Dipa ( Vyāsasūtrārthadīpa ) attributed to Gopalanand Swami. The second text explicitly references the first. In 1952, the Vadtal diocese's Sanskrit Pathashala published two Brahmasutra commentaries,

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5888-481: Is distressed and in sorrow. The issue is stated Arvind Sharma , "Is it morally proper to kill?" This and other moral dilemmas in the first chapter are set in a context where the Hindu epic and Krishna have already extolled ahimsa (non-violence) to be the highest and divine virtue of a human being. The war feels evil to Arjuna and he questions the morality of war. He wonders if it is noble to renounce and leave before

6072-517: Is established. Trayi means three, and refers to the three scriptures which establish Vedanta darshans ( darśana , a system of practice that helps one know, experience, and realize the truth; school of thought), known as the Prasthanatrayi, are the Upanishads ( Upaniṣad ), Shrimad Bhagavad Gita ( Śrimadbhagavadgītā ), and Brahmasutras ( Brahmasūtras ). Within the Vedanta school of thought, the inquisition of spiritual knowledge (brahmavidya, brahmavidyā ) and liberation (moksha, mokṣa ) must be grounded in

6256-399: Is evidenced by the discontinuous intermixing of philosophical verses with theistic or passionately theistic verses, according to Basham. J. A. B. van Buitenen , an Indologist known for his translations and scholarship on Mahabharata , finds that the Gita is so contextually and philosophically well-knit within the Mahabharata that it was not an independent text that "somehow wandered into

6440-515: Is found in the sixth book of the Mahabharata manuscripts – the Bhisma-parvan . Therein, in the third section, the Gita forms chapters 23–40, that is 6.3.23 to 6.3.40. The Bhagavad Gita is often preserved and studied on its own, as an independent text with its chapters renumbered from 1 to 18. The Bhagavad Gita manuscripts exist in numerous Indic scripts. These include writing systems that are currently in use, as well as early scripts such as

6624-452: Is found in the writing of Bharata Muni , the author of the ancient Natya Shastra text. The early Jain scholar Namisādhu acknowledged the difference, but disagreed that the Prakrit language was a corruption of Sanskrit. Namisādhu stated that the Prakrit language was the pūrvam ('came before, origin') and that it came naturally to children, while Sanskrit was a refinement of Prakrit through "purification by grammar". Sanskrit belongs to

6808-710: Is in accordance with the doctrinal principles revealed by Swaminarayan, and the divine mantra ‘Swaminarayan’ denotes Akshar and Purushottam who constitute Brahmavidya. May the manifest Swaminarayan Hari be ever pleased.” Although written in the 21st century, the Swaminarayan Bhashyam is composed in the same style as the Vedanta commentaries which precede it. It expounds and establishes the Akshar-Purushottam Darshan principles according to Swaminarayan's teachings. The five metaphysical eternal entities ( jiva , ishvara , maya , Aksharbrahman, and Parabrahman ),

6992-461: Is increasingly recognized by scholars that the extraordinary prominence of the Bhagavad Gita is a feature of modernity despite disagreement over the date at which it became dominant." According to Eric Sharpe, this change started in the 1880s, and became prominent after 1900. According to Arvind Sharma, the Bhagavad Gita was always an important scripture but became prominent in the 1920s. With its translation and study by Western scholars beginning in

7176-462: Is located in the 18th chapter of the Mahabharata (Mahābhārata). Each chapter in the Bhagavad Gita traditionally ends with a verse which states that the Gita is a sacred text on yoga, centralized around the theme of Brahmavidya, and is therefore considered an Upanishad, a text by which the knowledge of Brahman can be attained or known. As the Bhagavad Gita is part of the Mahabharata, this text holds

7360-420: Is modern, advocated by Swami Vivekananda from the 1890s in his books on Jnana Yoga , Karma Yoga , Bhakti Yoga and Raja Yoga , emphasizing Raja Yoga as the crowning achievement of yoga. Vivekananda, who was strongly inspired by the Gita, viewed all spiritual paths as equal. Yet, Vivekananda also noted that "The reconciliation of the different paths of Dharma, and work without desire or attachment — these are

7544-418: Is not distorted. While Hinduism is known for its diversity and the synthesis derived from it, the Bhagavad Gita holds a unique pan-Hindu influence. Gerald James Larson – an Indologist and scholar of classical Hindu philosophy , states that "if there is any one text that comes near to embodying the totality of what it is to be a Hindu , it would be the Bhagavad Gita." Yet, according to Robinson, "it

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7728-657: Is often written as Shrimad Bhagavad Gita or Shrimad Bhagavadgita (श्रीमद् भगवद् गीता or भगवद्गीता) where the Shrimad prefix is used to denote a high degree of respect. The Bhagavad Gita is not to be confused with the Bhagavata Puran , which is one of the eighteen major Puranas dealing with the life of the Hindu God Krishna and various avatars of Vishnu . The work is also known as the Iswara Gita ,

7912-475: Is opened by setting the stage of the Kurukshetra battlefield. Two massive armies representing different loyalties and ideologies face a catastrophic war. With Arjuna is Krishna, not as a participant in the war, but only as his charioteer and counsel. Arjuna requests Krishna to move the chariot between the two armies so he can see those "eager for this war". He sees family and friends on the enemy side. Arjuna

8096-532: Is rare in the later version of the language. The Homerian Greek, like Ṛg-vedic Sanskrit, deploys simile extensively, but they are structurally very different. The early Vedic form of the Sanskrit language was far less homogenous compared to the Classical Sanskrit as defined by grammarians by about the mid-1st millennium BCE. According to Richard Gombrich—an Indologist and a scholar of Sanskrit, Pāli and Buddhist Studies—the archaic Vedic Sanskrit found in

8280-422: Is supported by a few versions of chapter 6.43 of the Mahabharata . According to Gita exegesis scholar Robert Minor, these versions state that the Gita is a text where "Kesava [Krishna] spoke 574 slokas, Arjuna 84, Sanjaya 41, and Dhritarashtra 1". An authentic manuscript of the Gita with 745 verses has not been found. Adi Shankara, in his 8th-century commentary, explicitly states that the Gita has 700 verses, which

8464-479: Is taken along with evidence of controversy, for example, in passages of the Aitareya-Āraṇyaka (700 BCE), which features a discussion on whether retroflexion is valid in particular cases. The Ṛg-veda is a collection of books, created by multiple authors. These authors represented different generations, and the mandalas 2 to 7 are the oldest while the mandalas 1 and 10 are relatively the youngest. Yet,

8648-589: Is the predominant language of one of the largest collection of historic manuscripts. The earliest known inscriptions in Sanskrit are from the 1st century BCE, such as the Ayodhya Inscription of Dhana and Ghosundi-Hathibada (Chittorgarh) . Though developed and nurtured by scholars of orthodox schools of Hinduism, Sanskrit has been the language for some of the key literary works and theology of heterodox schools of Indian philosophies such as Buddhism and Jainism. The structure and capabilities of

8832-476: Is the principal devotee. The means of liberation is bhakti. In the 13th or 14th century, Madhva ( Madhva ) established a philosophy called the Dvaita ( Dvaita ) Darshan. Dvaita, which means dualism, refers to two types of metaphysical entities: svatantra ( svatantra , independent) and partantra ( paratantra , dependent). Brahman, specifically Vishnu ( Viṣṇu ), is independent while the others (jiva, prakriti, and

9016-410: Is the second highest metaphysical entity. Similar to Parabrahman, Aksharbrahman is eternally above the influences of maya. Aksharbrahman is one entity but manifests as four different forms: Sanskrit Sanskrit ( / ˈ s æ n s k r ɪ t / ; attributively 𑀲𑀁𑀲𑁆𑀓𑀾𑀢𑀁 , संस्कृत- , saṃskṛta- ; nominally संस्कृतम् , saṃskṛtam , IPA: [ˈsɐ̃skr̩tɐm] )

9200-540: The Bhagavata Purana , the Panchatantra and many other texts are all in the Sanskrit language. The Classical Sanskrit with its exacting grammar was thus the language of the Indian scholars and the educated classes, while others communicated with approximate or ungrammatical variants of it as well as other natural Indian languages. Sanskrit, as the learned language of Ancient India, thus existed alongside

9384-574: The Ananta Gita , the Hari Gita , the Vyasa Gita , or the Gita. The text is generally dated to the second or first century BCE, though some scholars accept dates as early as the 5th century BCE. According to Jeaneane Fowler, "the dating of the Gita varies considerably" and depends in part on whether one accepts it to be a part of the early versions of the Mahabharata , or a text that

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9568-580: The Dalai Lama , the Sanskrit language is a parent language that is at the foundation of many modern languages of India and the one that promoted Indian thought to other distant countries. In Tibetan Buddhism, states the Dalai Lama, Sanskrit language has been a revered one and called legjar lhai-ka or "elegant language of the gods". It has been the means of transmitting the "profound wisdom of Buddhist philosophy" to Tibet. The Sanskrit language created

9752-617: The Dvaitadvaita ( Dvaitādvaita ) Darshan, also known as the Bhedabhed Darshan, which resembles Ramanuja's philosophy. Nimbarka authored a commentary on the Brahmasutras entitled the Vedanta Parijatasaurabha ( Vedānta Pārijātasaurabha ). Within this darshan, there are three metaphysical entities: jiva (chit), the world (achit), and Brahman. Krishna ( Kṛṣna ) is worshipped as Brahman and Radha ( Rādhā )

9936-526: The Gita ( IAST : gītā ), is a Hindu scripture , dated to the second or first century BCE, which forms part of the Epic Mahabharata . It is a synthesis of various strands of Indian religious thought, including the Vedic concept of dharma (duty, rightful action); samkhya -based yoga and jnana (insight, knowledge); and bhakti (devotion). It holds a unique pan-Hindu influence as

10120-613: The Indo-European family of languages . It is one of the three earliest ancient documented languages that arose from a common root language now referred to as Proto-Indo-European : Other Indo-European languages distantly related to Sanskrit include archaic and Classical Latin ( c. 600 BCE–100 CE, Italic languages ), Gothic (archaic Germanic language , c.  350 CE ), Old Norse ( c. 200 CE and after), Old Avestan ( c.  late 2nd millennium BCE ) and Younger Avestan ( c. 900 BCE). The closest ancient relatives of Vedic Sanskrit in

10304-452: The Mahabharata , and therefore the Gita, must have been well known by then for a Buddhist to be quoting it. This suggests a terminus ante quem (latest date) of the Gita be sometime before the 1st century CE. He cites similar quotes in the dharmasutra texts, the Brahma sutras , and other literature to conclude that the Bhagavad Gita was composed in the fifth or fourth-century BCE. In

10488-753: The Rigveda had already evolved in the Vedic period, as evidenced in the later Vedic literature. Gombrich posits that the language in the early Upanishads of Hinduism and the late Vedic literature approaches Classical Sanskrit, while the archaic Vedic Sanskrit had by the Buddha 's time become unintelligible to all except ancient Indian sages. The formalization of the Saṃskṛta language is credited to Pāṇini , along with Patañjali's Mahābhāṣya and Katyayana's commentary that preceded Patañjali's work. Panini composed Aṣṭādhyāyī ('Eight-Chapter Grammar'), which became

10672-532: The Rigveda , a collection of 1,028 hymns composed between 1500 BCE and 1200 BCE by Indo-Aryan tribes migrating east from the mountains of what is today northern Afghanistan across northern Pakistan and into northwestern India. Vedic Sanskrit interacted with the preexisting ancient languages of the subcontinent, absorbing names of newly encountered plants and animals; in addition, the ancient Dravidian languages influenced Sanskrit's phonology and syntax. Sanskrit can also more narrowly refer to Classical Sanskrit ,

10856-531: The Rāmāyaṇa , however, were composed in a range of oral storytelling registers called Epic Sanskrit which was used in northern India between 400 BCE and 300 CE, and roughly contemporary with classical Sanskrit. In the following centuries, Sanskrit became tradition-bound, stopped being learned as a first language, and ultimately stopped developing as a living language. The hymns of the Rigveda are notably similar to

11040-608: The Upanishads ( Upaniṣad ). A commentary presents aphorisms or verses, as read in the text, followed by a detailed exposition on each term to reveal the author's philosophy. The bhashyakara ( bhāṣyakara ), or commentator, in the Vedanta tradition must have mastery of both the Sanskrit language as well as of the six schools of Hindu philosophy ( śaḍdarśana, shaddarshan ) - Sankhya ( Śāṅkhya ) , Yoga ( Yoga ) , Vaisheshika ( Vaiśeṣika ) , Nyaya ( Nyāya ) , Mimamsa ( Mīmāṃsā ) , and Vedanta ( Vedānta ) . Vedanta, which literally means

11224-420: The Upanishads and samkhya yoga philosophy . While praising the benefits of yoga to release man's inner essence from the bounds of desire and the wheel of rebirth , the Gita propagates the Brahmanic idea of living according to one's duty or dharma , in contrast to the ascetic ideal of liberation by avoiding all karma . Facing the perils of war, Arjuna hesitates to perform his duty ( dharma ) as

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11408-545: The Vachanamrut ( Vacanāmṛta ), the principal theological text of the Swaminarayan Sampradaya . As followers believe Swaminarayan to be Parabrahman ( Parabrahman ), his teachings are considered a direct revelation of God. Though Swaminarayan did not author a commentary himself, he discusses and interprets Vedanta texts in his teachings wherein he establishes his own philosophy. While Swaminarayan states

11592-574: The Vachanamrut , it ultimately bears more affinity with Vishishtadvaita Vedanta. The Brahma Mimamsa is even more aligned with Vishishtadvaita Vedanta rather than the Vedanta principles taught by Swaminarayan in his discourses in the Vachanamrut. The author of the Swaminarayan Bhashyam, Bhadreshdas Swami , is a swami of the BAPS Swaminarayan Sampradaya and an eminent scholar of the Swaminarayan Hindu tradition. He

11776-406: The sandhi rules, both internal and external. Quite many words found in the early Vedic Sanskrit language are never found in late Vedic Sanskrit or Classical Sanskrit literature, while some words have different and new meanings in Classical Sanskrit when contextually compared to the early Vedic Sanskrit literature. Arthur Macdonell was among the early colonial era scholars who summarized some of

11960-409: The tristubh meter found in the Vedas, where each line of the couplet has two-quarter verses with exactly eleven syllables. The Gita is a dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna right before the start of the climactic Kurukshetra War in the Hindu epic Mahabharata . Two massive armies have gathered to destroy each other. The Pandava prince Arjuna asks his charioteer Krishna to drive to the centre of

12144-500: The verbal adjective sáṃskṛta- is a compound word consisting of sáṃ ('together, good, well, perfected') and kṛta - ('made, formed, work'). It connotes a work that has been "well prepared, pure and perfect, polished, sacred". According to Biderman, the perfection contextually being referred to in the etymological origins of the word is its tonal—rather than semantic—qualities. Sound and oral transmission were highly valued qualities in ancient India, and its sages refined

12328-414: The 13th century, a premier center of Sanskrit literary creativity, Sanskrit literature there disappeared, perhaps in the "fires that periodically engulfed the capital of Kashmir" or the "Mongol invasion of 1320" states Pollock. The Sanskrit literature which was once widely disseminated out of the northwest regions of the subcontinent, stopped after the 12th century. As Hindu kingdoms fell in the eastern and

12512-487: The 19th and 20th centuries, various figures within the Swaminarayan Sampradaya took on the task of composing and publishing Vedanta commentarial texts. With respect to commentaries on the Brahmasutras , handwritten manuscripts date to the early 19th century, while printed commentaries began to appear in the early 20th century. Though these commentaries are attributed to senior monastic disciples of Swaminarayan , Muktanand Swami and Gopalanand Swami , their actual authorship

12696-465: The 2nd or 3rd century CE. Kashi Nath Upadhyaya dates it a bit earlier, but after the rise of Buddhism, by which it was influenced. He states that the Gita was always a part of the Mahabharata , and dating the latter suffices in dating the Gita. based on the estimated dates of Mahabharata as evidenced by exact quotes of it in the Buddhist literature by Asvaghosa (c. 100 CE), Upadhyaya states that

12880-532: The 7th century where he established a major center of learning and language translation under the patronage of Emperor Taizong. By the early 1st millennium CE, Sanskrit had spread Buddhist and Hindu ideas to Southeast Asia, parts of the East Asia and the Central Asia. It was accepted as a language of high culture and the preferred language by some of the local ruling elites in these regions. According to

13064-479: The Akshar-Purushottam distinction as a distinct view within Vedanta. The council also recognized Bhadreshdas Swami as an acharya in line with Shankara, Ramanuja, Madhva, and Vallabha, and as the only Sanskrit scholar in history to write both a commentary on the Prasthanatrayi and a vadagrantha, a Sanskrit text which offers systematic exposition of and justification for the philosophical principles found in

13248-411: The Bhagavad Gita as containing the essence of Hinduism and taking the Gita's emphasis on duty and action as a clue for their activism for Indian nationalism and independence. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838–1894) challenged orientalist literature on Hinduism and offered his interpretations of the Gita, states Ajit Ray. Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920) interpreted the karma yoga teachings in Gita as

13432-548: The Brahma Mimamsa ( Brahmamīmāṃsā ) and a sub-commentary to the Brahma Mimamsa titled Pradipa ( Pradīpa ). The two commentaries appeared in one volume with prefaces written by Krishnamacharya and Annangaracharya, two Srivaisnava scholars hired from Tamil Nadu by the Pathashala. Annangaracharya is credited as the editor of the entire volume. Though the Brahma Mimamsa commentary is attributed to Muktanand Swami and Pradipa

13616-425: The Classical Sanskrit language launched ancient Indian speculations about "the nature and function of language", what is the relationship between words and their meanings in the context of a community of speakers, whether this relationship is objective or subjective, discovered or is created, how individuals learn and relate to the world around them through language, and about the limits of language? They speculated on

13800-532: The Dravidian languages borrowed from Sanskrit vocabulary, but they have also affected Sanskrit on deeper levels of structure, "for instance in the domain of phonology where Indo-Aryan retroflexes have been attributed to Dravidian influence". Similarly, Ferenc Ruzca states that all the major shifts in Indo-Aryan phonetics over two millennia can be attributed to the constant influence of a Dravidian language with

13984-521: The Dravidian words and forms, without modifying the word order; but the same thing is not possible in rendering a Persian or English sentence into a non-Indo-Aryan language. Shulman mentions that "Dravidian nonfinite verbal forms (called vinaiyeccam in Tamil) shaped the usage of the Sanskrit nonfinite verbs (originally derived from inflected forms of action nouns in Vedic). This particularly salient case of

14168-421: The Gita discovered on the Indian subcontinent. However, variant readings are relatively few in contrast to the numerous versions of the Mahabharata it is found embedded in. The original Bhagavad Gita has no chapter titles. Some Sanskrit editions that separate the Gita from the epic as an independent text, as well as translators, however, add chapter titles. For example, Swami Chidbhavananda describes each of

14352-410: The Gita is set in the context of a wartime epic, the narrative is structured to apply to all situations; it wrestles with questions about "who we are, how we should live our lives, and how should we act in the world". According to Huston Smith, it delves into questions about the "purpose of life, crisis of self-identity, human Self, human temperaments, and ways for the spiritual quest". The Gita posits

14536-500: The Gita rejects the shramanic path of non-action, emphasizing instead "the renunciation of the fruits of action". According to Gavin Flood, the teachings in the Gita differ from other Indian religions that encouraged extreme austerity and self-torture of various forms ( karsayanta ). The Gita disapproves of these, stating that not only is it against tradition but against Krishna himself, because "Krishna dwells within all beings, in torturing

14720-447: The Indian tradition, the Bhagavad Gita, as well as the epic Mahabharata of which it is a part, is attributed to the sage Vyasa , whose full name was Krishna Dvaipayana, also called Veda-Vyasa. Another Hindu legend states that Vyasa narrated it when the lord Ganesha broke one of his tusks and wrote down the Mahabharata along with the Bhagavad Gita. Scholars consider Vyasa to be a mythical or symbolic author, in part because Vyasa

14904-476: The Indo-Aryan language underwent rapid linguistic change and morphed into the Vedic Sanskrit language. The pre-Classical form of Sanskrit is known as Vedic Sanskrit . The earliest attested Sanskrit text is the Rigveda , a Hindu scripture from the mid- to late-second millennium BCE. No written records from such an early period survive, if any ever existed, but scholars are generally confident that

15088-519: The Indo-European languages are the Nuristani languages found in the remote Hindu Kush region of northeastern Afghanistan and northwestern Himalayas, as well as the extinct Avestan and Old Persian – both are Iranian languages . Sanskrit belongs to the satem group of the Indo-European languages. Colonial era scholars familiar with Latin and Greek were struck by the resemblance of

15272-532: The Muslim rule in the form of Sultanates, and later the Mughal Empire . Sheldon Pollock characterises the decline of Sanskrit as a long-term "cultural, social, and political change". He dismisses the idea that Sanskrit declined due to "struggle with barbarous invaders", and emphasises factors such as the increasing attractiveness of vernacular language for literary expression. With the fall of Kashmir around

15456-496: The Muslim rulers. Hindu rulers such as Shivaji of the Maratha Empire , reversed the process, by re-adopting Sanskrit and re-asserting their socio-linguistic identity. After Islamic rule disintegrated in South Asia and the colonial rule era began, Sanskrit re-emerged but in the form of a "ghostly existence" in regions such as Bengal. This decline was the result of "political institutions and civic ethos" that did not support

15640-536: The Prasthanatrayi are: Ishavasya ( Īśāvāsya ), Kena ( Kena ), Katha ( Kaṭha ), Prashna ( Praśna ), Mundaka ( Muṇḍaka ), Mandukya ( Māṇḍūkya ), Taittiriya ( Taittirīya ), Aitareya ( Aitareya ), Chandogya ( Chāndogya ), and Bruhadaranyaka ( Bṛhadāraṇyaka ). The second established text (prasthana) is the Shrimad Bhagavad Gita ( Śrimadbhagavadgītā ), the philosophical dialogue of Arjuna and Krishna right before battle. The Bhagavad Gita contains 700 verses and

15824-403: The Prasthanatrayi that would highlight the distinguishing doctrines of Swaminarayan's philosophy was needed. Bhadreshdas Swami's exposition is the first Vedanta commentary that accurately brings forth Swaminarayan's own philosophical identity within the school of Vedanta, hence justifying the attribution of ‘Swaminarayan’ to the title of his commentarial work. Bhadreshdas Swami states the purpose of

16008-726: The Prasthanatrayi. Bhadreshdas Swami was authoring the commentaries in a room in the basement of the BAPS Swaminarayan Mandir in Sarangpur when, in 2007, a flash flood inundated his room destroying his books, notes, and writing. Pramukh Swami Maharaj was informed of the tragedy, and he inspired Bhadreshdas Swami to continue writing and finish the commentaries by the time of the BAPS Centenary Celebration in December 2007, approximately 6 months from

16192-454: The Prasthanatrayi. In the late 8th or early 9th century, Shankara established the Advaita ( Advaita ) Darshan (absolute non-dualism) with his commentary on the Prasthanatrayi. In this school of thought, the belief is that there is only one metaphysical entity, Brahman. Shankara states that maya ( māyā ), or ignorance, and its creations are unreal. To realize oneself as Brahman, knowledge is

16376-434: The Prasthanatrayi. Each Vedanta darshan, such as Advaita ( Advaita ), Dvaita ( Dvaita ), Vishishtadvaita ( Viśiṣṭādvaita ), or Akshar-Purushottam Darshan ( Akṣar-Puruṣottama Darśana ), has therefore established its philosophy by interpreting  the Prasthanatrayi. The first prasthana is the Upanishads ( Upaniṣad ), which are found at the end of the Vedas. It also known as the shruti-prasthana ( śrutiprasthāna ), and it takes

16560-530: The Sanskrit text, Swaminarayan Siddhant Sudha ( Svāminārāyaṇa-Siddhānta-Sudhā ), a vad grantha ( vādgrantha ) which offers systematic exposition of and justification for the philosophical principles found in the Swaminarayan Bhashyam. In 2005, upon the completion of his Ph.D., Bhadreshdas Swami was instructed by Pramukh Swami Maharaj , 5th spiritual successor of Swaminarayan in the BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha , to author Sanskrit commentaries on

16744-499: The Saṃskṛta language, both in its vocabulary and grammar, to the classical languages of Europe. In The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World , Mallory and Adams illustrate the resemblance with the following examples of cognate forms (with the addition of Old English for further comparison): The correspondences suggest some common root, and historical links between some of

16928-512: The Self in the Self By the Self through meditation; Others by the discipline of Sankhya And still others by the yoga of action. [25] Yet others, not knowing this, Worship, having heard it from others, And they also cross beyond death, Devoted to what they have heard. Bhagavad Gita, chapter XIII, verse 23-25 While the Upanishads refer to yoga as yoking or restraining the mind,

17112-638: The South India, such as the great Vijayanagara Empire , so did Sanskrit. There were exceptions and short periods of imperial support for Sanskrit, mostly concentrated during the reign of the tolerant Mughal emperor Akbar . Muslim rulers patronized the Middle Eastern language and scripts found in Persia and Arabia, and the Indians linguistically adapted to this Persianization to gain employment with

17296-587: The Swaminarayan Bhashyam is known as the Akshar-Purushottam Darshan ( Akṣara-Puruṣottama Darśana ). Unlike the previous darshans, the Akshar-Purushottam Darshan posits the existence of five eternally distinct entities: jiva ( jīva , the soul or ‘atman’), ishvara ( īśvara , the soul with greater power than the jiva), maya ( māyā , Parabrahman's divine creative energy, insentient entity), Aksharbrahman ( Akṣarabrahman , or Akshar, which transcends all except Parabrahman), and Parabrahman ( Parabrahman ,

17480-500: The Swaminarayan Bhashyam. In 2018, at a plenary session of the 17th World Sanskrit Conference in Vancouver, Canada, professor Ashok Aklujkar also acclaimed that Swaminarayan's Akshar-Purushottam distinction is a separate darshan within Vedanta . A bhashya (or bhashyam) in the Vedanta ( Vedānta ) tradition is an exposition or commentary on sutra ( sūtra ) texts, such as the Brahmasutras ( Brahmasūtras ), or sacred texts, such as

17664-447: The Vedic Sanskrit in these books of the Ṛg-veda "hardly presents any dialectical diversity", states Louis Renou – an Indologist known for his scholarship of the Sanskrit literature and the Ṛg-veda in particular. According to Renou, this implies that the Vedic Sanskrit language had a "set linguistic pattern" by the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE. Beyond the Ṛg-veda, the ancient literature in Vedic Sanskrit that has survived into

17848-468: The Vedic Sanskrit language, such as aorists and the prohibitive mā instead of the expected na (not) of classical Sanskrit. This suggests that the text was composed after the Pāṇini era, but before the long compounds of classical Sanskrit became the norm. This would date the text as transmitted by the oral tradition to the later centuries of the 1st-millennium BCE, and the first written version probably to

18032-451: The Vedic Sanskrit's bahulam framework, to respect liberty and creativity so that individual writers separated by geography or time would have the choice to express facts and their views in their own way, where tradition followed competitive forms of the Sanskrit language. The phonetic differences between Vedic Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit, as discerned from the current state of the surviving literature, are negligible when compared to

18216-459: The alphabet, the structure of words, and its exacting grammar into a "collection of sounds, a kind of sublime musical mold" as an integral language they called Saṃskṛta . From the late Vedic period onwards, state Annette Wilke and Oliver Moebus, resonating sound and its musical foundations attracted an "exceptionally large amount of linguistic, philosophical and religious literature" in India. Sound

18400-402: The author must align their philosophy with the teachings of the Prasthanatrayi. Shankara ( Śaṅkara ) set the precedent of commenting on all three scriptures in the Prasthanatrayi. However, commentators who followed him did not always complete a commentary on all three texts, leaving those commentators’ disciples or others in his philosophical lineage to author commentaries on the remaining texts of

18584-438: The battlefield so that he can get a good look at both the armies and all those "so eager for war". He sees that some among his enemies are his relatives, beloved friends, and revered teachers. He does not want to fight to kill them and is thus filled with doubt and despair on the battlefield. He drops his bow, wonders if he should renounce and just leave the battlefield. He turns to his charioteer and guide, Krishna, for advice on

18768-438: The body the ascetic would be torturing him", states Flood. Even a monk should strive for "inner renunciation" rather than external pretensions. It further states that the dharmic householder can achieve the same goals as the renouncing monk through "inner renunciation" or "motiveless action". One must do the right thing because one has determined that it is right, states Gita, without craving for its fruits, without worrying about

18952-440: The capacity to understand the old Prakrit languages such as Ardhamagadhi . A section of European scholars state that Sanskrit was never a spoken language. However, evidences shows that Sanskrit was a spoken language, essential for oral tradition that preserved the vast number of Sanskrit manuscripts from ancient India. The textual evidence in the works of Yaksa, Panini, and Patanajali affirms that Classical Sanskrit in their era

19136-527: The close relationship between the Indo-Iranian tongues and the Baltic and Slavic languages , vocabulary exchange with the non-Indo-European Uralic languages , and the nature of the attested Indo-European words for flora and fauna. The pre-history of Indo-Aryan languages which preceded Vedic Sanskrit is unclear and various hypotheses place it over a fairly wide limit. According to Thomas Burrow, based on

19320-417: The commentator must first identify a leading theme as the subject from the root text (abhidheya, abhidheya ), the principal purpose (prayojana, prayojana ), and the relation between the two (sambhanda, sambhanda ). Thereafter, the commentator can structure various sutras to follow a thematic order. The sutras do not have explicit labels but follow the pattern: 1) a statement of the topic (vishaya, viṣaya ) 2)

19504-614: The context of a speech or language, is found in verses 5.28.17–19 of the Ramayana . Outside the learned sphere of written Classical Sanskrit, vernacular colloquial dialects ( Prakrits ) continued to evolve. Sanskrit co-existed with numerous other Prakrit languages of ancient India. The Prakrit languages of India also have ancient roots and some Sanskrit scholars have called these Apabhramsa , literally 'spoiled'. The Vedic literature includes words whose phonetic equivalent are not found in other Indo-European languages but which are found in

19688-653: The crystallization of Classical Sanskrit. As in this period the Indo-Aryan tribes had not yet made contact with the inhabitants of the South of the subcontinent, this suggests a significant presence of Dravidian speakers in North India (the central Gangetic plain and the classical Madhyadeśa) who were instrumental in this substratal influence on Sanskrit. Extant manuscripts in Sanskrit number over 30 million, one hundred times those in Greek and Latin combined, constituting

19872-467: The detailed and sophisticated treatise then transmitted it through his students. Modern scholarship generally accepts that he knew of a form of writing, based on references to words such as Lipi ('script') and lipikara ('scribe') in section 3.2 of the Aṣṭādhyāyī . The Classical Sanskrit language formalized by Pāṇini, states Renou, is "not an impoverished language", rather it is "a controlled and

20056-471: The differences between the Vedic and Classical Sanskrit. Louis Renou published in 1956, in French, a more extensive discussion of the similarities, the differences and the evolution of the Vedic Sanskrit within the Vedic period and then to the Classical Sanskrit along with his views on the history. This work has been translated by Jagbans Balbir. The earliest known use of the word Saṃskṛta (Sanskrit), in

20240-460: The distant major ancient languages of the world. The Indo-Aryan migrations theory explains the common features shared by Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages by proposing that the original speakers of what became Sanskrit arrived in South Asia from a region of common origin, somewhere north-west of the Indus region , during the early 2nd millennium BCE. Evidence for such a theory includes

20424-622: The early 18th century, the Bhagavad Gita gained a growing appreciation and popularity in the West . Novel interpretations of the Gita, along with apologetics on it, have been a part of the modern era revisionism and renewal movements within Hinduism. According to Ronald Neufeldt, it was the Theosophical Society that dedicated much attention and energy to the allegorical interpretation of the Gita, along with religious texts from around

20608-490: The early medieval era, it became a language of religion and high culture , and of the political elites in some of these regions. As a result, Sanskrit had a lasting impact on the languages of South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, especially in their formal and learned vocabularies. Sanskrit generally connotes several Old Indo-Aryan language varieties. The most archaic of these is the Vedic Sanskrit found in

20792-551: The eighteen chapters as a separate yoga because each chapter, like yoga, "trains the body and the mind". He labels the first chapter "Arjuna Vishada Yogam" or the "Yoga of Arjuna's Dejection". Sir Edwin Arnold titled this chapter in his 1885 translation as "The Distress of Arjuna". The chapters are: Translators have variously titled the first chapter as Arjuna Vishada-yoga , Prathama Adhyaya , The Distress of Arjuna , The War Within , or Arjuna's Sorrow . The Bhagavad Gita

20976-408: The end of the Vedas (Veda + anta), refers to the essence of the Vedas found in the Upanishads. The Vedas are considered to hold the highest scriptural authority by most Hindus. The term Prasthanatrayi ( Prasthānatrayī ) is the combination of the Sanskrit words prasthana ( prasthāna ) and trayi ( trayī ). Prasthana means a starting-point or source, and specifically in Vedanta, a text by which philosophy

21160-482: The epic". The Gita, states van Buitenen, was conceived and developed by the Mahabharata authors to "bring to a climax and solution the dharmic dilemma of a war". According to Dennis Hudson, there is an overlap between Vedic and Tantric rituals within the teachings found in the Bhagavad Gita. He places the Pancaratra Agama in the last three or four centuries of 1st-millennium BCE, and proposes that both

21344-453: The existence of two selves in an individual, and its presentation of Krishna-Arjuna dialogue has been interpreted as a metaphor for an eternal dialogue between the two. The Bhagavad Gita is a synthesis of Vedic and non-Vedic traditions, reconciling renunciation with action by arguing that they are inseparable; while following one's dharma, one should not consider oneself to be the agent of action, but attribute all one's actions to God. It

21528-548: The first language of the respective speakers. The Sanskrit language brought Indo-Aryan speaking people together, particularly its elite scholars. Some of these scholars of Indian history regionally produced vernacularized Sanskrit to reach wider audiences, as evidenced by texts discovered in Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Maharashtra. Once the audience became familiar with the easier to understand vernacularized version of Sanskrit, those interested could graduate from colloquial Sanskrit to

21712-450: The five metaphysical eternal entities (jiva, ishvara, maya, Aksharbrahman, and Parabrahman), the ontological distinction between Aksharbrahman and Parabrahman, the exposition of spiritual knowledge (brahmavidya), and the means to liberation through identifying with Aksharbrahman and exclusive devotion to Parabrahman. Bhadreshdas Swami's commentarial work is the first Vedanta commentary to bring forth Swaminarayan's philosophical teachings within

21896-412: The foundation of Vyākaraṇa, a Vedānga . The Aṣṭādhyāyī was not the first description of Sanskrit grammar, but it is the earliest that has survived in full, and the culmination of a long grammatical tradition that Fortson says, is "one of the intellectual wonders of the ancient world". Pāṇini cites ten scholars on the phonological and grammatical aspects of the Sanskrit language before him, as well as

22080-537: The gods Varuna, Mitra, Indra, and Nasatya found in the earliest layers of the Vedic literature. O Bṛhaspati, when in giving names they first set forth the beginning of Language, Their most excellent and spotless secret was laid bare through love, When the wise ones formed Language with their mind, purifying it like grain with a winnowing fan, Then friends knew friendships – an auspicious mark placed on their language. — Rigveda 10.71.1–4 Translated by Roger Woodard The Vedic Sanskrit found in

22264-546: The group by the mantra and began referring to the sampradaya as the Swaminarayan Sampradaya and Sahajanand Swami as Swaminarayan. Textual sources indicate that as early as 1804 Swaminarayan was regarded as the manifestation of God, and over his life, he would be worshiped as God by his followers. Swaminarayan died on 1 June 1830, but the Swaminarayan Sampradaya continued to grow, with an estimated 5 million followers in 2001. Swaminarayan's teachings are found in

22448-483: The hermitage of Ramanand Swami in present-day Gujarat. On 28 October 1800, Ramanand initiated him as Sahajanand Swami and in 1801 appointed him to be his successor and leader of the Swaminarayan Sampradaya ( sampradāya , fellowship). After Ramanand Swami's death, on 17 December 1801, Sahajanand Swami directed his devotees to chant the Swaminarayan mantra. As devotees began chanting the new mantra, society identified

22632-406: The highest eternal entity, God). The Akshar-Purushottam Darshan's most distinctive feature is its identification of two Brahmans: Aksharbrahman and Parabrahman. All other commentators have only identified one Brahman. Parabrahman (or Purushottam, Paramatma, Parameshwar, God) is the highest of the five entities. Four qualities are attributed to Parabrahman:   Aksharbrahman (or Akshar, Brahman)

22816-431: The historic Sanskrit literary culture and the failure of new Sanskrit literature to assimilate into the changing cultural and political environment. Sheldon Pollock states that in some crucial way, "Sanskrit is dead ". After the 12th century, the Sanskrit literary works were reduced to "reinscription and restatements" of ideas already explored, and any creativity was restricted to hymns and verses. This contrasted with

23000-742: The honorific title Mahamahopadhyaya ( Mahāmadopādhyāya ) in 2012. In 2013 he received the Darshankesari ( Darśanakesarī ) award from the Akhil Bhartiya Vidvat Parishad, Varanasi and in 2015 ‘Vedanta-Martanda’ ( Vedānta-Mārtaṇḍa ) from Silpakorn University, Bangkok at the 16th World Sanskrit Conference. He currently serves as the head scholar at the Yagnapurush Sanskrit Pathshala in Sarangpur where he teaches Indian philosophy, Sanskrit, and Indian classical music. Bhadreshdas Swami has also authored

23184-486: The intense change that must have occurred in the pre-Vedic period between the Proto-Indo-Aryan language and Vedic Sanskrit. The noticeable differences between the Vedic and the Classical Sanskrit include the much-expanded grammar and grammatical categories as well as the differences in the accent, the semantics and the syntax. There are also some differences between how some of the nouns and verbs end, as well as

23368-432: The largest cultural heritage that any civilization has produced prior to the invention of the printing press. — Foreword of Sanskrit Computational Linguistics (2009), Gérard Huet, Amba Kulkarni and Peter Scharf Sanskrit has been the predominant language of Hindu texts encompassing a rich tradition of philosophical and religious texts, as well as poetry, music, drama , scientific , technical and others. It

23552-412: The linguistic expression and sets the standard for the Sanskrit language. Pāṇini made use of a technical metalanguage consisting of a syntax, morphology and lexicon. This metalanguage is organised according to a series of meta-rules, some of which are explicitly stated while others can be deduced. Despite differences in the analysis from that of modern linguistics, Pāṇini's work has been found valuable and

23736-514: The literary works. The Indian tradition, states Winternitz , has favored the learning and the usage of multiple languages from the ancient times. Sanskrit was a spoken language in the educated and the elite classes, but it was also a language that must have been understood in a wider circle of society because the widely popular folk epics and stories such as the Ramayana , the Mahabharata ,

23920-507: The meaning of Vishnu to be the 'pervading actor'. In the Bhagavad Gita, similarly, ' Krishna identified himself both with Vāsudeva , Vishnu and their meanings'. The ideas at the centre of Vedic rituals in Shatapatha Brahmana and the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita revolve around this absolute Person, the primordial genderless absolute, which is the same as the goal of Pancaratra Agama and Tantra. The Bhagavad Gita manuscript

24104-545: The message of the Gita, Vivekananda sought to energise the people of India to reclaim their dormant but strong identity. Aurobindo (1872–1950) saw the Bhagavad Gita as a "scripture of the future religion" and suggested that Hinduism had acquired a much wider relevance through the Gita. [23] He who in this way knows the Spirit And material nature, along with the qualities [guna], In whatever stage of transmigration he may exist, Is not born again. [24] Some perceive

24288-509: The methods and nature of liberation. As various principles are debated in the text using logical reasoning, it is known as the tarka-prasthana ( tarkaprasthāna ), text of reason. Vedanta Bhashyas extract and elaborate metaphysics, epistemology, or philosophy from the Prasthanatrayi. Bhashyas should, by convention, also follow the Sanskrit grammar rules established by Panini ( Pāṇini ) in the Ashtadhyayi ( Aṣṭādhyāyī ). To remain coherent,

24472-511: The modern age include the Samaveda , Yajurveda , Atharvaveda , along with the embedded and layered Vedic texts such as the Brahmanas , Aranyakas , and the early Upanishads . These Vedic documents reflect the dialects of Sanskrit found in the various parts of the northwestern, northern, and eastern Indian subcontinent. According to Michael Witzel, Vedic Sanskrit was a spoken language of

24656-429: The more advanced Classical Sanskrit. Rituals and the rites-of-passage ceremonies have been and continue to be the other occasions where a wide spectrum of people hear Sanskrit, and occasionally join in to speak some Sanskrit words such as namah . Classical Sanskrit is the standard register as laid out in the grammar of Pāṇini , around the fourth century BCE. Its position in the cultures of Greater India

24840-401: The most advanced analysis of linguistics until the twentieth century. Pāṇini's comprehensive and scientific theory of grammar is conventionally taken to mark the start of Classical Sanskrit. His systematic treatise inspired and made Sanskrit the preeminent Indian language of learning and literature for two millennia. It is unclear whether Pāṇini himself wrote his treatise or he orally created

25024-602: The most archaic poems of the Iranian and Greek language families, the Gathas of old Avestan and Iliad of Homer . As the Rigveda was orally transmitted by methods of memorisation of exceptional complexity, rigour and fidelity, as a single text without variant readings, its preserved archaic syntax and morphology are of vital importance in the reconstruction of the common ancestor language Proto-Indo-European . Sanskrit does not have an attested native script: from around

25208-628: The most prominent sacred text and is a central text in Vedanta and the Vaishnava Hindu tradition. While traditionally attributed to the sage Veda Vyasa , the Gita is probably a composite work composed by multiple authors. It is set in a narrative framework of dialogue between the Pandava prince Arjuna and his charioteer guide Krishna , an avatar of Vishnu , at the onset of the Kurukshetra War , incorporating teachings from

25392-441: The now dormant Sharada script . Variant manuscripts of the Gita have been found on the Indian subcontinent Unlike the enormous variations in the remaining sections of the surviving Mahabharata manuscripts, the Gita manuscripts show only minor variations. According to Gambhirananda, the old manuscripts may have had 745 verses, though he agrees that “700 verses is the generally accepted historic standard." Gambhirananda's view

25576-545: The numbers are thought to signify a wish to be aligned with the prestige of the language. Sanskrit has been taught in traditional gurukulas since ancient times; it is widely taught today at the secondary school level. The oldest Sanskrit college is the Benares Sanskrit College founded in 1791 during East India Company rule . Sanskrit continues to be widely used as a ceremonial and ritual language in Hindu and Buddhist hymns and chants . In Sanskrit,

25760-472: The only means. Ramanuja ( Rāmānuja ) was the founder of the Vishishtadvaita ( Viśiṣṭādvaita ) Darshan (11th to 12th century), also known as qualified non-dualism. The Vishishtadvaita Darshan posits three metaphysical entities: jiva (jiva, the self), prakriti or jagat ( prakṛti , jagat, the insentient, primordial matter), and Brahman. The 11th century theologian Nimbarka ( Nimbārka ) established

25944-466: The ontological distinction of Brahman and Parabrahman , an exposition of what constitutes spiritual knowledge (brahmavidya), and the means to liberation through identifying with Brahman and exclusive devotion to Parabrahman are extensively established through the commentary, using classical hermeneutical moves. This comprehensive commentary on the Prasthanatrayi spans 5 volumes and over 2,000 pages: The philosophy taught by Swaminarayan and expounded upon in

26128-403: The oral transmission of the texts is reliable: they are ceremonial literature, where the exact phonetic expression and its preservation were a part of the historic tradition. However some scholars have suggested that the original Ṛg-veda differed in some fundamental ways in phonology compared to the sole surviving version available to us. In particular that retroflex consonants did not exist as

26312-431: The other." Reinöhl further states that there is a symmetric relationship between Dravidian languages like Kannada or Tamil, with Indo-Aryan languages like Bengali or Hindi, whereas the same relationship is not found for non-Indo-Aryan languages, for example, Persian or English: A sentence in a Dravidian language like Tamil or Kannada becomes ordinarily good Bengali or Hindi by substituting Bengali or Hindi equivalents for

26496-444: The path of knowledge ( jnana yoga ), the path of devotion ( bhakti yoga ), the path of action ( karma yoga ), and the path of meditation ( raja yoga ). Medieval commentators argued which path had priority. According to Robinson, modern commentators have interpreted the text as refraining from insisting on one right marga (path) to spirituality. According to Upadhyaya, the Gita states that none of these paths to spiritual realization

26680-414: The possible influence of Dravidian on Sanskrit is only one of many items of syntactic assimilation, not least among them the large repertoire of morphological modality and aspect that, once one knows to look for it, can be found everywhere in classical and postclassical Sanskrit". The main influence of Dravidian on Sanskrit is found to have been concentrated in the timespan between the late Vedic period and

26864-439: The previous 1,500 years when "great experiments in moral and aesthetic imagination" marked the Indian scholarship using Classical Sanskrit, states Pollock. Scholars maintain that the Sanskrit language did not die, but rather only declined. Jurgen Hanneder disagrees with Pollock, finding his arguments elegant but "often arbitrary". According to Hanneder, a decline or regional absence of creative and innovative literature constitutes

27048-464: The principles taught by Swaminarayan as perceived by the BAPS. Acharyas, including Shankara, Ramanuja, Madhva, Nimbarka, and Vallabha, all wrote commentaries on the Prasthanatrayi to establish their own school of thought. Swaminarayan did not author a Sanskrit commentary himself, but he interpreted Hindu texts in discourses found in the Vachanamrut . The Swaminarayan Bhashyam establishes the following:

27232-480: The problems of interpretation and misunderstanding. The purifying structure of the Sanskrit language removes these imperfections. The early Sanskrit grammarian Daṇḍin states, for example, that much in the Prakrit languages is etymologically rooted in Sanskrit, but involves "loss of sounds" and corruptions that result from a "disregard of the grammar". Daṇḍin acknowledged that there are words and confusing structures in Prakrit that thrive independent of Sanskrit. This view

27416-422: The rationale for war, his choices and the right thing to do. The Bhagavad Gita is the compilation of Arjuna's questions and moral dilemma and Krishna's answers and insights that elaborate on a variety of philosophical concepts. The compiled dialogue goes far beyond the "rationale for war"; it touches on many human ethical dilemmas, philosophical issues and life's choices. According to Flood and Martin, although

27600-609: The regional Prakrit languages, which makes it likely that the interaction, the sharing of words and ideas began early in the Indian history. As the Indian thought diversified and challenged earlier beliefs of Hinduism, particularly in the form of Buddhism and Jainism , the Prakrit languages such as Pali in Theravada Buddhism and Ardhamagadhi in Jainism competed with Sanskrit in the ancient times. However, states Paul Dundas , these ancient Prakrit languages had "roughly

27784-497: The relationship between various Indo-European languages, the origin of all these languages may possibly be in what is now Central or Eastern Europe, while the Indo-Iranian group possibly arose in Central Russia. The Iranian and Indo-Aryan branches separated quite early. It is the Indo-Aryan branch that moved into eastern Iran and then south into South Asia in the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE. Once in ancient India,

27968-619: The results, loss or gain. Desires, selfishness, and the craving for fruits can distort one from spiritual living. The Bhagavad Gita is part of the Prasthanatrayi , which also includes the Upanishads and the Brahma sutras , the foundational texts of the Vedanta school of Hindu philosophy. The Gita is a revered text in the Vaishnava tradition, mostly through the Vaishnava Vedanta commentaries written on it, though

28152-464: The rise of Buddhism and Jainism in the 5th century BCE, and particularly after the semi-legendary life of Ashoka in the 3rd century BCE. Thus, the first version of the Bhagavad Gita may have been composed in or after the 3rd century BCE. Winthrop Sargeant linguistically categorizes the Bhagavad Gita as Epic-Puranic Sanskrit, a language that succeeds Vedic Sanskrit and precedes classical Sanskrit. The text has occasional pre-classical elements of

28336-562: The role of language, the ontological status of painting word-images through sound, and the need for rules so that it can serve as a means for a community of speakers, separated by geography or time, to share and understand profound ideas from each other. These speculations became particularly important to the Mīmāṃsā and the Nyaya schools of Hindu philosophy, and later to Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism, states Frits Staal —a scholar of Linguistics with

28520-496: The same relationship to Sanskrit as medieval Italian does to Latin". The Indian tradition states that the Buddha and the Mahavira preferred the Prakrit language so that everyone could understand it. However, scholars such as Dundas have questioned this hypothesis. They state that there is no evidence for this and whatever evidence is available suggests that by the start of the common era, hardly anybody other than learned monks had

28704-670: The school of Vedanta. In 2005, after the completion of his Ph.D. in Sanskrit , Bhadreshdas Swami , an ordained monk of the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha , was instructed by Pramukh Swami Maharaj to author Sanskrit commentaries on the Prasthanatrayi. The commentary was completed and presented to Pramukh Swami Maharaj on 17 December 2007 in Ahmedabad during the BAPS Centenary Celebration. Bhadreshdas Swami holds

28888-556: The semi-nomadic Aryans . The Vedic Sanskrit language or a closely related Indo-European variant was recognized beyond ancient India as evidenced by the " Mitanni Treaty" between the ancient Hittite and Mitanni people, carved into a rock, in a region that now includes parts of Syria and Turkey. Parts of this treaty, such as the names of the Mitanni princes and technical terms related to horse training, for reasons not understood, are in early forms of Vedic Sanskrit. The treaty also invokes

29072-450: The six types of criteria: 1) corollary - prasanga ( prasaṅga ) 2) prerequisite - upoddhata ( upoddhāta ) 3) causal dependence - hetutva ( hetutva ) removal of an obstacle to further inquiry - avasara ( avasara ) 5) common end is found in adjacent endings - nirvahakaikya ( nirvāhakaikya ) 6) the adjacent sections are joint with a common factor - karyaikya ( kāryaikya ). In order for a school of thought (or darshan) to be established in Vedanta,

29256-615: The social structures such as the role of the poet and the priests, the patronage economy, the phrasal equations, and some of the poetic metres. While there are similarities, state Jamison and Brereton, there are also differences between Vedic Sanskrit, the Old Avestan, and the Mycenaean Greek literature. For example, unlike the Sanskrit similes in the Ṛg-veda, the Old Avestan Gathas lack simile entirely, and it

29440-527: The tantric and vedic, the Agama and the Gita share the same Vāsudeva-Krishna roots. Some of the ideas in the Bhagavad Gita connect it to the Shatapatha Brahmana of Yajurveda . The Shatapatha Brahmana , for example, mentions the absolute Purusha who dwells in every human being. According to Hudson, a story in this Vedic text highlights the meaning of the name Vāsudeva as the 'shining one (deva) who dwells (Vasu) in all things and in whom all things dwell', and

29624-521: The tension between the Brahmanical worldorder with its caste-based social institutions that hold society together, and the search for salvation by ascetics who have left society. Knowledge is indeed better than practice; Meditation is superior to knowledge; Renunciation of the fruit of action is better than meditation; Peace immediately follows renunciation. Bhagavad Gita, chapter XII, verse 12 According to Gavin Flood and Charles Martin,

29808-668: The text itself is also celebrated in the Puranas, for example, the Gita Mahatmya of the Varaha Purana . While Upanishads focus more on knowledge and the identity of the self with Brahman, the Bhagavad Gita shifts the emphasis towards devotion and the worship of a personal deity, specifically Krishna. There are alternate versions of the Bhagavad Gita (such as the one found in Kashmir), but the basic message behind these texts

29992-410: The time of the flood. Bhadreshdas Swami was able to complete the task and presented the bhashyas to Pramukh Swami Maharaj on 17 December 2007 in Ahmedabad. Biographies indicate Swaminarayan studied and attained mastery in Hindu texts at a young age. In his teachings recorded in the Vachanamrut and other texts, Swaminarayan discussed Vedanta texts (such as the Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita) and established

30176-485: The title in the introductory verses of the Brahmasutra commentary: Svāminārāyaṇeha siddhānto yaḥ prakāśitaḥ | Tasyaiva sarvathā samyagiānusaraṇam yataḥ || Yasmācca divyamantro’yaṃ Svāminārāyaṇeti yaḥ | Bravīti brahmavidyāsthau hyakṣarapuruṣottamau || Tasmāddhi saṃjñitaṃ bhāṣyaṃ svāminārāyaṇā’’khyayā | Prasīdatu sadā sākṣātsvāminārāyaṇo hariḥ || “The commentary has been titled Swaminarayan because it

30360-411: The topic of BG chapter 6, the Bhagavad Gita introduces "the famous three kinds of yoga, 'knowledge' ( jnana ), 'action' ( karma ), and 'love' ( bhakti ). BG XIII verse 23-25 famously mentions four kinds of yoga, or ways of seeing the self, adding meditation to the three yogas. Yet, the practice of dhyana (meditation), is a part of all three classical paths in Hinduism. Knowledge or insight, discerning

30544-414: The true self ( purusha ) from matter and material desires ( prakriti ), is the true aim of classical yoga , in which meditation and insight cannot be separated. Furthermore, the Gita "rejects the Buddhist and Jain path of non-action, emphasizing instead renunciation of the fruits of action" and devotion to Krishna. The systematic presentation of Hindu monotheism as divided into these four paths or "Yogas"

30728-653: The turn of the 1st-millennium CE, it has been written in various Brahmic scripts , and in the modern era most commonly in Devanagari . Sanskrit's status, function, and place in India's cultural heritage are recognized by its inclusion in the Constitution of India 's Eighth Schedule languages . However, despite attempts at revival, there are no first-language speakers of Sanskrit in India. In each of India's recent decennial censuses, several thousand citizens have reported Sanskrit to be their mother tongue, but

30912-792: The two special characteristics of the Gita." Similarly, Cornille states that the Gita asserts that the path of Bhakti (devotion) is the foremost and the easiest of them all. According to Huston Smith , a notable neo-Vedantin , referring to BG XIII verse 23–25, the Gita mentions four ways to see the self, based on the Samkhya-premise that people are born with different temperaments and tendencies ( guṇa ). Some individuals are more reflective and intellectual, some are effective and engaged by their emotions, some are action-driven, yet others favour experimentation and exploring what works. According to Smith, BG XIII verse 24-25 lists four different spiritual paths for each personality type respectively:

31096-552: The two. Numerous classical and modern thinkers have written commentaries on the Gita with differing views on its essence and essentials, including on the relation between the individual self ( jivatman ) and God (Krishna) or the supreme self (Atman/ Brahman ). The Gita famously mentions, in chapter XIII verse 24–25, the four ways to see the self, interpreted as four yogas, namely through meditation ( raja yoga ), insight/intuition ( jnana yoga ), work/right action ( karma yoga ) and devotion/love ( bhakti yoga ), an influential division that

31280-408: The variants in the usage of Sanskrit in different regions of India. The ten Vedic scholars he quotes are Āpiśali, Kaśyapa , Gārgya, Gālava, Cakravarmaṇa, Bhāradvāja , Śākaṭāyana, Śākalya, Senaka and Sphoṭāyana. In the Aṣṭādhyāyī , language is observed in a manner that has no parallel among Greek or Latin grammarians. Pāṇini's grammar, according to Renou and Filliozat, is a classic that defines

31464-564: The vernacular Prakrits. Many Sanskrit dramas indicate that the language coexisted with the vernacular Prakrits. The cities of Varanasi , Paithan , Pune and Kanchipuram were centers of classical Sanskrit learning and public debates until the arrival of the colonial era. According to Lamotte , Sanskrit became the dominant literary and inscriptional language because of its precision in communication. It was, states Lamotte, an ideal instrument for presenting ideas, and as knowledge in Sanskrit multiplied, so did its spread and influence. Sanskrit

31648-510: The world) are dependent. Madhva authored four commentaries on the Brahmasutras, two commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita, and ten commentaries on the Upanishads. Bhakti based on the knowledge of the philosophy is the pathway for liberation, according to him. This darshan, like others which precede it, refutes and criticizes Shankara's Advaita philosophy. Vallabha ’s philosophy, the Shuddhadvaita ( Śuddhādvaita ) Darshan, or pure non-dualism,

31832-551: The world, after 1885 and given H. P. Blavatsky, Subba Rao and Anne Besant writings. Their attempt was to present their "universalist religion." These late 19th-century theosophical writings called the Gita a "path of true spirituality" and "teaching nothing more than the basis of every system of philosophy and scientific endeavour", triumphing over other "Samkhya paths" of Hinduism that "have degenerated into superstition and demoralized India by leading people away from practical action". Neo-Hindus and Hindu nationalists have celebrated

32016-502: The Ṛg-veda is distinctly more archaic than other Vedic texts, and in many respects, the Rigvedic language is notably more similar to those found in the archaic texts of Old Avestan Zoroastrian Gathas and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey . According to Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton – Indologists known for their translation of the Ṛg-veda – the Vedic Sanskrit literature "clearly inherited" from Indo-Iranian and Indo-European times

32200-408: Was a spoken language ( bhasha ) used by the cultured and educated. Some sutras expound upon the variant forms of spoken Sanskrit versus written Sanskrit. Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang mentioned in his memoir that official philosophical debates in India were held in Sanskrit, not in the vernacular language of that region. According to Sanskrit linguist professor Madhav Deshpande, Sanskrit

32384-427: Was a spoken language in a colloquial form by the mid-1st millennium BCE which coexisted with a more formal, grammatically correct form of literary Sanskrit. This, states Deshpande, is true for modern languages where colloquial incorrect approximations and dialects of a language are spoken and understood, along with more "refined, sophisticated and grammatically accurate" forms of the same language being found in

32568-472: Was adopted voluntarily as a vehicle of high culture, arts, and profound ideas. Pollock disagrees with Lamotte, but concurs that Sanskrit's influence grew into what he terms a "Sanskrit Cosmopolis" over a region that included all of South Asia and much of southeast Asia. The Sanskrit language cosmopolis thrived beyond India between 300 and 1300 CE. Today, it is believed that Kashmiri is the closest language to Sanskrit. Reinöhl mentions that not only have

32752-738: Was also the language of some of the oldest surviving, authoritative and much followed philosophical works of Jainism such as the Tattvartha Sutra by Umaswati . The Sanskrit language has been one of the major means for the transmission of knowledge and ideas in Asian history. Indian texts in Sanskrit were already in China by 402 CE, carried by the influential Buddhist pilgrim Faxian who translated them into Chinese by 418 CE. Xuanzang , another Chinese Buddhist pilgrim, learnt Sanskrit in India and carried 657 Sanskrit texts to China in

32936-611: Was established around the 15th or 16th century. He wrote a commentary on the Brahmasutras, titled the Anubhashya ( Aṇubhāṣya ), and the Bhagavata Purana ( Bhāgavata Purāṇa ), titled the Subodhini ( Subodhinī ). Vallabha, like Shankara, posited the existence of a single entity, Brahman, yet he maintained that the world and the selves are real in being parts of Brahman. Vallabha defines maya as a power of Brahman. Liberation

33120-419: Was initiated as a swami by Pramukh Swami Maharaj in 1981. As Shaddarshan Acharya ( Śaḍdarśanācārya ) he holds the equivalent of a master's degree in each of the six classical schools of Hindu philosophy: Sankhya ( Sāṅkhya ), Yoga ( Yoga ), Nyaya ( Nyāya ), Vaisheshika ( Vaiśeṣika ), Mimamsa ( Mīmāṃsā ), and Vedanta ( Vedānta ), a Master's in neo-classical Indian logic (Navya Nyaya Acharya, Navyanyāyācārya ), and

33304-406: Was inserted into the epic at a later date. The earliest "surviving" components therefore are believed to be no older than the earliest "external" references we have to the Mahabharata epic. The Mahabharata – the world's longest poem – is itself a text that was likely written and compiled over several hundred years, one dated between "400 BCE or little earlier, and 2nd century CE, though some claim

33488-469: Was likely a deliberate declaration to prevent further insertions and changes to the Gita. Since Shankara's time, "700 verses" has been the standard benchmark for the critical edition of the Bhagavad Gita. The Bhagavad Gita is a poem written in the Sanskrit language. Its 700 verses are structured into several ancient Indian poetic meters , with the principal being the shloka ( Anushtubh chanda ). It has 18 chapters in total. Each shloka consists of

33672-417: Was popularized by Swami Vivekananda in the 1890s. The Gita in the title of the Bhagavad Gita means "song". Religious leaders and scholars interpret the word Bhagavad in several ways. Accordingly, the title has been interpreted as, "the song of God"; "the word of God" by the theistic schools, "the words of the Lord", "the Divine Song", and "Celestial Song" by others. In India, its Sanskrit name

33856-442: Was visualized as "pervading all creation", another representation of the world itself; the "mysterious magnum" of Hindu thought. The search for perfection in thought and the goal of liberation were among the dimensions of sacred sound, and the common thread that wove all ideas and inspirations together became the quest for what the ancient Indians believed to be a perfect language, the "phonocentric episteme" of Sanskrit. Sanskrit as

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