January 27, 2008

Vyākrta & Vyākarana

Day is the symbol of the continual manifestation of material things the vyākrta, the manifest or fundamentally in Sat, in infinite being; Night is the symbol of their continual disappearance into avyākrta, the Unmanifest or finally into asat, into infinite non-being...The birth of one is in the Eastern Ocean, of the other in the Western, that is to say, in sat and asat, in the ocean of Being and the ocean of denial of Being or else in vyākrta prakrti and avyākrta prakrti, occult sea of Chaos, manifest sea of Cosmos...
the early Vedantins attached great importance to words in both their apparent and their hidden meaning and no one who does not follow them in this path, can hope to enter into the associations with which their minds were full. Yet the importance of associations in colouring and often in determining our thoughts, determining even philosophic and scientific thought when it is most careful to be exact and free, should be obvious to the most superficial psychologist. Swami Dayananda's method with the Vedas, although it may have been too vigorously applied and more often out of the powerful mind of the modern Indian thinker than out of the recovered mentality of the old Aryan Rishis, would nevertheless, in its principle, have been approved by these Vedantins...
the Upanishads, always intent on their deeper object, never waste time over mere mythology. We must therefore go deeper than Shankara and follow out the intuition he himself has abandoned...It illustrates the Vedantic use of the etymology of words and it throws light on the pre­cise notions of the old thinkers about those super-terrestrial beings with whom the vision of the ancient Hindus peopled this universe. The Vedantic writers, we continually find, dwelt deeply and curiously on the innate and on the concealed meaning of words; vyākarana, always considered essential to the interpretation of the Vedas, they used not merely as scholars, but much more as intuitive thinkers. It was not only the actual etymological sense or the actual sense in use but the suggestions of the sound and syllables of the words which attracted them; for they found that by dwelling on them new and deep truths arose into their understandings...

No comments:

Post a Comment