Knowledge, faith and Sanskrit

[Guest guest]

In a message dated 8/9/00 6:14:45 AM Pacific Daylight Time,

harsha-hkl writes:

 

<<

To communicate profound truths any language will do! English is quite

adequate for the job! Where there is the experience of Truth and Self, the

words follow like obedient servants. In fact, for those seeking intensely to

Know and Realize their true and original and primal state, the advice to

learn Sanskrit might be quite irrelevant. Sanskrit, or any other language

must be mastered through the mind. The Self is Realized by seeing the

unreality of the mind, by absorbing the mind into the Heart and Realization

of Self as Pure Consciousness. When the mind disappears, so does Sanskrit or

any other language, the culture one is born into as well as any and all

conditioning and identification. The whole universe appears as a shadow of

the Self, so what can be said of a particular language, culture, etc. These

are shadows of even shadows. How much importance should we give them on the

spiritual path. Well, perhaps the answer is, "As much as you like - it is up

to you." >>

 

 

This is masterfully stated. There's even something else that one may want

to consider before swallowing whole the idea of studying sacred scriptures in

sanskrit. lt's been said that both western and lndian scholars are uncertain

as to the exact interpretation of the form of sanskrit used in the vedic

period. All modern dictionaries rely heavily on a single source, the lexicon

compiled by Bothlingk and Roth in the 19th century, which is acknowledged to

contain alot of guesswork. So we may simply have no way of grasping the true

literal meaning of the Vedas and Upanishads.

 

Before l go too far in giving any

impression of my own scholarship, l'll give credit to Alan Watts for the

above observation -- l'd read it not long ago and was reminded of it when l

read this post. )

 

What we don't need to be scholars to know is that whereas the mind is limited

in what it can comprehend spiritually, the heart is unlimited in its ability

to love.

jerrysan