Verse from the Bhagavad Gita in Devanāgarī script.
A quick note—I am not fluent in Sanskrit nor am I a professional. However, I am learning from an amazing teacher and hope to pass on some of the things that really inspire me about the language.
To begin, I’ll share some history about the language.
Sanskrit developed in South Asia between 1500 and 1000 BCE, around the time of the Vedas (we’ll get more into those later). We aren’t sure /who/ developed it—some scholars speculate that it was migrant Aryans, and some posit it was an earlier migration. What we do know is that it didn’t emerge from the peoples natively in the region.
It was the language of the upper classes—namely priests (known in Sanskrit as brahmins). As far as we can tell, it was not the language the general people spoke. In 1000 BCE, a priestly class emerged in the Punjab who were responsible for the Vedic fire worship, and we have evidence that they used Sanskrit for these rituals.
During the Vedic period there must have been poetry contests because the quality of poetry produced was so high it has attained the status in India of being sacred.
It was primarily used for rituals and music. But, you see, it wasn’t considered to be a language people created—rather the sound itself was the true reality of all things. The Vedas were thought to be eternal—not created by humans OR by god. Some of you may know “OM”, which is considered to be the sound of creation, the very first sound ever made and the sound of the universe coming into being.
Since sound, when it emerges into the world as something physical, is the vibration of all things. For instance, the sound for tree /is/ the tree. In other words, the object is secondary to the sound of its name.
How they knew that the vibration was what made up objects back then I just can’t fathom! And because a lot of this happened before writing, our knowledge of it is mostly speculative.
Western thought is structural in thinking; something that exists in language exists separate from something else. In the Indian tradition, the Vedas are assumed to be the sounds of creation.
Because of this relation between sound and object, using it for ritual made complete sense—the sounds had a true power to create, or manifest, and were as real, if not more real, than the objects themselves.
The rituals were often trying to create something, like wealth or wellbeing or good crops, something along those lines. So it was often physically-based things they were asking for, so to use the words or sound that actually represented the things they were looking for, or were those things, makes total sense. But we have to remember that this language wasn’t the language the general people spoke, so it was reserved for these special purposes.
In Sanskrit, the sound of the poem and the meaning of the sound are considered to have an ontological status—the sounds themselves are alive. Because of how important the sounds themselves are, the word order was completely free. In other words, there is no sentence structure that must be maintained, as in most other languages. However, people still tend to use subject-object-verb as it makes the meaning of the sentence more clear.
They manipulate the placement of the words so that it sounds better and is to easier to say. So for instance, there’s actually a rule in the grammar that is called sandhi and it basically changes the letters at the ends and/or beginnings of words to match the place of production of the sounds around it.
This is especially true with vowels. For instance, if you have a word that ends with ‘i’, and the following word beings with ‘a’ you’ll pronounce it as ya. The words actually combine to make one word in a lot a cases. So when reading manuscripts it can be really hard to translate if you don’t know these rules because they allow the combination of words endlessly so they sound better, so if you don’t know all these rules and the vocab, translating can be a nightmare as a whole line can be put together to look like one gigantic word, when really it’s a combination of multiple words!
Now, a really interesting part for me when learning this language is that it is part of the same language group as Latin and Greek! It is part of the Indo-European language family, and because of this, many of the words are actually quite similar to English, and some are even the roots of English words.
For example:
Sanskrit – Agni; Latin – Ignis; English – ignition = fire
Sanskrit – vāk / vār; Latin – Vox, vocis; English – voice, vocal
They posit that the languages actually all came from the same place in the Mesopotamia area, so they all have the same roots and history.
It is important to know that Sanskrit wasn’t written until around 300 BCE, but a particularly important work was written some time between 600 and 400 BCE by someone named Pānini. He analyzed the language in such a fantastic way that we still use his work to learn grammar and usage!
Because of the importance of the sounds and the fact that they didn’t actually have writing, all the works in Sanskrit, the Vedas, all of it, were actually all transmitted orally. The brahmins in particular had to memorize them in their entirety and exactly word for word as they are, because the sounds are so important there couldn’t be any change.
The poem below is from a book of poetry that is translated by Andrew Schelling called Bright as an Autumn Moon. These poems were around the times of the Vedas, though of course after them as they were considered the very first. This one was by Kālidāsa:
Absorbed night and day
Śiva makes love
to Pārvatiī
his hunger for pleasure
not slaked.
Like a single night
a hundred aeons
roll past.
In ocean’s deep waters
slow geomorphic flames twist
they too
unabated.
As you can maybe guess, most, if not all, of the poems were written about/to/for the gods. The writing system used is called devanāgarī, and is also used for Hindi and many other South Asian languages.
As a note, I don’t capitalize the word ‘gods’ because it isn’t a proper noun. There are hundreds of them, so I will capitalize their names, but not the general term, not out of disrespect but out of grammar.
Q: Are the gods immune from the wax and wane changes across creation?
No, they are subject to it as we are, as the gods are a product of sound just like us. And because of the immense number of them, basically one for every possible thing, for instance smallpox, then it would be illogical for them to possibly be in control like that.
Q: Many of [the] god[s], Krishna Das says, [are] more of a state of being then a specific person.
Yes, absolutely, though that depends on the tradition you come from. In particular around the medieval period, there was a new type of devotion known as bhakti, and they two schools of thought, one the sarguna the other is nirguna; saraguna believes in gods with attributes, and nirguna believes in gods without attributes.
So for instance, a bhakti poet named Mirabai, was actually a female (many of the bhakti poets were male but they took on female persona’s in their poems because they viewed the relationship to the divine as one between woman and man, mother and child, etc), and she was part of the sarguna class and her poetry and story in general are beautiful because she writes about how she is actually meant to be married to Shiva, and she describes in her poetry their relationship and how she is so devoted to him. The stories of her life say that she was actually taken by Shiva when he thought he that she was going to have to return to her worldly-husband. It’s a long story, but basically he wants her for himself and so he comes through a painting or a sculpture of himself depending on the story and takes her away with him.
Q: Do gods have passions, desires, and suffer consequences of their actions?
Absolutely, and they are often fighting amongst themselves in kind of sibling-esque ways, though of course they also have many romantic get-togethers, like Shiva and Shakti, Rama and Sita, though the latter aren’t necessarily gods…
That leads me to the next part actually…
The major texts that were written in Sanskrit are the Mahabharata which includes the Bhagavad Gita, and the Ramayana, both of which are still central to South Asian life. You don’t have to be a Hindu to know and appreciate these stories. In them, the gods are actually referenced as avatars (which is easier for us to understand as SL-visitors). Avatars are basically vessels for them to enter on earth in order to interact and manipulate the ways things are going. Both of these stories are amazing, so I definitely recommend watching/reading about them. There are countless recreations so many modes of access.
Something I will add is that the language wasn’t ever spoken by the general population, it was never vernacular. However, it was used ongoing in poetry and such, and you could say it still is. We have to be careful coming at it as “westerners” because it has been and continues to be so distorted—and not just by Europeans, but by all the migration that occurred throughout history, and not always in negative ways.
Q: By distorted, you mean materialistic?
Not necessarily, though yes that is part of it. A lot of the translations we have access to were by what are called Indologists and they were mostly from the 18-20th centuries and done by British Raj, and were highly biased and the language and meaning behind it wasn’t well understood, and still isn’t in many ways. But that is aa discussion for a whole other topic.
The last thing I want to note is about the music, and oh my goodness is that amazing. I certainly don’t know enough to give it credit. Sanskrit, as such an important vocal language, actually served as the basis for music. By this I mean that they use the language to count beats, they also use it to teach rhythm. So for instance, drumming uses ‘da dhin dhin da dha’, and there are different aspirations that mark different types of sound on the drums and other instruments.
For instance, one of the aspirated/unaspirated sounds that English speakers have a really hard time hearing the difference between is ‘pa’ and ‘pha’. ‘pa’ is unaspirated in Sanskrit but in the west we say ‘p’ aspirated, so to get it unaspirated is really challenging.
Go ahead and try: put hand in front of your mouth and say pa normally. You should feel air hit your hand. Now trying saying pa without letting the air out. I have a really hard time getting this right!
So when you’re saying words, like “Panini” (lol), it always sounds funny to South Asian speakers. The differences can really change the meaning of a word; same as long vowels and short vowels. A word that has a long vowel can be exactly the same with a short vowel and have a completely different meaning.
That is all for today, but please leave comments and questions below so we can continue the conversation!
May you all be well.
Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu.
May all beings everywhere be happy and free. _/\_
Citta Bhavana 