Sanskrit Research *
THE appearance of this Anglo-Sanskrit Quarterly "devoted to research
work in all fields of Indian Antiquity" is a welcome sign of the recent
development towards a . wider culture, a more flexible and strenuous
scholarship and a more original thinking which promises to lift the Indian mind
out of the rut of second-hand provincialism and sterile repetition of
commonplaces into which the vices of its school and university education had
betrayed it and to equip it for the important contribution we may expect it to
make to the world's increasing stock of knowledge. There has been a
considerable expansion in this country, both in English and the vernaculars, of
that ordinary periodical literature which caters for the popular mind and
supplies it with snippets of knowledge, facile information and ready but not
always very valuable opinions on all sorts of subjects. But there has been
hitherto little or nothing corresponding to those more serious publications
common in every European country which appeal to a more limited audience but
succeed in popularising within those limits a more serious and original
thinking and a more thorough knowledge in each branch of human enquiry.
Attempts have been made but, outside the field of religion and philosophy, they
have usually foundered in their inception for want of adequate support; they
have not found, as they would have found elsewhere, an interested circle of
readers. Now, however, there ought to be a sufficient number of cultivated
minds interested and competent in Sanskrit scholarship and the research into
Indian antiquity to ensure an adequate support and an increasing usefulness
for this new Quarterly.
The second (October) number of the Quarterly is before me
* An Anglo-Sanskrit Quarterly, conducted by the Sanskrit Academy of India,
Bangalore,
and edited by Pundit Lingeca Mahabhagawat.
We regret that this review comes out
very belated as it had to be held over last month
for want of space.
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and its sound editing and the value and interest of its. contents promise well
for its future. There are especially two very solid articles, one by Mr. Tilak
on "A Missing Verse in the Sankhya Karikas," and another by Professor
R.D. Ranade of the Ferguson College headed "Greek and Sanskrit: a
Comparative Study", but there is no article without its interest and value.
I note that in this number all the contributors, with one exception, are either
from Maharashtra or the Madras Presidency. It is to be hoped that the editor
will be able to secure the co-operation of Sanskrit scholars in the north so
that this Review may become an All- India organ of Indian research.
Mr. Tilak's article shows all the thoroughness and acuteness which that great
scholar brings to his work great or small whether he is seeking for the
original home of the Aryans in the cryptic mass of the Rig-veda or restoring
with his rare powers of deduction a lost verse in the Karikas. The point he
seeks to establish, though apparently a small one, has really a considerable
importance. He points out that there is a consensus of authority for the
existence of 70 verses in Ishwarakrishna's Sankhya-Karikas, but, if we
exclude the last three which do not belong to the doctrinal part of the text,
we have both in the Indian text and in the Chinese version only 69; at the same
time he shows that both Gaudapada's Bhashya and the commentary in the Chinese
version contain a passage developing a refutation of four possible subtler
causes of the world, Ishwara, Purusha, Kala and Swabhava (God, the Soul, Time
and Nature) rejected by the Sankhyas, a refutation which logically ought to
be but is not found in the text itself. From the passage in the Bhashya he
seeks to re-establish the sense and even the language of the missing verse. It
seems to me that he has established both the fact of the missing verse and its
substance. But the interesting point is the reason assigned by him for the loss
of the verse; it was, he thinks, no accident, but a deliberate suppression made
at a time when the Sankhya philosophy was being re-explained by thinkers like
Vijnanabhikshu in a Vedantic sense. If so, the point made sheds a very
interesting light on the historic course of philosophical thought in India.
The general line which that development followed arises
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more indirectly from an interesting and carefully reasoned article by Mr. Y.
Subbarao on the question of the originality of Shan- kara's philosophy. Mr.
Subbarao seeks to establish his point that it was no new system of thought
which Shankara created, but only the restatement perhaps in a more developed
form of a very ancient school of Vedantic interpretation. Certainly, it cannot
be supposed that Shankara invented a new philosophy out of his own brain; he
believed himself to be establishing against attack the real sense of the
Vedantic philosophy founded on the original texts of its canon and supported by
the best tradition. Nor does any greater thinker really invent a system
new-born from his own intellect; what he does is to take up the material
available to him in the past history of thought, to choose, select, reject; to
present new light on old ideas, to develop latent suggestions, to bring into
prominence what was before less prominent or not so trenchant and definite, to
give a fresh, striking and illuminating sense to old terms, to combine what was
before not at all or else ill combined; in doing so he creates; his philosophy,
though not new in its materials, is new in the whole effect it produces and the
more powerful light that in certain directions it conveys to the thinking mind.
The question is whether Shankara's system was not new in this sense and, though
the previous material still subsisting is insufficient to decide the question,
it must, I think, be answered provisionally in the affirmative. Adwaitavada undoubtedly existed before, but it was the form Shankara gave it which made it a
clear, well-thought-out and powerfully trenchant philosophy and put his name at
the head of Indian metaphysicians.
Mr. Subbarao admits that it is impossible to establish an exclusive
Adwaitavada, much less the Mayavada, from the Veda, Upanishads, Brahmasutras or
the Gita. It is impossible not because the great thinkers who gave us these
writings thought confusedly or without a clear grasp of principles, but
because theirs was an entirely different method. India began with a synthetic and intuitive manner of thinking based not upon logical distinctions and
verbal oppositions, but upon the facts of spiritual experience and vision. In
such synthetic and intuitive philosophies truths are arranged according to the
place of each
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in the actual fact of things, as different laws and generalisations are
arranged in Science, each positive in its own field and each having its proper
relation to the others. The perfection of this method is to be found in the Upanishads
and the Gita; and that is the reason why all attempts to interpret these great
works by the methods of logical debate and the rigorous exclusions dear to the
analytic metaphysician always fail even in the strongest hands; they raise
questions about the sense of these works which cannot be conclusively solved,
but must necessarily lead to eternal debate, because the method is wrong and
the original work itself never intended to cause or countenance such
discussions. Only a synthetic method of interpretation can explain a synthetic
and intuitive philosophy.
The analytical tendency began with the gradual divisions which ended in the
establishment of the six philosophical schools. Each of them claims to be
justified by the Veda and from its own point of view each is quite in the
right, for the primary data of each are there in the sacred writings. It is
where they press to exclusive conclusions and deny and refute each other that
they can no longer. truly claim Vedic authority. Even the Buddhists could, if
they had chosen, have based themselves on the Veda, for there are passages
which, if taken by themselves, seem to deny the Atman and attribute all to
Karma or to assert the Non- Existent as the source of things. The perfect
resort to the analytical method came later; it was employed with great effect though often rather naively by the Buddhists, but it was Shankara who applied
rigorously the analytical method of the intellectual reason in all its
trenchant clearness and force to metaphysics. Hence the greatness of his
position in the history of Indian thought. From his time forward Indian
metaphysics was bound to the wheels of the analytical and intellectual mind.
Still, it is to be noted that while the philosophers thus split the catholicity
of .the ancient Truth into warring schools, the general Indian mind was always
overpoweringly attracted by the synthetical tendency. The Gita seems to be in
part the expression of such a synthetic reaction, the Puranas show constantly
the same tendency and even into the philosophical schools it made its entry.
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Prof. Ranade's article on Greek and Sanskrit carries us into another field,
that of Comparative Philology. His object is in a brief scope to establish the
identical origin of Greek and Sanskrit in that which is most essential in the
growth of a language, its grammatical forms and syntactical peculiarities. He
has had to allow himself only a very small space for so large and important a
subject, but within these narrow limits he has done his work with great
thoroughness and, subject to a few minor reservations, with a minute accuracy.
It is to be regretted that by printing the Greek words in their proper
character instead of in Roman type Mr. Ranade has made this interesting essay
unintelligible to all but a very few Indian readers. He lays down the principle
that the words of each language should be printed in its own type and that
anyone who wishes to study Comparative Philology must take the trouble to
familiarise himself with the original alphabets. This is a counsel of
perfection which is not practicable in India, nor indeed on any large scale in
Europe either. If for instance a scholar were dealing with the philology of the
Aryan languages and had to cite largely verbal forms both from the European
tongues and from Sanskrit and its Indian descendants he would be compelled on
this principle to require at least nine different types from the Press to which
he entrusted his work. No Press would be able to meet the demand and very few
even of his learned readers but would be baftled by the variety. Mr. Ranade
himself gives us German words and a German sentence, but not in the Gothic
character which alphabetical purism would demand.
There are three or four statements in the article to which objection can be
taken and, since in philplogy even the smallest details are of importance, the
learned writer will not object to my pointing them out with some emphasis; in
one case at least he has fallen into a serious error by correcting which he may
add an . interesting and not unimportant subsection to his array of grammatical
and syntactical identities between the two languages. I do not understand in the
first place what is meant by the statement that "in
Greek no difference is made between the dentals and the linguals and they are
fused together". If it is meant that the Greek language possessed both
dental and lingual sounds
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but expressed them by the same characters, I do not think this can be correct.
The distribution of dentals and linguals in the various languages is one of the
most curious phenomena in the history of linguistic phonetics and deserves a
closer inquiry than has been accorded to it. The Latin and Celtic languages
reject the lingual and use only the dental; English on the other hand prefers
the linguals, though it uses occasionally the dental t, th and d, all
of which it represents by the, as in with, thin, though, - a
desperately clumsy device thoroughly in keeping with the chaotic wildness of
English orthography. Everyone in India knows the difficulty an Englishman finds
in pronouncing the Indian dentals; he turns them resolutely into linguals. On
the contrary a Frenchman who has not educated himself into the right English
pronunciation, will turn the English lingual into a dental; he will say feasth
instead of feast, noth instead of not, and pronounce do as
if it were the English though. A similar peculiarity is one of the chief
features of the brogue, the Irish mispronunciation of English speech; for the
natural Irish tongue cannot manage the hard lingual sound in such words as Peter
and shoulder, it mollifies them into true dentals. I have noticed
the same peculiarity in the pronunciation of a Spanish actress playing in
English on a London stage; otherwise perfect, it produced a strange impression
by its invariable transformation of the harder English into the softer Latin
sound. Now Greek must certainly have belonged to the Latin-Celtic group in this
phonetic peculiarity; otherwise the difference would have been too striking to
escape the sensitive ear of the ancient poets and scholars. It seems to me
therefore that in the comparative scheme of the two alphabets the Sanskrit
linguals should be marked as absent in the Greek and, not as Mr. Ranade represents
them, correspondent equally with the dentals to the Greek tau, theta, and
delta.
In the comparison of the declensions Mr. Ranade asserts that Greek feminine
nouns in long a like chôrâ correspond in their endings to
Sanskrit nouns of the type of bhāryā and Greek nouns in long e like
tîmê to Sanskrit nouns of the type of dāsī. Surely this is an
.error. The writer has fallen into it because he was looking only at the Attic
dialect, but the Attic is only one
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variation of the Greek language and it is misleading to study it by itself. As
a matter of fact, this â and this ê both represent the same
original sound which must have been the feminine termination in â; only
the Doric dialect prefers always the original â, the Ionic modifies it
into ê, and the Attic standing between the Doric and the Ionic belts
makes a compromise. In the Attic when this feminine â is preceded by a
vowel it remains unmodified, as also usually when it is preceded by r, but
if it is preceded by a consonant it becomes ê; thus philiâ, choôrâ, but
tîmê, kîmê. Ionic will say philiê and not philiâ; Doric
tîmâ and not tîmê. This is enough to negative Mr. Ranade's identification
of this Attic e with the Sanskrit feminine î. Certainly there are
cases in which Sanskrit uses this î termination where Attic has the ê,
as in ca turthī and tetartê; but this simply means that the
Greek has rejected the Sanskrit deviation into the î form and kept to the
more regular a which here too will appear in its pure form in the Doric.¹
In the comparison of tenses Mr. Ranade makes the rather curious assertion that
the Sanskrit Conditional does not occur in any other language except perhaps
German; but surely if the German "wurden getodet worden sein" corresponds
to the Sans- krit abhavisyat, the French conditionals e.g. auraient
été tués and the English "would have been killed" ought equally
to be considered as parallel syntactical constructions; they have the same
sense and with a slight difference the same form as the German.
Finally, Mr. Ranade tells us that there are no such com- pounds in Greek as in
Sanskrit and again that there are no dvandva, karmadhāraya and bahuvrīhi
compounds in Greek, although there are verbs compounded with prepositions.
I am at a loss to understand how so sound a scholar can have come to make a
statement so contrary. to all the facts. The power of the Greek language to
make compounds is one of its most not- able characteristics and its rich though
never intemperate use is one of the great beauties of the Greek poetical style.
When the Romans came into contact with Greek literature, their earlier poets
tried to introduce this faculty into Latin and even
¹ This phonetic variation is a general rule in the dialects and not confined to
the feminine termination.
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Virgil describes the sea as velivolum, sail-flying, i.e. with sails
flying over it like the wings of birds through the air, but the usage
was too contrary to the Latin genius to succeed. Not only did the Greek
compound prepositions with its verbs, but it compounded nouns and verbs
together. Thus from nau-archos, ship-ruler, Le. admiral, they made nauarchein,
to be an admiral; nor did they hesitate before such forms as paidopoiein,
to beget children, paidotribein, to train boys, mnêsikakein, to
remember wrongs, neottotropheisthai, to be brought up like the young of
a bird. In fact with the exception of nominal dvandvas the Greek
illustrates all the main varieties of the Sanskrit compound. For it is capable
of such compounds as pseudo-martus, a false witness, pseudo-christos,
a false Christ, chauno-politês, a silly city; as andro-phonos, man-killing,
paid-oletôr, a destroyer of one's children, phusi-zoos, life-producing,
koruth-aiolos, helmet-glan- cing, lao-kataratos, cursed by the
people, thumo-leon, heart-lion, as anabadên and katabadên answering
to the Sanskrit avyayibhāva; as oxu-thumos, sharp-passioned, oxu-schoinos,
having sharp reeds, polu-teknos, having many children, io-stephanos,
violet-crowned. The language indeed pullulates with compounds. It is true
that they are usually composed of two members only, but compounds of three
members are found, as tris-kako-daimôn, thrice-evil-fated and
Aristophanes even perpetrates such forms as glischr-antilog-exepitriptos and
sphragid-onuch-argo-kometes.
I have dwelt on these points because they leap to the eye in the perfection
otherwise complete of an admirable essay which, I hope, is only the first
sketch of a more important treatise. But with the exception of the last they
are minor points and do not seriously detract from the completeness of the
exposition. Especially new and interesting are the parallel between Greek and
Vedic accents and the rearrangement of Greek conjugations according to the
Sanskrit classification. The common origin of Greek and Sanskrit is apparent
enough, but like other philologists Mr. Ranade is far too sure of the
conclusion he draws from it. I believe him to be right in thinking that the
Indian Aryans and the Greek came from one stock, but when he says that this has
been proved beyond dispute by the discoveries of the philologist he is going
much too fast. Common origin of language
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or even common language does not prove common ethnic origin. The French and
Spaniards are not Latins nor the Irish of Dublin and Munster Anglo-Saxons. From
the 'possible causes of linguistic similarity which the writer has given he
has omitted one, conquest and cultural pressure. According to the theory of the
Italian ethnologist, Sergi, all the Mediterranean races of Northern Africa and
Southern Europe belong to one "Mediterranean" stock ancient and
highly civilised which was conquered by Aryan savages and this accounts for
their "Aryan" languages. It is the same theory that now prevails in a
different form with regard to the Aryan conquest of a highly civilised
Dravidian India. Philology can bring no sufficient argument to contradict it.
Mr. Ranade deprecates the scorn of the linguistically ignorant for philology,
but we must not forget that in Europe it is not the ignorant alone who feel
this contempt, but the scientists, and that there is a certain justification
for their contempt; this was admitted by so great a philological scholar as Renan
when in the evening of his days he had to apologise for his favourite pursuits
as "our petty conjectural sciences". Philology is in fact not yet a
science, but rather far too largely a structure of ingenuities and plausible
conjectures. It set out with the hope of discovering the origin of language
and the scientific laws of its development, but it has failed entirely; and
it failed not because they are undiscoverable, - I believe the clue is there
lying ready to our hands in the Sanskrit language, - but because it strayed off
to the facile pursuit of obvious similarities and identities instead of delving
patiently and scrupulously, as all true Science must do, behind the outward
appearances of things to get back at origins and embryonic indices. And on its
scanty and uncertain data it began to build up enormous structures of theory
such as the common origin of Aryan-speaking races, their original habitat,
their common form of culture before separation, etc. Such facile play of an
ingenious imagination is still the failing of the scholar and justifies to a
certain extent the scorn of the patient, accurate and scrupulous physical
scientist for the freaks and pretentions of the "philolog".
Not altogether is it justified, for philology has made several interesting and
useful discoveries, established a few minor genera-
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lisations and, above all, substituted a sounder though not yet entirely sound
critical method for the fantastic licence of the old unscientific philology
which, once it left the sure ground of grammar, was capable of anything and
everything however absurd or impossible. But much has to be learned and a great
deal more unlearned before we can measure ourselves with the physical scientist
or deserve his approval. It is here that much is to be hoped from the Indian
intellect which is more accustomed than the European to move with a penetrating
subtlety and accuracy in the things of the mind. But to justify the hope it must
first get rid on one side of its attachment to the methods of the Pundit and his
subservience to traditional authority and on the other not give itself bound
hand and foot to the method of the European scholar or imitate too
freely that swiftly leaping ingenious mind of his which gives you in a trice a
Scythian or a Persian Buddha, identifies conclusively Murghab and Maurya,
Mayasura and Ahura Mazda and generally constructs with magical rapidity the
wrong animal out of the wrong bone. We have to combine the laboriousness of the
Pundit, the slow and patient conscientiousness of the physical scientist
abhorrent of a too facile conclusion and the subtlety of the psychologist in
order to deserve the same success in these other sciences and to lift them
beyond the shifting field of conjecture.
Sanskrit Research gives us Sanskrit articles as well
as English with
the laudable object of bringing together with a view to mutual helpfulness the
old and the new scholarship. Sanskrit ought still to have a future as a
language of the learned and it will not be a good day for India when the
ancient tongue ceases entirely to be written or spoken. But if it is to
survive, it must get rid of the curse of the heavy pedantic style contracted by
it in its decline with the lumbering impossible compounds and the overweight of
hair-splitting erudition. The Sanskrit articles in this number are learned and
laborious, but they suffer heavily from this defect of style. If the contact
established by the Sanskrit Research can teach the new scholarship the
patient thoroughness of the old and the old the flexibility and penetrating
critical sense of the new, it will have done to both a great and muchneeded
service.
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