Posted on 07/14/2012 7:48:30 PM PDT by James C. Bennett
You may know more Sanskrit than you realize.
In fact, the word know comes from the same Indo-European root for the Sanskrit jnana. A Greek form of the root inflected by Latin gives us the English term gnostic, referring to knowledge of spiritual mysteries. You, faithful reader, know what agnostic means.
Have you ever watched or created a video? Again, an IE root is the source of the term. Some scholars think the Sanskrit vidya, another word for knowledge, arose from a lexeme for seeing. With the twists and turns of consonants and vowels as language developed, we have an astounding number of English words, from advice and evidence to wit and wizard.
Its opposite, avidya, in a spiritual context, is not seeing the unity of our individual selves with the cosmic reality.
Yoga is a term so familiar we no longer italicize it. It means union with God or the practice that makes that union achievable. The English word most closely related is yoke, but other transformations have given us join, junction, conjugal, subjugation and zygote.
Sutra is another familiar term, used for some Hindu, Jain and Buddhist sacred texts, such as the Brahma Sutra and the Heart Sutra. In Sanskrit sutra means thread, as in a thread of thought. The English word derived from the IE source is sew.
I was surprised to find my favorite Sanskrit term in the 2001 “New Oxford American Dictionary,” though I doubt its technically fair definition is very intelligible — shunyata: “the doctrine that phenomena are devoid of an immutable or determinate intrinsic nature.”
This nontheistic Buddhist teaching is a simple but profound insight that everything depends on everything else. In our time of partisanship, academic specialization and widening gaps in our social order, I wish this Sanskrit term were better known.
(Excerpt) Read more at kansascity.com ...
well, don’t forget that Sanskrit “the refined language” was codified by Panini in the 6th century BC, but Vedic Sanskrit is older. Perhaps Vedic Sanskrit and Avestani Persian are the original Indo-European?
I must confess to being very impressed that Freepers know so much about Sanskrit, of all things!
I have no doubt that there must be someone or other on this web site who reads Babylonian, Medieval Chinese, and/or speaks fluent Basque...
Thanks!
indian gods in mecca
I give the edge to the Jains for rugged individualism.
Just talking about ‘em makes me want to dump milk all over statues for some reason.
Great, now I’m hungry.
It is conceivable that Jains and adherents to other Indian religions may have thought of far distant CARNAC (filled to the brim with megaliths) as an object of religious veneration.
There are not enough cows for Carnac's stones!
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