Sanskrit

“ Sanskrit certainly forms the only sound foundation of Comparative Philology, and it will always remain the only safe guide through all its intricacies. A comparative philologist without a knowledge of Sanskrit is like an astronomer without a knowledge of mathematics. He may admire, he may observe, he may discover, but he will never feel satisfied, he will never feel certain, he will never feel quite at home. ”

“ A striking peculiarity of Sanskrit poetry is its extensive use in treating of those subjects apparently the most difficult to reduce to a metrical form—not only the Vedas and Manu's code are composed in verse, but the sciences are expressed in this form. Even in the few works which may be called prose, the style is so modulated and bears so great a resemblance to the language of poetry as scarcely to be distinguished from it. The history of Sanskrit poetry is, in reality, the history of Sanskrit literature. ”

“ If one listens to the discourse of those who have been much inclined to study the savant language of the Indians, Sanskrit, he will be persuaded that it is the most perfect language that man has ever spoken. Nothing, according to them, can surpass its riches, its fertility, its admirable structure; it is the source of the most poetic conceptions and the mother of all the dialects which are in use from the Persian Gulf to the waters of China. ”

“ Such was that chaos of thought into which the discovery of Sanskrit suddenly threw its great light. Well does one of the foremost modern philologists say that this "was the electric spark which caused the floating elements to crystallize into regular forms." Among the first to bring the knowledge of Sanskrit to Europe were the Jesuit missionaries, whose services to the material basis of the science of comparative philology had already been so great, and the importance of the new discovery was soon seen among all scholars, whether orthodox or scientific. ”

“ The style, too, excepting the two old epics, is in Sanskrit poetry made more artificial by the frequent use of long compounds, as well as by the application of the elaborate rules of poetics, while the language is regulated by the grammar of Pāṇini. Thus classical Sanskrit literature, teeming as it does with fantastic and exaggerated ideas, while bound by the strictest rules of form, is like a tropical garden full of luxuriant and rank growth, in which, however, many a fair flower of true poetry may be culled. ”

“ It is true, no doubt, that in their first enthusiasm the students of Sanskrit had uttered many exaggerated opinions. Sanskrit was represented as the mother of all languages, instead of being the elder sister of the Aryan family. The beginning of all language, of all thought, of all religion was traced back to India, and when Greek scholars were told that Zeus existed in the Veda under the name of Dyaus, there was a great flutter in the dovecots of classical scholarship. ”

“ For that purpose a study of Chinese and the Turanian dialects, a study even of the jargons of the savages of Africa, Polynesia, and Melanesia is far more instructive than the most minute analysis of Sanskrit and Hebrew. The impression which a study of Greek and Latin and Sanskrit leaves on our minds is, that language is a work of art, most complicated, most wonderful, most perfect. We have given so many names to its outward features, its genders and cases, its tenses and moods, its participles, gerunds, and supines, that at last we are frightened at our own devices. ”

“ Thus in the course of a century the whole range of Sanskrit literature, which in quantity exceeds that of Greece and Rome put together, has been explored. The great bulk of it has been edited, and most of its valuable productions have been translated, by competent hands. There has long been at the service of scholars a Sanskrit dictionary, larger and more scientific than any either of the classical languages yet possesses. ”

“ Whenever I receive a letter from a learned man in India, it is written in Sanskrit. Whenever there is a controversy on questions of law and religion, the pamphlets published in India are written in Sanskrit. There are journals written in Sanskrit which must entirely depend for their support on readers who prefer that classical language to the vulgar dialects. There is The Pandit, published at Benares, containing not only editions of ancient texts, but treatises on modern subjects, reviews of books published in England, and controversial articles, all in Sanskrit. ”

“ The Sanskrit period, embracing in general secular subjects, achieved distinction in many branches of literature, in national as well as court epic, in lyric and especially didactic poetry, in the drama, in fairy tales, fables, and romances. Everywhere we find much true poetry, the beauty of which is, however, marred by obscurity of style and the ever-increasing taint of artificiality. But this period produced few works which, regarded as a whole, are dominated by a sense of harmony and proportion. Such considerations have had little influence on the æsthetic notions of India. ”

“ The most perfect of all tongues, the Sanskrit, has been the parent of many others, and now that her lustre has faded, and her children fallen into a condition of sloth and superstition, let us, at least, do her historic justice. ”

“ Nor is that all; for even that Proto-Aryan language, as it has been reconstructed from the ruins scattered about in India, Greece, Italy, and Germany, is clearly the result of a long, long process of thought. One shrinks from chronological limitations when looking into such distant periods of life. But if we find Sanskrit as a perfect literary language, totally different from Greek and Latin, 1500 b.c., where can those streams of Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin meet, as we trace them back to their common source? ”

“ We can trace the most modern forms of language back to Sanskrit, or rather to that postulated linguistic stratum of which Sanskrit formed the most prominent representative, just as we can trace the French Dieu back to Latin Deus and Sanskrit Devas, the brilliant beings behind the phenomena of nature; and again behind them, Dyaus, the brilliant sky, the Greek Zeus, the Roman Iovis and Iuppiter, [198] the most natural of all the Aryan gods of nature. This is real evolution, a real causal nexus between the present and the past. ”

“ The study of Sanskrit literature deserves far more attention than it has yet received in this country. For in that ancient heritage the languages, the religious and intellectual life and thought, in short, the whole civilisation of the Hindus, who form the vast majority of the inhabitants of our Indian Empire, have their roots. Among all the ancient literatures, that of India is, moreover, undoubtedly in intrinsic value and æsthetic merit second only to that of Greece. ”

“ Sanskrit, though an artificial literary language ceased, at one time, to be a purely hieratic speech, and having become the vehicle of thought of all men, dealing with different branches of knowledge, it exercised such an influence in the country, that the living speeches which succeeded Pali, could not become respectable enough to leave literary monuments for us; (3) To ensure intelligibility in all provinces of India, the Prākṛta books (very limited in number) , were composed in such an unreal generalized form, as does not help us to reconstruct the living speeches of old days. ”

“ It would lead me too far, were I to enter into the heart of the question which of the three idioms, Sanskrit, Pâli, and the so-called Gâthâ dialect, was the oldest scriptural language of the Buddhists, and I will therefore confine myself to a few remarks. In the first place it will be granted that the same person cannot have uttered any speech or stanza in two languages at the same time, and, further, that he is not likely to have spoken Sanskrit, when expressing himself in prose, and to have had recourse to a mere dialect, when speaking in poetry. ”

“ That the language employed for literary purposes in India during all this time was Sanskrit, we learn, not only from the numerous names and religious and philosophical terms mentioned in the travels of the Chinese pilgrims, but from a short paradigm of declension and conjugation in Sanskrit which one of them (Hiouen-thsang) has inserted in his diary.
As soon as the Muhammedans entered India, we hear of translations of Sanskrit works into Persian and Arabic.140 Harun-al-Rashid (786-809) had two Indians, Manka and Saleh, at his court as physicians. ”

“ No doubt the old Pāli of Buddha's days was being transformed into new and newer dialects, but the old-time Pāli failed to become a living heritage with the speakers of the newly-transformed speeches. In that the literary Sanskrit in its broader and more catholic character was being enriched every day by the composition of interesting and entertaining secular literature of various genre, the influence of Sanskrit became more potent and abiding, upon the laymen of letters all throughout the country. ”

“ The Sanskrit tongue itself, as the learned or court language, is spoken by gods, Brahmans, heroes, kings, and men of good birth and position in general. Women and the lower classes of men speak various dialects of the Prākrit language, the old vernacular tongue of India. ”

“ One need not suppose that the common and every-day language of the god Brahma and the Buddha was Pâli or Prâkrit, in order to call it an absurdity that those persons would have spoken prose in Sanskrit and poetry in the Gâthâ dialect, such as we find in some passages already quoted and in many others. Nor is it absurd, even if we do not believe that Pâli is the original language of scripture, to contend that the Sanskrit text of the canonical works is at any rate a translation from some dialect. ”

“ In studying psychology anyone who is acquainted with the Sanskrit tongue must know how valuable that language is for precise and scientific dealing with the subject. The Sanskrit, or the well-made, the constructed, the built-together, tongue, is one that lends itself better than any other to the elucidation of psychological difficulties. ”

“ A scholar who studies Sanskrit in Germany is supposed to be initiated in the deep and dark mysteries of ancient wisdom, and a man who has travelled in India, even if he has only discovered Calcutta, or Bombay, or Madras, is listened to like another Marco Polo. In England a student of Sanskrit is generally considered a bore, and an old Indian civil servant, if he begins to describe the marvels of Elephanta or the Towers of Silence, runs the risk of producing a count-out. ”

“ Although Sanskrit is no longer spoken by the great mass of the people, there are few large towns in which we do not meet with some more or less learned natives—the pandits, or, as they used to be called, pundits—men who have passed through a regular apprenticeship in Sanskrit grammar, and who generally devote themselves to the study of some special branch of Sanskrit literature, whether law, or logic, or rhetoric, or astronomy, or anything else. ”

“ No word in Latin, Greek, in the Celtic, Teutonic, Slavic, or other European tongues is derived from a Sanskrit word, although the two may seem identical. Both are derived alike from an elder word or root. The supreme importance of Sanskrit in the study of language is in the fact that it is the oldest, very much the oldest, of all the existing Aryan languages, and that it has been preserved for thousands of years with a minute accuracy and a religious devotion. ”

“ This agrees with the distribution of the dialects in the Indian drama, a distribution doubtless based on a tradition much older than the plays themselves. Here the king and those of superior rank speak Sanskrit, while the various forms of the popular dialect are assigned to women and to men of the people. The dramas also show that whoever did not speak Sanskrit at any rate understood it, for Sanskrit is there employed in conversation with speakers of Prākrit. ”

“ It is impossible even for the Sanskrit scholar who has not lived in India to appreciate fully the merits of this later poetry, much more so for those who can only become acquainted with it in translations. For, in the first place, the metres, artificial and elaborate though they are, have a beauty of their own which cannot be reproduced in other languages. ”

“ Similarly in Buddhist inscriptions pure Prākrit is relieved by the mixed dialect, the latter by Sanskrit. Thus in the inscriptions of Nāsik, in Western India, the mixed dialect extends into the third, while Sanskrit first begins in the second century A.D. From the sixth century onwards Sanskrit prevails exclusively (except among the Jains) in inscriptions, though Prākritisms often occur in them. Even in the literature of Buddhism the mixed dialect was gradually supplanted by Sanskrit. ”

“ There was indeed a time when people began to imagine that all that was worth knowing about Indian literature was known, and that the only ground on which Sanskrit could claim a place among the recognized branches of learning in a university was its usefulness for the study of the Science of Language. ”

“ There was, in fact, even in the earlier Vedic age, a caste language, such as is to be found more or less wherever a literature has grown up; but in India it has been more strongly marked than in any other country. If, however, Vedic was no longer a natural tongue, but was already the scholastic dialect of a class, how much truer is this of the language of the later literature! Sanskrit differs from Vedic, but not in conformity with the natural development which appears in living languages. The phonetic condition of Sanskrit remains almost exactly the same as that of the earliest Vedic. ”