Day .24-JAWAHARLAL NEHRU - The Discovery of India (Continued)

 Vitality and Persistence of Sanskrit

Sanskrit is a language amazingly rich, efflorescent, full of luxu riant growth of all kinds, and yet precise and strictly keepin within the framework of grammar which Panini laid down tw thousand six hundred years ago. It spread out, added to its

richness, became fuller and more ornate, but always it stuck to its original roots.

In the years of the decline of Sanskrit literature, it lost some of its power and simplicity of style and became involved in highly complex forms and elaborate similes and metaphors. The gram-matical rule which enable words to be joined together, became in the hands of the epigones a mere device to show off their cleverness by combining whole strings of words running into many lines.

Sir William Jones observed as long ago as 1784: 'The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either: yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs, and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all without believing them to have sprung from some common source which perhaps no longer e x i s t s . . . . ' -

William Jones was followed by many other European scholars, English, French, German, and others, who studied Sanskrit and laid the foundations of a new science—comparative philology. German scholarship forged ahead in this new domain and it is to these German scholars of the nineteenth century that the grea-test credit must go for research in Sanskrit. Practically every German university had a Sanskrit department, with one or two professors in charge of it.Indian scholarship, which was considerable, was of the old style, uncritical and seldom acquainted with foreign classical languages, except Arabic and Persian. A new type of scholarship arose in India under European inspiration, and many Indians went to Europe (usually to Germany) to train themselves in the new methods of research and critical and comparative study. These Indians had an advantage over the Europeans, and yet there was a disadvantage also. The disadvantage was due to certain preconceived notions, inherited beliefs and tradition, which came in the way of dispassionate criticism. The advantage, and it was great, was the capacity to enter into the spirit of the writing, to picture the environment in which it grew and thus to be more in tune with it.

A language is something infinitely greater than grammar and philology. It is the poetic testament of the genius of a race and a culture, and the living embodiment of the thoughts and fancies that have moulded them. Words change their meanings from age to age and old ideas transform themselves into new, often keeping their old attire. It is difficult to capture the meaning, much less the spirit, of an old word or phrase. Some kind of a romantic and poetical approach is necessary if we are to have a glimpse into that old meaning and into the minds of those who used the language in former days. The richer and more abundant the language, the greater the difficulty. Sanskrit, like other classical languages, is full of words which have not only poetic beauty but a deep significance, a host of associated ideas, which cannot be translated into a language foreign in spirit and outlook. Even its grammar, its philosophy, have a strong poetic content; one of its old dictionaries is in poetic form.

It is no easy matter, even for those of us who have studied Sanskrit, to enter into the spirit of this ancient tongue and to live again in its world of long ago. Yet we may do so to a small extent, for we are the inheritors of old traditions and that old world still clings to our fancies. Our modern languages in India are children of Sanskrit, and to it owe most of their vocabulary and their forms of expression. Many rich and significant words in Sanskrit poetry and philosophy, untranslatable in foreign languages, are still living parts of our popular languages. And Sanskrit itself, though long dead as a language of the people, has still an astonishing vitality. But for foreigners, however learned, the difficulties become greater. Unfortunately, scholars and learned men are seldom poets, and it is the scholar poet who is required to interpret a language. From these scholars we usually get, as M. Barth has pointed out, 'traductions infidfeles & force d'etre litterales.'

So while the study of comparative philology has progressed and much research work has been done in Sanskrit, it is rather barren and sterile from the point of view of a poetic and romantic approach to this language. There is hardly any translation in English or any other foreign language from the Sanskrit which can be called worthy of or just to the original. Both Indians and foreigners have failed in this work for different reasons. That is a great pity and the world misses something that is full of beauty and imagination and deep thinking, something that is not merely the heritage of India but should be the heritage of the human race.

The hard discipline, reverent approach, and insight of the English translation of the Authorized Version of the Bible, not only produced a noble book, but gave to the English language strength and dignity. Generations of European scholars and poets have laboured lovingly over Greek and Latin classics and produced fine translations In various European languages. And so even common folk can share to some extent in those cultures and, in their drab lives, have glimpses of truth and loveliness. Unfortunately, this work has yet to be done with the Sanskrit classics. When it will be done, or whether it will be done at all, I do not know. Our scholars grow in numbers and grow in scholarship, and we have our poets too, but between the two there is a wide and ever-growing gap. Our creative tendencies are turned in a different direction, and the many demands that the world of to-day makes upon us hardly give us time for the leisured study of the classics. Especially in India we have to look another way and makeup for long lost time; we have been too much immersed in the classics in the past, and because we lost our own creative instincts we ceased to be inspired even by those classics which we claimed to cherish so much. Translations, I suppose, from the Indian classics will continue to appear, and scholars will see to it that the Sanskrit words and names are properly spelt and have all the necessary -diacritical marks, and that there are plenty of notes and explanations and comparisons. There will be everything, in fact, literally and conscientiously rendered, only the living spirit will be missing. What was a thing of life and joy, so lovely and musical and full of imaginative daring, will become old and flat and stale, with neither youth nor beauty, but with only the dust of the scholar's study and the smell of midnight oil.

For how long Sanskrit has been a dead language, in the sense of not being popularly spoken, I do not know. Even in the days of Kalidasa it was not the people's language, though it was the language of educated people throughout India. So it continued for centuries, and even spread to the Indian colonies in south-east Asia and central Asia. There are records of regular Sanskrit recitations, and possibly plays also, in Cambodia in the seventh century A.C. Sanskrit is still used for some ceremonial purposes in Thailand (Siam). In India the vitality of Sanskirt has been amazing. When the Afghan rulers had established themselves on the throne of Delhi, about the beginning of the thirteenth century, Persian became the court language over the greater part of India and, gradually, many educated people took to it in preference to Sanskrit. The popular languages also grew and developed literary forms. Yet in spite of all this Sanskrit continued, though it dec-lined in quality. Speaking at the Oriental Conference held in 1937 at Trivandrum, over which he presided, Dr. F. F. Thomas pointed out what a great unifying force Sanskrit had been in India and how widespread its use still was. He actually suggested that a simple form of Sanskrit, a kind of basic Sanskrit, should be encouraged as a common all-India language to-day! He quoted, agreeing with him, what Max Miiller had said previously: 'Such is the marvellous continuity between the past and the present in India, that in spite of repeated social convulsions, religious reforms, and foreign invasions, Sanskrit may be said to be still the only language spoken over the whole extent of that vast country.... Even at the present moment, after a century of English rule and English teaching, I believe that Sanskrit is more widely understood in India than Latin was in Europe at the time of Dante.'

I have no idea of the number of people who understood Latin in the Europe of Dante's time; nor do I know how many understand Sanskrit in India to-day; but the number of these latter is still large, especially in the south. Simple spoken Sanskrit is not very difficult to follow for those who know well any of the present-day Indo-Aryan languages—Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujrati, etc. Even present-day Urdu, itself wholly an Indo-Aryan language, probably contains 80 per cent words derived from Sanskrit. It is often difficult to say whether a word has come from Persian or Sanskrit, as the root words in both these languages are alike. Curiously enough, the Dravidian languages of the south, though entirely different in origin, have borrowed and adopted such masses of words from the Sanskrit that nearly half their vocabulary is very nearly allied to Sanskrit.

Books in Sanskrit on a variety of subjects, including dramatic works, continued to be written throughout the medieval period and right up to modern times. Indeed, such books still appear from time to time, and so do Sanskrit magazines. The standard is not high and they do not add anything of value to Sanskrit literature. But the surprising thing is that this hold of Sanskrit should continue in this way throughout this long period. Some-times public gatherings are still addressed in Sanskrit, though naturally the audiences are more or less select.

This continuing use of Sanskrit has undoubtedly prevented the normal growth of the modern Indian languages. The educated intellectuals looked upon them as vulgar tongues not suited to any creative or learned work, which was written in Sanskrit, or later not infrequently in Persian. In spite of this handicap the great provincial languages gradually took shape in the course of centuries, developed literary forms, and built up their literatures.

It is interesting to note that in modern Thailand when the need arose for new technical, scientific, and governmental terms, many of these were adapted from Sanskrit.

The ancient Indians attached a great deal of importance to sound, and hence their writing, poetry or prose, had a rhythmic and musical quality. Special efforts were made to ensure the correct enunciation of words and elaborate rules were laid down for this purpose. This became all the more necessary as, in the old days, teaching was oral, and whole books were committed to memory and thus handed down from generation to generation. The significance attached to the sound of words led to attempts to co-ordinate the sense with the sound, resulting some-times in delightful combinations, and at other times in crude and artificial mixtures. E. H. Johnstone has written about this: 'The classical poets of India have a sensitiveness to variations of sound, to which the literature of other countries afford few parallels, and their delicate combinations are a source of never-failing joy. Some of them, however, are inclined to attempt to match the sense with the sound in a way that is decidedly lack-ing in subtlety, and they have perpetrated real atrocities in the manufacture of verses with a limited number of consonants or even only one (From E. H. Johnstone's translation of 'Asvaghosa's Buddhaearita' Lahore, 1936). Recitations from the Vedas, even in the present day, are done according to the precise rules for enunciation laid down in ancient times.

The modern Indian languages descended from the Sanskrit, and therefore called Indo-Aryan languages, are: Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Marathi, Gujrati, Oriya, Assamese, Rajasthani (a vari-ation of Hindi), Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, and Kashmiri. The Dravidian languages are: Tamil, Telugu, Kanarese, and Malayalam. These fifteen languages cover the whole of India, and of these, Hindi, with its variation Urdu, is far the most wide-spread and is understood even where it is not spoken. Apart from these, there are only some dialects and some undeveloped languages spoken, in very limited areas, by some backward hill and forest tribes. The oft-repeated story of Ind'a having five hundred or more languages is a fiction of the mind of the philo-logist and the census commissioner who notes down every variation in dialect and every petty hill-tongue on the Assam-Bengal frontier with Burma as a separate language, although sometimes it is spoken only by a few hundred or a few thousand persons. Most of these so-called hundreds of languages are confined to this eastern frontier of India and to the eastern border tracts of Burma. According to the method adopted by census commissioners, Europe has hundreds of languages and Germany was, I think, listed as having about sixty.

The real language question in India has nothing to do with this variety. It is practically confined to Hindi-Urdu, one language with two literary forms and two scripts. As spoken there is hardly any difference; as written, especially in literary style, the gap widens. Attempts have been, and are being, made to lessen this gap and develop a common form, which is usually styled Hindustani. This is developing into a common language under-stood all over India.

Pashto, one of the Indo-Aryan languages derived from Sans-krit, is the popular language in the North West Frontier Province as well as in Afghanistan. It has been influenced, more than any of our other languages, by Persian. This frontier area has in the past produced a succession of brilliant thinkers, scholars, and grammarians in Sanskrit.

The language of Ceylon is Singhalese. This is also an Aryan language derived directly from Sanskrit. The Singhalese people have not only got their religion, Buddhism, from India, but are racially and linguistically akin to Indians.

Sanskrit, it is now well recognized, is allied to the European classical and modern languages. Even the Slavonic languages have many common forms and roots with Sanskrit. The nearest approach to Sanskrit in Europe is made by the Lithuanian language.

Buddhist Philosophy

Buddha, it is said, used the popular language of the area he lived in, which was a Prakrit, a derivative of Sanskrit. He must have known Sanskrit, of course, but he preferred to speak in the popular tongue so as to reach the people. From this Prakrit developed the Pali language of the early Buddhist scriptures. Buddha's dialogues and other accounts and discussions were recorded in Pali long after his death, and these form the basis of Buddhism in Ceylon, Burma, and Siam, where the Hinayana form of Buddhism prevails.

Some hundreds of years after Buddha there was a revival of Sanskrit in India, and Buddhist scholars wrote their philosophical and other works in Sanskrit. Ashvaghosha's writings and plays (the earliest plays we have), which are meant to be propaganda for Buddhism, are in Sanskrit. These Sanskrit writings of Buddhist scholars in India went to China, Japan, Tibet, and Central Asia, where the Mahayana form of Buddhism prevailed.

The age which gave birth to the Buddha had been one of tremendous mental ferment and philosophic inquiry in India. And not in India only for that was the age of Lao-tze and Confucius, of Zoroaster and Pythagoras. In India it gave rise to materialism as well as to the Bhagavad Gita, to Buddhism and Jainism, and to many other currents of thought which were subsequently to consolidate themselves in the various systems of Indian philosophy. There were different strata of thought, one leading to another, and sometimes overlapping each other.

Different schools of philosophy developed side by side with Buddhism, and Buddhism itself had schisms leading to the forma-tion of different schools of thought. The philosophic spirit gradually declined giving place to scholasticism and polemical controversy.

Buddha had repeatedly warned his people against learned controversy over metaphysical problems. 'Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent,' he is reported to have said. Truth was to be found in life itself and not in argument about matters outside the scope of life and therefore beyond the ken of the human intellect. He emphasized the ethical aspects of life and evidently felt that these suffered and were neglected because of a preoccupation with metaphysical subtleties. Early Buddhism reflected to some extent this philosophic and rational spirit of the Buddha, and its inquiries were based on experience. In the world of experience the concept of pure being could not be grasped and was therefore put aside; so also the idea of a creator God, which was a presumption not capable of logical proof. Nevertheless the experience remained and was real enough in a sense; what could this be except a mere flux of becoming, ever changing into some-thing else ? So these intermediate degrees of reality were recognized and further inquiry proceeded on these lines on a psychological basis. Buddha, rebel as he was, hardly cut himself off from the ancient faith of the land. Mrs. Rhys Davids says that 'Gautama was born and brought up and lived and died as a Hindu.... There was not much in the metaphysics and principles of Gautama which can-not be found in one or other of the orthodox systems, and a great deal of his morality could be matched from earlier or later Hindu books. Such originality as Gautama possessed lay in the way in which he adapted, enlarged, ennobled, and systematized that which had already been well said by others; in the way in which he carried out to their logical conclusion principles of equity and justice already acknowledged by some of the most prominent Hindu thinkers. The difference between him and other teachers lay chiefly in his deep earnestness and in his broad public spirit of philanthropy (This quotation, as well as much else, is taken from Sir S. Radhakrishnan" s 'Indian Philosophy [George Allen and Unwin, London, 1940). (Ceylon, Burma, Siam)].

Yet Buddha had sown the seeds of revolt against the conventional practice of the religion of his day. It was not his theory or philosophy that was objected to—for every conceivable philosophy could be advocated within the fold of orthodox belief so long as it remained a theory—but the interference with the social life and organization of the people. The old system was free and flexible in thought, allowing for every variety of opinion, but in practice it was rigid, and non-conformity with practice was not approved. So, inevitably, Buddhism tended to break away from the old faith, and, after Buddha's death, the breach widened. With the decline of early Buddhism, the Mahayana form developed, the older form being known as the Hinayana. It was in this Mahayana that Buddha was made into a god and devotion to him as a personal god developed. The Buddha image also appeared from the Grecian north-west. About the same time there was a revival of Brahminism in India and of Sanskrit scholarship. Between the Hinayana and the Mahayana there was bitter controversy and the debate and opposition to each other has continued throughout subsequent history. The HinSyana countries  even now rather look down upon the Buddhism that prevails in China and Japan, and I suppose this feeling is reciprocated.

While the Hinayana adhered, in some measure, to the ancient purity of doctrine and circumscribed it in a Pali Canon, the Mahayana spread out in every direction, tolerating almost every-thing and adapting itself to each country's distinctive outlook. In India it began to approach the popular religion; in each of the other countries—China and Japan and Tibet—it had a separate development. Some of the greatest of the early Buddhist thinkers moved away from the agnostic attitude which Buddha had taken up in regard to the existence of the soul and rejected it completely.

Among a galaxy of men of remarkable intellect, Nagarjuna stands out as one of the greatest minds that India has produced. He lived during Kanishka's reign, about the beginning of the Christian era, and he was chiefly responsible for formulating the Mahayana doctrines. The power and daring of his thought are remarkable and he is not afraid of arriving at conclusions which to most people must have appeared as scandalous and shocking. With a ruthless logic he pursues his argument till it leads him to deny even what he believed in. Thought cannot know itself and cannot go outside itself or know another. There is no God apart from the universe, and no universe apart from God, and both are equally appearances. And so he goes on till there is nothing left, no distinction between truth and error, no possibility of understanding or misunderstanding anything, for how can anyone misunderstand the unreal? Nothing is real. The world has only a phenomenal existence; it is just an ideal system of qualities and relations, in which we believe but which we cannot intelligibly explain. Yet behind all this experience he hints at something—the Absolute—which is beyond the capacity of our thinking, for in the very process of thought it becomes something relative (Professor Th. Stcherbatsky of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., in his book ' The Conception of Buddhist Nirvana' (Leningrad, 1927) suggests that Nagarjuna should be placed 'among the great philosophers of humanity.' He refers to his 'wonderful style' which never ceases to be interesting, bold, baffling, sometimes seemingly arrogant. He compares Nagarjuna's views with those of Bradley and Hegel: 'Very remarkable are then the coincidences between Nagarjuna's negativism and the condemnation by Mr. Bradley of almost every conception of the everyday world: things and qualities, relations, space and time, change, causation, motion, the self. From the Indian standpoint Bradley can be characterised as a genuine Madhyamika. But above all these parallelisms we may perhaps find a still greater family likeness between the dialectical method of Hegel and Nagarjuna's dialectics ' Stcherbatsky points out certain resemblances between some of the Buddhist schools of philosophy and the outlook of modern science, especially the conception of the final condition of the universe according to the law of entropy. He gives an interesting story. When the yet it is something very different from our conception of vacancy or nothingness.). This absolute is often referred to in Buddhist philosophy as Shunyata or nothingness (Shunya is the word for the zero mark) Professor Stcherbatsky who is an authority on the subject, having personally examined the original texts in various languages, including Tibetan, says that 'shunyata' is relativity. Everything being relative and interdependent has no absoluteness by itself. Hence it is 'shunya.' On the other hand, there is something entirely beyond the phenomenal world, but comprising it, which might be considered the absolute. This cannot be conceived or described in terms of the finite and phenomenal world and hence it is referred to as 'tathata' or thatness, suchness. This absolute has also been called 'shunyata'. f This occurs in Vasubandhu's' Abhidharmakosa', which was written in the early fifth century A.C., collecting previous views and traditions. The original in Sanskrit has been lost. But Chinese and Tibetan translations exist. The Chinese translation is by the famous Chinese pilgrim to India, Hsuan Tsang. From this Chinese translation a French translation has been made (Paris-Louvain, 1926). My colleague and companion in detention, Acharya Narendra Dev, has been translating this book from the French into Hindi and English, and he pointed out this passage to me. It is in the third chapter  educational authorities of newly founded republic of Burials in Transbaikalia in the U.S.S.R. started an anti-religious propaganda, they emphasized that modern science takes a materialistic view of the universe. The Buddhist monks of that republic, who were Mahayanists, retorted in a pamphlet, pointing out that materialism was not unknown to them and that, in fact, one of their schools had developed a materialistic theory.

In our world of experience we have to call it nothingness for there is no other word for it, but in terms of meta-physical reality it means something transcendent and immanent in all things. Says a famous Buddhist scholar: 'It is on account of Shunyata that everything becomes possible, without it nothing in the world is possible.' All this shows where metaphysics leads to and how wise was Buddha's warning against such speculations. Yet the human mind refuses to imprison itself and continues to reach out for that fruit of knowledge which it well knows is beyond reach. Metaphysics developed in Buddhist philosophy but the method was based on a psychological approach. Again, it is surprising to find the insight into the psychological states of the mind. The subconscious self of modern psychology is clearly envisaged and discussed. An extraordinary passage in one of the old books has been pointed out to me. This reminds one in a way of the Oedipus Complex theory, though the approach is wholly different.| Four definite schools of philosophy developed in Buddhism, two of these belonged to the Hinayana branch, and two to the Mahayana. All these Buddhist systems of philosophy have their origin in the Upanishads, but they do not accept the authority of the Vedas. It is this denial of the Vedas that distinguishes them from the so-called Hindu systems of philosophy which developed about the same time. These latter, while accepting the Vedas generally and, in a sense, paying formal obeisance to them, do not consider them as infallible, and indeed go their own way without much regard for them. As the Vedas and the Upanishads spoke with many voices, it was always possible for subsequent thinkers to emphasize one aspect rather than another, and to build their system on this foundation.

Professor Radhakrishnan thus describes the logical movement of Buddhist thought as it found expression in the four schools. It begins with a dualistic metaphysics looking upon knowledge as a direct awareness of objects. In the next stage ideas are made the media through which reality is apprehended, thus raising a screen between mind and things. These two stages represent the Hinayana schools. The Mahayana schools went further and abolished the things behind the images and reduced all experience to a series of ideas in their mind. The ideas of relativity and the sub-conscious self come in. In the last stage—this was Nagarjuna's Madhyamika philosophy or the middle way—mind itself is dissolved into mere ideas, leaving us with loose units of ideas and perceptions about which we can say nothing definite.

Thus we arrive finally at airy nothing, or something that is so difficult to grasp for our finite minds that it cannot be described or defined. The most we can say is that it is some kind of consciousness —vijyana as it is called. In spite of this conclusion arrived at by psychological and metaphysical analysis which ultimately reduces the conception of the invisible world or the absolute to pure consciousness, and thus to nothing, so far as we can use or comprehend words, it is emphasized that ethical relations have a definite value in our finite world. So in our lives and in our human relations we have to con-form to ethics and live the good life. To that life and to this phenomenal world we can and should apply reason and knowledge and experience. The infinite, or whatever it may be called, lies some-where in the beyond and to it therefore these cannot be applied.