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Updated: May 28, 2025
An Indian, who called himself a Parsee, but there was reason to think that he was really a Bengali Hindu, was on his way to Germany to learn Sanskrit. As India is its home, although it is no longer a spoken language, except that Sanskrit words are found in many vernaculars, it appeared strange that an Indian should be travelling westwards in order to learn an Eastern language.
We know that the Pali recension which we possess was not the only one, for fragments of a Sanskrit version have been discovered. There was probably a large floating literature of sutras, often presenting several recensions of the same document worked up in different ways.
Firstly the Sanskrit Abhidharma of the Sarvâstivâdins seems to date from his council and secondly a Buddhist drama by Aśvaghosha of about the same time represents the Buddha as speaking in Sanskrit whereas the inferior characters speak Prakrit.
The worshipers of Vishnu, called the Preserver, the first-born of Brahma, constitute the most extensive sect of India, and their ideas relating to this form of the Divinity are represented by tradition and poetry, and are particularly developed in the great monuments of Sanskrit literature.
The old Sanskrit books call this selective concentrative power "Vach," which means "Voice," and is the root of the Latin word "Vox," having the same meaning. Philo, and the Neo-Platonists of Alexandria who follow him, call it "Logos," which means the same; and we are all familiar with the opening verses of St. John's Gospel and First Epistle in which he attributes Creation to "The Word."
He thinks that the name of the Great Bear is the result of a mistake as to the meaning of words. There was in Sanskrit, he says, a root ark, or arch, meaning 'to be bright. The stars are called riksha, that is, bright ones, in the Veda. 'The constellations here called the Rikshas, in the sense of the "bright ones," would be homonymous in Sanskrit with the Bears.
In 1789, Jones published his translation of the drama of S'akuntala, that charming specimen of Hindu literature, so full of feeling and refinement. Sanskrit grammars and dictionaries were now multiplied, and a regular rivalry was set on foot in British India, which would undoubtedly soon have spread to Europe, had not the continental blockade prevented the introduction of works published abroad.
It has an unfortunate but distinct later phase known in Sanskrit as Mantrayâna and Vajrayâna but generally described by Europeans as Tantrism. This phase took some of the worst features in Hinduism, such as spells, charms, and the worship of goddesses, and with misplaced ingenuity fitted them into Buddhism. I shall treat of it in a subsequent chapter, for it is chronologically late.
Sanskrit Literature, p. 80. See Kingsborough, Mexican Antiquities, vol. vi. Probably the wide range of this doctrine would have been far better and more generally known, had not the Christian Church, all through, made the greatest of efforts and taken the greatest precautions to extinguish and snuff out all evidence of pagan claims on the subject.
"Among the Indians, the people from whom perhaps all the cultivation of the human race has been derived, plays were known long before they could have experienced any foreign influence." Sanskrit plays are full of lyrical passages describing scenes or persons presented to view, or containing reflections suggested by the incidents that occur. They usually consist of four-line stanzas.
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