Abstract
This article investigates the use of metaphorical language in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (henceforth CW). Vivekananda is one of the most important modern-day Hindu scholars because his interpretation of ancient Hindu scriptural lore has been very influential. Vivekananda’s influence was part of the motivation for choosing his CW as the empirical domain for the current study. AntConc software was used to mine Vivekananda’s CW for water-related terms, which seemed to have a predilection for metaphoricity. Which terms to search for specifically was determined after a manual reading of a sample from the CW. The data were then tagged using a convention inspired by the well-known Metaphor Identification Procedure – Vrije University (MIPVU). Then, a representative sample of the data was chosen, and the metaphors were mapped and analysed thematically. Five of these are referred to in this article, but special emphasis is placed on the theme of the Vedanta philosophy as the basis for neo-Hinduism, which has become synonymous with contemporary Hinduism, with Yoga as the practical wing, and Vedanta as the ideological basis for the practice; this aspect is expounded upon in more detail. The study’s main aim was therefore to investigate whether Hindu religious discourse uses metaphors to explain abstract religious concepts in a specific way, and indeed one of the main findings was the pervasiveness of water as a source domain. Hence, the key finding in this article is that neo-Hindu thought, as reconceptualised by Vivekananda, relies heavily on the water frame (as is convention in the field of Cognitive Semantics, conceptual domains are written in upper case, including hypothetical frames and conceptual metaphors), which is not as pervasive in other religio-philosophical traditions.
Highlights
The complex nature of religious discourse remains a problem worth investigating, in the sense that the language used when talking about topics within the domain of religion often has nuanced connotations
As the first key figure to cross the East–West spiritual-intellectual divide, an analysis of the strategies he used to bring his ideas to the populace is worthy of investigation – the rationale behind the current study. It is with this in mind that the current study was undertaken, and given the facts above, including Vivekananda’s mandate to bring the Vedanta philosophy to the West; the specific research question underlying this study is as follows: ‘What are the specific metaphors that Vivekananda used to explain the nuances of the Vedanta philosophy in bringing it to the West?’ it is assumed at the outset that there will be a proliferation of metaphorical language, given the abstract nature of the target domain
According to Geeraerts (2010:84), there is a clear growth in interest ‘in corpus-based and experimental studies’, because cognitive linguistics (CL) aims at analysing real-life, user-based data; this being said, he adds that ‘it would be an exaggeration to say that it has become the standard approach in Cognitive Linguistics’
Summary
The complex nature of religious discourse remains a problem worth investigating, in the sense that the language used when talking about topics within the domain of religion often has nuanced connotations. One salient example is the word ‘God’, for which there is literally no analogue in Buddhism, and the same term applied to Hindu philosophy means something very different from the Judaeo-Christian word. When speaking in English, a practising Hindu will use the word ‘God’; ‘while this conception is found in the Indian tradition, it stands in sharp contrast to the dominant conceptualisation of knowledge found in traditional East Asian philosophies’ (Harrison 2015:308). These conceptual differences are part of the problem and can stunt inter-cultural and inter-religious dialogue
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