Yes, it was disappointing to me to learn at some point that you can't actually read much of the great classical and vedic compositions without assistance of a commentary. Although the commentaries themselves are fairly exact.
It reminds me a lot of Greek drama, except there even if the grammar is funky, you can usually deduce how the language is being stretched and why, even if its very difficult and technical. In Sanskrit that isn't always an option, you just have to know from context why and how certain words are being used after having already studied the language for decades.
Sure you can. The parts of Veda I’ve learned were in the traditional with rigour in recitation but no attempt at understanding the meaning. But because I went on to study vyakarana and Kayvas etc. where meaning is emphasized I can understand most of the mantras without the commentaries.
But a good commentary does help and more importantly it is the accepted academic style just as footnotes, APA formatting etc. are Western academic conventions.
You always have to know context because language can always be stretched. People write poetry in Perl for goodness sake!
Interestingly Rigveda is comparatively easy to understand compared to the newer texts.
Perhaps because it’s written in more flowery, loose Sanskrit with words and idioms made up when the situation called for it.
Compared to that everything newer is a bit weird to interpret because some random phrase would be taken from some other contemporary text, the reader is assumed to understand and appreciate the cryptic reference.
Funnily enough this reminds me of Rick and Morty/South Park kind of media nowadays, where the inner joke is usually a pop culture reference.
> Interestingly Rigveda is comparatively easy to understand compared to the newer texts.
I've found this to be the case also, despite the free-wheeling and less regular grammatical style - because the Rigvedic hymns usually have pretty concrete subject matter - like getting motivated to steal (or perhaps "free") some cows held by an adversary.
Of course any number of other more abstract or esoteric interpretations can be read into the hymns, but I prefer the simpler and more earthly interpretation.
>Although the commentaries themselves are fairly exact.
Now the problem is that these descriptions are colored by the philosophy and opinion of the person writing it, often heavily because of the lack of cross pollination of ideas.
For example, the ISKCON descriptions of the verses of Gita are often completely orthogonal to the main philosophy of Gita, but the interpretation is technically as valid as the literal interpretation.
>Now the problem is that these descriptions are colored by the philosophy and opinion of the person writing it, often heavily because of the lack of cross pollination of ideas.
Yes but you can always read multiple commentaries, and its usually good to be critical of whichever one you are looking at.
>For example, the ISKCON descriptions of the verses of Gita are often completely orthogonal to the main philosophy of Gita, but the interpretation is technically as valid as the literal interpretation.
Yea, my first Sanskrit teacher was not ISKCON but ISKCON-adjacent, a very well-meaning guy, but I think recently we're beginning to break because I'm rejecting his interpretations of the Gita and the Sankhya philosophy. I've never read the ISKCON materials directly but I get the feeling that they emphasize a kind of personal monasticism and asceticism, which seems not exactly antithetical to what the Gita propounds, but is certainly a very restricted reading.
> I get the feeling that they emphasize a kind of personal monasticism and asceticism, which seems not exactly antithetical to what the Gita propounds, but is certainly a very restricted reading.
Their interpretation is heavily filtered through the 15th century devotional movement of Chaitanya, himself a member of the devotional/dualist lineage started by Madhvacharya. Their beliefs stem from the medieval sectarian Puranic literature, and have the goals of moralization and idealization of Indian rural, pastoral, doctrinally vegetarian lifestyles, which is a perspective very far removed from the martial culture that produced the Mahabharata. Hence the strained interpretation they use.
I'd also argue that there is nothing particularly monastic or ascetic about the Gita, which propounds that conquest and the fruits thereof are not only acceptable, but are expected as a matter of the prince's duty.
Perhaps this was intentional, or supported by having teachers and a stronger oral history/tradition? Just as with Buddhism, I always felt there wasn't as much of a clear divide between philosophy and science as you find in western thought. You seem more well versed than I in this topic, so thought I would throw this out there in case you have any insight into this (or I easily could be misinterpreting).
> The claim from the Greek historian is that this is what caused eastern science and engineering to stagnate compared to Greek/Roman efforts.
I am not an historian, but is this really true? Scientists/mathematicians then were philosophers or "natural philosophers" and it seems like most of the famous ones also worked on things like metaphysics.
It’s definitely true that European, Arabic, and Chinese engineering overtook Indians at some point in ancient history.
If I had to put a timestamp on it, it would be the fall of the Maurya empire around 200BC when the Roman War Machine was getting more and more organized and industrialized.
This is one of those topics where we can only dream of where we could currently be, had these traditions been allowed to continue and the knowledge shared.
Being from the western world, with a deep curiosity in eastern thought and practice, these types of thought experiments are very interesting to me, but also depressing when you look closely at the reality of how things played out.
Not true. Unless you learn Sanskrit, you cannot understand that the language can communicate multi[le dimensions of meanings. Ofcourse, it is not needed rudimentary things like physics, chemistry etc.
Ofcourse, Sanskrit can be used like English too. That is like using a super computer as a calculator.
> Even if you try to describe precise and scientific facts in Sanskrit, the nature of the language would enable multiple interpretations of it.
Sanskrit's high polysemy is restricted to a rather bounded set of words (see the नानार्थवर्गः in the अमरकोशः).
Stepping back, this claim and the others you have made in this thread are strange and at odds with my experience reading and speaking and teaching the language, specfically the claims that:
- "Sanskrit semantics is intentionally loosely defined"
- the Rigveda contains "words and idioms made up when the situation called for it" in some way that is different from the ordinary suffixation that is a standard part of Sanskrit grammar;
- the ISKCON interpretation of the Gita is "technically as valid as the literal interpretation" in some manner that is unique to Sanskrit.
I consider these claims extraordinary and request evidence that any of these problems are (a) real and (b) unique to Sanskrit.
> That is amazing if you want to have intellectual debates, but useless if you are trying to follow directions to build ..say.. a bridge.
We have the various Shilpa Shastras [1] as a clear example of this kind of instruction, so I eagerly await a concrete example of what you mean.
Panini codified Sanskrit because he felt the language was evolving too rapidly and knowledge and wisdom might be getting lost in translation.
> the ISKCON interpretation [...] unique to Sanskrit.
I concede that this problem is not unique to Sanskrit. It is unique to classical (and not vedic) Sanskrit literature though. My hypothesis is that it is a natural side effect of codifying a language strictly and trying to prevent change.
Other languages can (and has been) used to produce literature where interpretation is the key to understanding, but for Sanskrit it is the vast majority of the available literature, not a few oddballs here and there.
> We have the various Shilpa Shastras
Do you notice that these are heavily focused on art and crafts?
And the number of these is astonishingly low for a ~7000 year old civilization.
It's not surprising that a spiritual community highly invested in a fixed text can find new interpretations for it, see all of Christiany for illustration or [1] for a specific Christian example. The "kshetre kshetre dharma kuru" example, though, is especially naive -- sure, I guess you can make a new meaning if you totally ignore Sanskrit grammar. The author is clearly quite early on in their study.
> rigvedic sanskrit differs from modern sanskrit in the sense that vedic sanskrit is similar to all other languages
Sure, I agree that Vedic and Classical Sanskrit differ, largely in the same way that Homeric and Attic Greek differ. But this isn't the claim you made -- you said that the Rigveda contains "words and idioms made up when the situation called for it," which I reject.
> Panini codified Sanskrit because he felt the language was evolving too rapidly
Panini's intent is an open question, though your view is a reasonable one. The Ashtadhyayi is more descriptive than people give it credit for: it generally focuses on the भाषा, i.e. the contemporaneous usage of experts (शिष्ट), with a lesser emphasis on Vedic usage, and it further takes extensive notice of regional variation and different preferences among other grammarians of the time. Another possible interpretation is that just as the other parts of the ritual had been fully worked over and polished, it was thought that the language itself should be perfected (संस्कृत).
> for Sanskrit it is the vast majority of the available literature, not a few oddballs here and there.
This is an interesting observation that has other explanations -- see below.
> It is unique to classical (and not vedic) Sanskrit literature though
Again, I see no support for this.
> And the number of these is astonishingly low
Sure, I agree with this. But this isn't the claim you made -- you said that the nature of Sanskrit makes it useless for tasks like describing how to build a bridge, which I reject.
~~~
I'd like to conclude with two thoughts.
First, you are raising interesting questions. Why is it the case that so much of Sanskrit literature is commentary? Why does the number of Shilpa Shastras seem relatively low? Why does Sanskrit literature tend to have a culture of reinterpretation?
Assuming these observations are true, I believe that the answer is some combination of: India's oral memory culture and a concomitant deference to authority and preference for the spoken over the written; consequently, a preference for text forms that can be easily memorized (sutra and verse), which can be harder to parse and change; material constraints on manuscript preservation in the hot and humid Indian climate; strong deference to realized spiritual teachers, and by extension to all teachers; and extensive competition with local languages for intellectual territory.
But that's an armchair answer that needs further investigation. Note that none of these points have anything to do with Sanskrit as a language.
Second, Sanskrit and the tradition are far more exacting and precise than you give them credit for, and I encourage you to look into the matter more deeply before making extremely strong statements about it that have little basis in fact.
I have been reading and teaching Sanskrit for a long time, and in that time I have learned that while Sanskrit is special in many ways, it is still a language that can be used and learned like any other. Even so, I have seen extraordinary claims, both positive and negative, from people confidently asserting what Sanskrit is like without looking deeply into the matter. And while they are well-intentioned, they are -- to use your phrase -- "modern keyboard warriors who have not studied Sanskrit literature."
I have studied Sanskrit literature much more (15+ years with two mentors and on my own) than I have studied Sanskrit formally (3 years in high school). I love Sanskrit literature but not the modern culture of putting Sanskrit on a pedestal.
There is a reason the language has vanished from use and to a large extent not been used for passing on practical knowledge. These are potentially fixable issues, but to fix an issue a community should be able to admit that there exist issues.
This means a sentence can often have many different meaning, not just the literal one suggested by the words.
The idea is you either accept multiple meanings or settle it through debate.
I am not criticizing this, this is fundamentally what makes literature and poetry interesting.
But this makes it really difficult to draw a line between philosophy and science.