Study Of Sanskrit Research Articles

The Use of Hand Gestures (Hastas) in Bharatanatyam for Creative Aging.

Bharatanatyam is a traditional Indian dance form that involves the use of facial expressions and body movements to tell stories. A key aspect of Bharatanatyam is the use of hand gestures, also known as hastas, which are used to communicate with specificity and precision. Hastas are symbols, and along with facial expressions and body movements that are contextually relevant, they help to communicate narratives. I am a neuroscientist and have been immersed in Bharatanatyam for 25 years; true to the tradition of the form that emphasizes lifelong scholarship and immersion, I continue to learn from my gurus and supplement my dance training with the study of Carnatic music and Sanskrit. My journey in creative aging started after losing my mother and witnessing the lack of access to expressive movement that was available to her; for fear of falls, my previously-dynamic mother spent the last three months of her life without leaving the bed or feeling the sunshine on her skin. By using hastas in the context of creative aging, I describe how we can promote the acquisition of new skills, the physical benefits even in the face of arthritis and limited mobility, the ability to ascribe meaning to the gestures, and the capability to form new meanings and new gestures that are contemporary and relevant to the lives of older adults. Above all, we can engage older adults actively in the creation and appreciation of art.

A Study of Middle Age Sanskrit Poṣadha Palm-leaf Manual

The Poṣadha, or observing of eight Buddhist precepts by lay and monastic people in Buddhism starts inthe lifetime of Buddha. With the growth of time, many Buddhist sects developed and they developed their Poṣadha methods (I.-Tsing, 1896). Among them is the tradition of the Sanskrit Mahayana monks. This article is about a palm-leaf manuscript [RAS Hudgson MS 70] from the Hudgson collection which is now in the South Asian society collection. This Poṣadha manual written by a novice has great significance as it takes us back to the time when the monks following Sanskrit tradition were still functioning. Interestingly this Poṣadha text is based largely on the Mahayana context and has very little Sravakayana influence. Directions for forming puṣpamaṇḍala has significant difference which hasn't been revealed before. This Vrata manual can be looked at as the initial ritualistic development of a now surviving Sanskrit Buddhism, this is Newar Buddhism.

Що таке санскрит? / Переклад з російської, вступна стаття та примітки Д. В. Бурби

The essay What is Sanskrit was published in 1911 as a preface to P. Ritter’s Sanskrit textbook. It is an updated version of the trial lecture, given by him in the fall of 1899 at Kharkiv University (Ukraine). There he was teaching Sanskrit from the autumn of 1900 at the Department of Comparative Linguistics and headed this Department later. The author debunks popular myths about Sanskrit, describes its place among Indian languages emphasizing temporal and geographical differences between Sanskrit and Vedic language, distinguishes epic and classical Sanskrit, lists the prominent works of Sanskrit literature, and pays tribute to the Indian grammatical tradition. He mentions such prominent works of ancient Indian Sanskritology as the Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini (4th–3rd centuries BC), Nirukta of Yāska (4th century BC), Vārttika of Кātyāyana (3rd–2nd centuries BC), Mahābhāṣya of Patañjali (2nd century BC). Ritter’s account of the history of the discovery and study of Sanskrit in the West is interesting, as is the characterization of Sanskrit scholars (his predecessors and contemporaries), some of whom he knew personally. Ritter’s students testified that he was fluent in Ukrainian which he apparently knew from childhood but the lecture was given by him and then published in Russian as a result of two hundred years of systematic extirpation of the Ukrainian language in the Russian Empire. All notes except two marked are written by the translator. The notes provide philological, historical, and biographical information. The introductory article tells about the origin of P. Ritter, his studies, his work as a scientist, translator, compiler of the Ukrainian-language Anthology of Ancient Indian Literature, lecturer, and organizer of science, as well as about his hobby and his tragic death due to repressions of NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs).

A Buddhist Bhairava? Kṛtanagara’s Tantric Buddhism in Transregional Perspective

This article discusses some key aspects of the historical and religious background of the period of Kṛtanagara and his aftermath in East Java and Sumatra. Our analysis is based on a comparative study of Sanskrit, Old Javanese, and Tibetan textual sources and artistic vestiges (“medias”) to highlight the transregional networks of tantric Buddhism (“traditions”) that may have contributed to shape the king’s religio-political agenda. Having identified the enigmatic colossal statue at Padang Roco/Sungai Langsat in Dharmasraya (Central-Western Sumatra) as a Mahākāla bearing Śaiva iconographic contaminations, and as a product of Siṅhasāri-period East Java from Sino-Tibetan prototypes, we revive Moens’ (1924: 557) idea of an association between the icon and Kṛtanagara. Adding to the discussion on the Eastern Indian-style icon of Arapacana Mañjuśrī found near Candi Jago, we highlight further parallels that complement and fine-tune the idea advanced by previous scholars about the commonality of the tantric Buddhist paradigms practiced at the courts of Kṛtanagara and Kublai Khan, and propose that their legacy was adopted by the political elites of the subsequent generation in both Nusantara and China.

The Study of Sanskrit in Medieval East Asia: China and Japan

The Study of Sanskrit in Medieval East Asia: China and Japan

The relationship of the languages of the peoples of central asia with sanskrit

This article deals with the relationship between the languages of the peoples of Central Asia and Sanskrit. These relations are based on the study of common sources of Turkic (Uzbek) Buddhist (Sanskrit) literature, the study of Sanskrit with Sogdian, Old Turkic and Uyghur languages, bilingual “texts written in two languages (translation)” and the analysis of articles on bilingualism “Sogd-Sanskrit”, “Turkish-Sanskrit”, “Uyghur-Sanskrit” and the conclusions of scientific speeches. The researches of European scientists on this study is analyzed.

TB pitke ‘fat, grease, oil’ and PIE *peih̯1- ‘to be fat, be bursting with’

Abstract This paper investigates the meaning and the etymology of TB pitke. Based on a philological study of Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan parallel texts, the meaning of TB pitke can be determined to be ‘fat, grease, oil’. TB pitke corresponds to Skt. medas- ‘fat’, Tib. tshil ‘fat, grease’ and Chin. 脂zhī ‘fat, grease’. The philological identification of the meaning of TB pitke as ‘fat, grease, oil’ opens the door to an etymological connection with PIE *pei̯H- ‘to be fat, swell’, and, based on the historical phonology of Tocharian, leads to the determination of the laryngeal as *‑h1.

The Study of Indian Religions in Latin America

In the present paper, we examine the current state of the study of Indian religions in Latin America. An important investigation on the study of Sanskrit outside India conveys the image that the situation of the study of Indian religions in Latin America is perceived internationally as an activity carried out by isolated scholars. Relevant analyses on the Study of Religion in Latin America, on the other hand, show that many social scientists of the region tend to overlook the presence and the effect that religious phenomena linked to Indian culture have over the religious scenario of Latin American countries. The exam of the field we carry out in this paper, in contrast, seeks to demonstrate that the study of Indian religions in Latin America is neither an isolated phenomenon nor an issue disregarded by all social scientists. In order to corroborate our point of view, we discuss, in the first place, the orientation and activities of the main scholarly centers dedicated to the field, and the larger academic areas in which the study of Indian religions appears to be included. We survey, in the second place, the works of important scholars of the region published in the present decade with the purpose of analyzing the main tendencies of current research and of showing which are the main editorial channels involved in the circulation of such works. Our study provides, thus, substantial information on the current state of the field in the region and suggests that the conditions are favorable enough for the field to attain, in the near future, a considerable degree of regional integration and international projection.

Book Reviews

102 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XXXIV, No.4, Summer 2011 Book Reviews Edited by Nadia Barsoum SOUTH ASIA AND THE MIDDLE EAST RELIGION, CASTE AND POLITICS IN INDIA by Christophe Jaffrelot, Columbia University Press, New York, 2011, pp.802. Jaffrelot traces the transformation of India throughout the latter half of the 20th century, particularly in 1980 and 1990s. The traditional Nehruvian system is giving way to a less cohesive though more active India, a country that has become what it is against all odds. The author maps this tumultuous journey, exploring the role of religion, caste, and politics in determining the fabric of a modern demographic state. DOES THE ELEPHANT DANCE? Contemporary Indian Foreign Policy by David M. Malone, Oxford University Press, New York, 2011, pp.425. Malone seeks to survey the main features of contemporary Indian foreign policy. It identifies elements of Indian history relevant to the topic; examines the role therein of domestic politics and internal and external security challenges, and of domestic and international economic factors and in successive chapters delves into the specifics of India’s policy within its South Asian neighborhood, and with respect to china, the USA, West Asia (the Middle East), East Asia, Europe and Russia, and multilateral diplomacy. THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO GANDHI edited by Judith M. Brown and Anthony Parel, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2011, pp. 273. Even today, six decades after his assassination in January 1948. Gandhi is still revered as the father of the Indian nation. This volume comprising essays by leading scholars in the field, traces his extraordinary story. The first part explores Gandhi’s transformation from a small-town lawyer into a skilled leader of civil resistance while the second section is devoted to his writings and his thinking. The final part reflects on Gandhi’s imageand on his legacy in India, the West and beyond. NIMOS’S WAR, EMMA’S WAR: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War by Cynthia Enloe, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2010 pp. 320. Enloe looks closely at the lives of eight women, four Iraquis and four Americans, during the war of Iraq. JAINS in the WORLD: Religious Values and Ideology in India by John E. Cort, Oxford University Press, New York, 2011, pp.267 This book presents a detailed fieldwork-based study of the ancient Indian religion of Jainism. Drawing on field research in Northern Gujarat and on the study of both ancient Sanskrit and Prakrit and modern vernacular Jain religious literature, John Cort provides a rounded portrait of the religion as it is practiced today. SECULARIZING ISLAMISTS? Jama’at-e-Islami and Jama’at-ud-Da’wain Urban Pakistan by Humeira Iqtidar University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2011 pp. 216. This work provides in-depth analysis of two Islamist parties in Pakistan, the highly influential Jama’at-e-Islami and the more militant Jama’at-ud-Da’wain , widely blamed for the November terrorist attack in Mumbai, India. Basing her findings on thirteen months of ethnographic work with the two parties in Lahore. Iqtidar proposes that these Islamists are involuntarily facilitating secularization within Muslim societies, even as they vehemently opposed secularism. CONCEIVING CITIZENS: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran by Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Oxford University Press, New York, 2011, pp.306, Kashani-Sabet illustrates how debates over hygiene, reproductive politics, and sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries explained demographic trends and put women at the center of nationalist debates. Exploring women’s lives under successive regime, she chronicles the hygiene campaigns that cast mothers as a custodians oh a healthy civilization ; debates over female education, employment, and political rights, government policies on contraception and population control; and tensions between religion and secularism. THE MAKING OF A MODERN KINGDOM: Globalization and Change in Saudi Arabia by Ann T. Jordan, Waveland Press Inc, Illinois 2011, pp. 190. This timely and relevant case study presents an unparalleled anthropological overview of Saudi Arabia, a nation state of prime importance , while it builds a vital understanding of globalization –The connectedness of the world. Jordan describes how a country with no modern education system and no modern technology or infrastructure developed all of these and became...

Kūkai on the Philosophy of Language (review)

Reviewed by: Kūkai on the Philosophy of Language Eric H. Swanson Kūkai on the Philosophy of Language. By Shingen Takagi and Thomas Eijō Dreitlein. Keio University Press, 2010. 480480 pages. Hardcover ¥6,500. Kūkai on the Philosophy of Language (hereafter Philosophy of Language) was published as the fifth volume of the Izutsu Library Series on Oriental Philosophy. Every title in this series has been a translation of distinguished philosophical treatises from Eastern traditions into a Western language, with the expectation that "the translation itself will naturally and necessarily open up the 'space,' or a functional field of semantics, in which the Orient encounters the Occident, and the traditional the existential present" (p. vi). Especially following the recent publications of Ryūichi Abé's The Weaving of Mantra: Kūkai and the Construction of Esoteric Buddhist Discourse (Columbia University Press, 1999) and Cynthia Bogel's With a Single Glance: Buddhist Icons and Early Mikkyo Vision (University of Washington Press, 2010), it has been widely accepted in the Western academic world that Kūkai is a critical figure in studying not only Japanese Buddhist thought, but also the literary and visual culture of Japan. Philosophy of Language, which provides new translations of Kūkai's doctrinal [End Page 341] works by Shingen Takagi and Thomas Eijō Dreitlein, is a substantial addition to the goals of the Izutsu series and to deeper scholarly study of Kūkai. The volume begins with an introduction by Takagi that provides a good overview of the concept of language seen in Kūkai's writings. One point that Takagi articulates in the introduction is the "paradigm shift" in Kūkai's thought. He explains, "Kūkai's profound thoughts on letters and language probably had their source in his experience with the esoteric Ākāśagarbha practice. That experience allowed Kūkai to escape from the world of superficially interpreting pages in books full of written letters to enter the great realm of empty space (ākāśa), where he learned to decipher the natural and inherent letters written on the pages of the book of the universe itself" (p. 6). According to Takagi, this aspect of experience that Kūkai acquired through esoteric practice is essential to understanding his theory of language. Takagi also introduces Toshihiko Izutsu's interpretation of Kūkai's philosophy of language: Toshihiko Izutsu has attempted an explanation of Kūkai's philosophy of language using his original theory of semantic articulation. According to Izutsu, the central proposition of Kūkai's language theory is hosshin seppō, the preaching of the Dharmakāya. He writes that the preaching of the Dharmakāya is possible only because the Dharmakāya is preaching, or language itself. That the Dharmakāya is itself the preaching means that the foundation or essence of existence is itself language. (pp. 14-15) Takagi goes on to discuss the difference between the exoteric and esoteric scriptures, Kūkai's study of Siddham letters and Sanskrit, and Kūkai's view of language through the theory of the letter a as the fundamental sound of existence. The main section of the book is made up of the translation of Sokushin jobutsu gi (Buddhahood Immediately and in This Body), Shō-ji-jissō gi (The Meanings of Sound, Letter, and Reality), and Unji gi (The Meanings of the Letter Hūṃ). As Takagi mentions in his introduction, these three treatises are known for their detailed exposition of the doctrines through which Kūkai established Shingon teachings. There is no doubt that they represent his theory of language. Some may question the necessity of new translations, as these treatises can already be found in Yoshito S. Hakeda's Kūkai: Major Works (Columbia University Press, 1972), but given that there will never be a definitive rendition of the original text, we can be assured that each new translation has the potential to reveal a different aspect of its source. In fact, as I will explain, Philosophy of Language makes a major contribution to the academic study of Buddhist philosophy and of Kūkai in the West distinct from that of the Hakeda volume. The first major difference between the two works is in...

Sanskrit Cosmos-Asian Empire-Pune Fortress

Sanskrit Cosmos-Asian Empire-Pune Fortress

“Applied Orientalism” in British India and Tsarist Turkestan

Writing in 1872, Sir Alfred Lyall, Governor of the North-Western Provinces of British India, was talking about the reluctance amongst many of the old Muslim scholarly class of North India to embrace the modern, enlightened learning of the West. For Lyall, to be an “Orientalist” was to be one of those Anglo-Indian advocates of state support for “Oriental Learning”—the study of Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit—in the tradition established by Warren Hastings and Sir William Jones, who had been worsted by the “Anglicists” led by Lord Macaulay in 1835. To adopt the meaning popularized by Edward Said, we might say that while Lyall makes a classic “Orientalist” judgment about the value of Eastern civilization, he is also making an observation about the relationship between knowledge and power that still resonates today. Lyall is consciously echoing Macaulay's notorious statement, “A single shelf of a good European Library was worth the whole literature of India and Arabia,” which has often been taken as a byword for the arrogance of Europeans confronted with an Orient to which they felt themselves superior. The obvious point is that Macaulay had no interest in Oriental knowledge or knowledge of the Orient: he was not an Orientalist at all. Perhaps this is why Said dealt with him only tangentially.

Murray Barnson Emeneau

28 FEBRUARY 1904 * 29 AUGUST 2005 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS BORN IN LUNENBURG, Nova Scotia, Emeneau had an unusually long and productive career as professor of Sanskrit and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a founder of the linguistics department and of the Survey of California Indian Languages; he was elected to the APS in 1952. He died peacefully at his home in Berkeley on 29 August 2005, aged 101. In his later years, he was often asked whether he owed his longevity to any particular regimen of life; he always answered, No, just genes. In fact, medical researchers have discovered in recent years that Emeneau's hometown of Lunenburg produces the highest percentage of centenarians in North America. Emeneau was first trained in classics at Dalhousie University, Halifax, and at Oxford University. In 1926 he began the study of Sanskrit and comparative Indo-European at Yale, where he received his doctorate in 1931 with a dissertation on Sanskrit. From then until 1935, he did postdoctoral study at Yale under the direction of the leading anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir. From him Emeneau eagerly absorbed not only the then-new structural linguistics, but also Sapir's distinctive approach to what was later called linguistics. As he wrote in later years, I was exposed to methods of fieldwork on non-literary languages, including intensive phonetic practice and analysis of material, but especially to Sapir's approach to anthropological linguistics, in which language is only part of the total culture, but a most important part, since in it the community expresses in its own way, 'verbifies' its culture. With Sapir's help and guidance, and with grants from sources including the APS, Emeneau spent the years 1935-38 doing fieldwork on unwritten Dravidian languages of India, in particular on Toda. Back in the U.S., after teaching linguistics at Yale for a year, Emeneau was hired in 1940 as assistant professor of Sanskrit and general linguistics at Berkeley; he rose rapidly, becoming full professor by 1946, and later chair. He was a prolific interdisciplinary writer throughout his career, in areas ranging from Sanskrit philology to Dravidian linguistics to cultural anthropology, and he constantly urged his students to begin their own publication records. In 1971 he retired to emeritus status, but he continued his research, publication, and participation in academic activities well into his nineties. …

Sanskrit for Civil Servants 1806-1818

The first program of Sanskrit instruction in Great Britain poses a challenge to a claim by authors in the postcolonial vein to the effect that the study of Sanskrit was encouraged in the West as part of an encompassing colonial project aimed at appropriating and subverting Indian culture. Isolated at the college the East India Company founded in England to train its civil servants, Sanskrit studies were slower to blossom at the primary seat of colonial power than on the continent of Europe.

The Sanskrit Language: An Introductory Grammar and Reader

Now available in paperback, this grammar offers a completely new approach to the study of Sanskrit, aimed at students with no previous specialist knowledge of the categories of grammar. It is a stimulating and infectious approach, designed to cultivate rapid and lasting enthusiasm for Sanskrit. Important features of the work are the use of connected passages for exercise which are intrinsically more interesting and challenging than the unrelated sentences found in other grammars; the great deal of attention given to the explanation of the Devanagari system; and the extensive appendices and glossaries.

Studies on Indian Philosophy in Japan, 1963-1987

The history of the study of Indian philosophy in Japan may be considered to have started on December 25, 1879, when Hara Tanzan (18191892), a lecturer at the Department of Japanese and Chinese Literature at the University of Tokyo, initiated a course of Lectures on Buddhist Texts. But it was to be more than twenty years later that the study of Indian philosophy in the truly modern sense of the term may be said to have begun. In 1884, Nanjo Bunyu (1849-1927) returned to Japan after having studied Sanskrit for eight years under F. Max Muller (1823-1900) at the University of Oxford, and the following year, having been appointed lecturer at the University of Tokyo, he started a course in Sanskrit. Already in the early Heian period the siddham studies of China had been introduced to Japan from the T'ang and had been continued in an unbroken tradition up until that time. But Nanjo was the first to introduce European Sanskrit studies to Japan, and he laid the firm foundations for the modern study of Sanskrit and Buddhism in Japan. This current was further consolidated by Takakusu Junjiro (1886-1945). He, too, pursued the study of Sanskrit language and literature under Max Muller, as Nanjo had done, and also studied Pali, Indian philosophy, Tibetan, and Mongolian at German universities in Kiel, Berlin, and Leipzig, after which he returned to Japan in 1897 and began lecturing in Sanskrit as a lecturer at the University of Tokyo the following year. In 1901 a chair of Sanskrit was established at the University of Tokyo, the first in Japan, with Takakusu being appointed its first professor. Then, in 1906, he initiated a course in the of Indian Philosophy and Religion, which was to become the starting point for the study of Indian philosophy in Japan. This course was taken over by Kimura Taiken (1881-1930) in 1912, and the draft notes for the course were published in 1914 as a joint work entitled Indo tetsugaku shukyo shi (The History of Indian Philosophy and Religion). This was the first work in Japanese to provide a conspectus of the history of Indian philosophy and religion from the time of the Rgveda to the age of the sutras that not only was based on secondary sources in Western languages, but also referred directly to the original texts. Subsequently, this tradition of scholarship was carried over and further developed by Ui Hakuju (1882-1963) and Nakamura Hajime (1912-), and today the study of Indian philosophy is being pursued primarily at, apart from the University of Tokyo, institutions such as Kyoto, Hokkaido, Tohoku, Nagoya, Osaka, and Kyushu Universities. The study of Indian Sengaku Mayeda

Bhāgavata Mēḷa Nāṭakam, a Traditional Dance-Drama Form

In the present renaissance of India's traditional arts, a great deal of attention is being focused upon dance and dance-drama. Much has been done for their revival, and several attempts have been made to relate the present survivals of traditional dance and dance-drama to the Sastric literature of antiquity, principally to the Bharata Nāṭyaśāstra. In the West, the study of Sanskrit plays and Sanskrit dramaturgy has been limited mostly to the literature per se and to those aspects of it that could yield historical or philological material. Only in the last thirty years or so has the general social stigma attached to the traditional profession of dance in India been substantially removed, bringing about a new resurgence in practice and scholarship. We are indebted to a number of recent Indian scholars who have done valuable work in tracing the theoretical, and in some cases practical, relationships of the current forms of dance and dance-drama to the precedents and usages of dramaturgy as described in the Bharata Nātyaśāstra and allied works.

Waman Pandit—Scholar and Marathi Poet (17th century)

Wāman Pandit was born in the second half of the seventeenth century (the definite date is not obtainable) at the village of Kumthe in the Satārā, district of the Bombay Presidency. According to the latest research work of the Bharata Itīhāsa Samśodhak Mandali of Poona, Wāman was a native of Bijāpore. In his early days he received some training in Sanskrit from his father, who was the village-astrologer by profession, and who had considerable knowledge of Sanskrit. When about 18 he went to Benāres, the centre of Hindu learning and also the most sacred place of the Hindus. He was accompanied by his wife, an incident which shows that his parents were dead at that time. He applied himself rigorously to the study of Sanskrit for not less than twelve years, and having completed his education, in all departments of knowledge, he returned to his native place.

The Study of Sanskrit as an Imperial Question

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Art. III.—On the Bearing of the Study of the Bántu Languages of South Africa on the Aryan Family of Languages

In 1784, just a century ago, the Asiatic Society was founded at Calcutta, and since then a great movement has been going on, leading to the discovery and study of Sanskrit and other Indian languages, and resulting in what is called Comparative Philology or the Science of Language.