Sanskrit And Indian Civilization

TITLE: Sanskrit and Indian Civilization CHANNEL: Wes Cecil DATE: 2012-11-28 ---TRANSCRIPT--- All right, ladies and gentlemen, let’s get rolling. Let’s get rolling tonight. Um Sanskrit and Indian civilization. Two notes. One, I always apologize for mispronouncing things. Tonight I will set a new record in mispronunciation. Sanskrit I actually studied Sanskrit in college briefly. Uh long enough to learn that Sanskrit is an actually an impossible language. It can neither be read nor written. That’s my claim. Uh despite all the evidence to the contrary. So I apologize for the names as as we move along. So uh bear with me for some of the mispronunciations. Um so second is this always this notion of trying to cover a lot of ground. You know, Sanskrit Indian civilization in an hour or so that’s a fair bit to cover. Well, and in this case it’s it’s just an appallingly huge and incredibly ridiculous thing to attempt. So I will leave out everything practically and I’ll just try and hit on a few high points. Our story begins roughly 3,500 BC. So what is that? 5,500 years ago? Um when the Aryans so-called now we call them the Aryans came into uh northern India from roughly the Swat Valley. So I put the map on there uh on the back. If you look on the back of the sheet, it’s in the upper left corner there uh just above uh between basically Srinagar and Kabul. In that area. Um a group of of peoples who called themselves by the way this is a self they they referred to themselves as the Aryans which simply means the noble ones, the good ones. Uh everyone else being dirt. Uh it it’s the same functions similarly to the Greek notion of the barbarian. Right? The to the Greeks the barbarians were everybody didn’t speak Greek. Uh which um so in a sort of used in a similar way when they come into this area. Of course there was already a very rich and quite genetically diverse community in this area um when they when they cross into what is modern-day India. Um and they referred to them or in in the name that’s applied to these people are the Dravidians. Um this distinction between the Aryans and the Dravidians 5,500 years later is probably the single defining feature of modern Indian society, believe it or not. So this this we’ll talk about this more but you want to keep this in mind that as time goes on the Aryans and the Dravidians are they’re still at it today. It’s a sort of amazing uh historical moment. Um so yeah, 5,500 years later still these tensions and differences and distinctions uh within uh Indian society. Uh another note um at this time is we’re a predominantly monolingual society. What follows makes no sense to a predominantly monolingual society. It’s important to understand that for most of human history to be an educated person, to have a person of any position whatsoever meant that you spoke many languages, most of them with perfect fluency. In for most of world history um the equivalent would be as if in America today we speak English conversationally around the table at home but because our biggest trading partner is Japan say every business person knows Japanese. Anybody at all interested in business knows Japanese because you’re going to do most of your business in Japanese and the government does everything in Spanish. Right? What this means is that there would be people in the government who only spoke Spanish but not many. They’re going to mostly also know English and Japanese, probably some other languages. There would be people who only spoke English but they would be sort of the hoi polloi. They could never do anything with government because they don’t even speak the language and they couldn’t read the language of any government documents cuz they would all be in Spanish. And they certainly couldn’t do much business because the business is all conducted in Japanese. And so to be monolingual, to only speak one language or usually the vernacular language of an area for most of human history meant you didn’t matter. You you were the peasants. You were you were nothing. Uh so so one thing that we need to understand and bring this up several times is when the uh Aryans come into the area that’s occupied by the Dravidians and begin to intermingle and conquer and move the Dravidians spoke a bunch of language, the Aryans spoke their language. They don’t cancel each other out. They kind of float along together. And there’s all this mixing and influence over thousands of years but contemporaneously, it’s not like there’s ever going to be a time when the language is Sanskrit, the government is composed in Sanskrit, the people on the street speak Sanskrit. This isn’t going to happen. I mean rarely, occasionally but basically this is this is never the case. Um and so you keep that in mind cuz from a society like ours where monolingualism is the assumed position, what happens may seem slightly strange but we’re actually historically the strange ones. So important. So 3,500 years ago here come the Aryans. And we’ll call this era the Vedic era. When they show up in India, all the evidence that the notion of the Vedas are already there. And the Vedic Vedic texts are the earliest texts and ideas that we have from the ancient period um in a proto sort of proto Sanskrit speech. Um and this goes back the Indians will claim 17,000 years but probably about 3,000 years BC, 2,000 years BC right around in there. So if you look back on the front of your paper Om Namah Shivaya. This is from the Varanya uh Vedas. So it uh has anybody you people heard Om Namah Shivaya? Om Namah Shivaya? Yeah, this is this is taken from um again the Aranya one of the original four primary Vedas. You have the Rigveda, the Aranya Vedas. I forget the other two. Uh those are the two most famous but this was the Veda that you chanted, the chanting mantra Vedas. Uh these are the ones that are all about chanting and and and speech. And so this huge Vedic literature is developed almost entirely focused on lots of gods, Agni fire god being a key one but sacrifice. Sacrifice sacrifice sacrifice. These these were ancient religion built on you know, sort of like Old Testament Hebrews in a way. Lots of information about how you cut things up and chop them up and burn them. Um the horse sacrifice being the single most important uh sacrifice. Uh and the Brahmin at this time are the people who lead the sacrifices. Most importantly because this is an oral culture uh the focus is on pronouncing the ritual words and chants and mantras correctly. And I mean correctly. They felt that a single mispronunciation could cause everything to go awry and the gods would smite you. Cuz it meant you didn’t care. And so they spent a huge amount of time uh in the Vedic texts and the Upanishads everything in fact all their texts talking about pronunciation, grammar, uh word choice. They’re hugely concerned with this because always this is an oral culture. We’ll get a lot of writing. Sanskrit has an a vast and impressive literature that’s written down. They have no sacred text. There are no sacred texts as such as we understand them uh in Indian civilization until you get uh about 1,700 uh AD. So a couple hundred years ago. For a couple thousand years they just didn’t believe in sacred text. They believed in a sacred oral tradition. This was the single most important thing that they focused on. So you get the Vedas. And the and the Vedic period goes on again for less I mean it’s hard to know exactly several Well, the Indians will tell you they’re still in the Vedic period. Right? So I mean it’s still going on. So Om Namah Shivaya uh is is probably the single most Vedic favorite uh famous Vedic chant. How many people have heard this by the way? Om Namah Shivaya? Yeah. So so think about that. That chant is at least 4,500 years old. That’s a minimum age for that. Um and because of the care with which Sanskrit pronunciation and phonology has been maintained within their their tradition that’s exactly how it was pronounced 4,500 years ago. I mean it’s one of the few cases where we could linguists can say, “You know what? Probably hasn’t changed. If it’s changed very small amount.” So if that’s the the the huge continuity of literary tradition we’re talking about which is why I say you know this is just an absurd attempt to cover this in an hour. But Om Namah Shivaya you know, 4,000 years at least that’s been pronounced continuously and it sounds, you know, if I were saying it correctly like that. Uh and then of course I gave you the little Sanskrit there to give you an idea. Uh this big Sanskrit block you see is an actual sample. This is the horse sacrifice uh from an early Vedic text. That’s the actual horse sacrifice there. Um so that’s what Sanskrit looks like. It’s read left to right just like English. Um written in that same way. They do a lot of pressing together of letters and words and so they can make hugely long words but they could also sort of abbreviate them and stick them together. And this is a an interesting development that has all kinds of influences we’ll talk about. So that period continues till about 600 BC, again, give or take. 600-ish BC when it starts developing the Upanishads. Uh called again Brahmanic culture, but what you get with the Upanishads, the next major text that we’re concerned with, is sort of the Upanishads are didactic texts. I mean, they’re all kinds of things, but they’re didactic texts that attempt to explain what the Vedas mean. They all point to the Vedas. So, you keep the Vedas alive and you bring them into the Upanishads. And in the Upanishads, you have all these stories where, you know, a husband and wife are sitting around the table and they say, “Oh, you know, what should we do?” And they have a discussion, and then the conclusion is, “This is the correct thing to do uh according to the gods or the sacrifice or what the Vedas say.” So, you have all these sorts of different kinds of traditions. Again, perhaps most famously, um which I’ve concluded here, we won’t read all of it, but this is a selection from the description of the universe as a horse. And this is important to note because one of the things that’s happening is there’s this slow shift. If you think of Hinduism today and its respect for cows and animals and often vegetarian, not exclusively, but primarily vegetarian. The notion that back in the day they were sacrificing horses and other animals a lot seems odd. But what happens in part is this literal sacrifice comes to be increasingly embodied as sort of a metaphoric or literary device and idea. And you can see this in one of the earliest Upanishads here where you get the description of the universe universe as a horse. So, the literal sacrifice of the horse to the literal gods becomes this metaphorical literary understanding of a horse. That says the universe itself is just like a horse. You don’t have to kill it specifically anymore. Um you can do this. And so, it’s it’s an important transition. It says, “Dawn is the head of the horse sacrificial. The sun is his eyes. His breath is the wind. His wide open mouth is fire. The master of might universal. Time is the self of the horse sacrificial. Heaven is his back and the mid-world his belly. Earth is his footing. The regions are his flanks and the half months are their joints. The days and nights are of his body. The strands are food in his belly. The rivers are his veins. His liver and lungs are the mountains. Herbs and plants are his hairs. The rising is his font, and the setting of his hidden portions. When he stretches himself, then it lightens. When he shakes his frame, then it thunders. When he urinates, then it rains. Speech, verily, is the sound of him.” Right? So, this invocation of the power of the horse as again, the embody I think quite lovely. Much of this is quite lovely. Couple of things that you get um that are important in the Upanishads is two ideas that we essentially have almost no version of um in in modern world until very late. One is the Brahman and two is the Atman. There’s roughly a billion pages in in in India written on what are the Brahman and what are the Atman. I mean, it’s a hugely compelling philosophical debate. To simplify and sort of oversimplify is is the Brahman is the idea of the universal spirit that is everything. Sort of some equivalent to what we might call the prime mover in medieval philosophy. The spirit that pervades all that is the universe. The Atman is the essence of that that is in you, in an individual. Um one of the analogies that’s used is to say that um a tree, if the universe is a tree, then the entire tree, everything, the life force of the tree, that is the Brahman. A fruit hanging on the tree, say us, is the Atman. And notice the fruit is the tree, but it’s distinguishable from the tree, but it is the tree. Right? So, that the notion that So, the Atman is part of the universe, but it’s also distinct, but not so distinct that it’s not part of it. Does that make sense? So, this This is one of the central philosophical ideas that come up early. Now, again, we’re talking this is 3,500 years ago. This is a central philosophical core already established uh in the Upanishads. Then we get this interesting I like So, I’m sorry, I’m moving quickly. So, you have this period of the Upanishads. Again, uh you also get I should mention the distinction of light skin becomes uh important and is included in here in this discussion. Who are the good people? The Aryans, the noble people, are the light-skinned people. The bad payers bad people people who don’t count, they’re the dark-skinned people, the Dravidians. Um and so, this is built into the notion you can see the beginning of the caste system, which is is already formed to a certain extent, not to the way it’s developed today, but it is starting to develop. And the the key distinction is skin color and education. But notice, if you show up, you’re powerful, you conquer a region, and you say, “Look, here’s the deal. You need to be able to speak our language, not your language, very well, and you need to have light skin.” Notice what a great deal this is, right? This is This This sort of gives you a big advantage in maintaining a social order cuz you can say, “Well, theoretically, everybody’s okay and equal, but in practice, because you’re dark-skinned and because you don’t really know our language, which is very formal and difficult, you’re sort of out of business.” Uh it was a very powerful means of maintaining social segregation. Right now today in India, if you go and get um marriage ads, right? Sort of the eHarmony equivalents in India. Uh the traditionally they’re they’re traditionally placed by uncles. So, it’s if your uncle will contact my uncle if we’re going to get married. And it says, you know, it will be two of the most important things that they will list are uh skin color, fair-skinned. The fairer the skin, the better. And one imagines that of course everybody’s lying the same way they do here, you know. Uh and sort of trying to shift it up. Um and so, if you’re going to be dark-complected, then you have to offset that with a lot of money or a lot of education or particularly high religious status. And so, you can see the negotiation. But again, this distinction that’s there already in the Upanishads 3,500 4,000 years ago um is carried forward today. You can see it all over Indian society. You can see it very clearly um like I said, in the in the wanted ads, the sort of dating ads in Indian newspapers, although online now as well. So, this develops in the struggle with you richness continues. Um and then you get two things happen almost simultaneously. Uh one is you get the rise of of the oral tradition of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. These are the two founding epics of Indian society. Uh there’s several people have claimed that uh the the Mahabharata is always on Indian TV. I don’t know if this is literally true, but apparently it’s pretty damn close to literally true. So, at any moment in India, you can turn on the TV and flip through channels, and eventually you’ll find the Mahabharata. At some point, some place, they’re doing it. It’s always on. Currently in India, there’s a party called the BJP, which is sort of a Hindu fundamentalist party, sort of a Hindu nationalist fundamentalist party. It’s a very strange mixture. Um and they ran a character as Rama. They That’s how he That’s how he ran. He won. He He went around in a golden chariot painted blue and won. He was a member of parliament or, you know, their house of representatives, essentially. Congress, right? So, again, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana are not gone. They’re there. They’re these these incredibly powerful social forces and intellectual literary forces in India, but primarily oral. The earliest written version of the Mahabharata now is from 1400 AD. So, they’d been around for probably 12 to 2 1,200 to 2,000 years orally before they begin to be systematically written down, which is again important for me. So, it’s sort of like Homer and the Iliad. We know that poem existed for a long long time before it was written down, but nothing like 1,500 or 2,000 years, not even close. But in a culture that’s so attached to oral traditions, it it it apparently didn’t seem like they needed to do a lot of that. Um so, amazing. But this is where the gods that we’re more familiar with now begin to rise in importance. Agni, the fire god, if you leave read the Upanishads and particularly the Vedas, you would think, “Oh, Agni, he’s going to be the the god.” When you get to, you know, modern Hinduism, now you can’t hardly find Agni. I mean, you can find every god, but he’s not a prominent god in any longer in Hinduism. You know, Shiva, Rama, and Krishna, these these other ones, Ganesha, have have rose risen up. But a lot of that comes from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. So, this oral tradition begins again around 600-ish. Again, these dates for oral texts very difficult to fix. Much clearer distinction between castes starts to be developed. Much clearer definition of, you know, who’s supposed to be doing what. And so, what we can read back into that is a very highly stratified caste system developing. Huge divisions between rich and poor, educated and not educated. Sanskrit at this time is a literary language who keeps shooting off daughter language. I was going to give you a list of all the daughter languages of Sanskrit in India, but it would have filled all the pages I’ve given you. I mean, it’s just huge, dozens. The written language itself, though, in 400 BC, is systematized by a guy called Panini who wrote a grammar that is the grammar of Sanskrit. Sanskrit, since that day, has been written almost precisely the same. I mean, basically the same. So, for the last 2,500 years, at least, the Sanskrit has not changed in the way it is written down. The grammar and the words and the language and the endings not similar, not kind of close, precisely the same. So, if you can read Sanskrit today, you can take a text from 1,000 years ago and read it. You can take a text from 2,000 years ago and read it. You don’t have a lot from 2,000 years ago, mostly inscriptions, but you can read it. Cuz it was the rules were set down in 400 BC. They’ve been developed and ex- explored, those are the rules, and they’ve stuck with them to a degree that’s almost hard to imagine. For comparison, I want to give you two sheets. Lots of sheets tonight. There was a lot of stuff to cover. Uh the first column is the wanderer. This is a 10th century Old English poem. Oft him anhaga earf gebidep meotod miltsa, paet he ne mot mece Right. Right? So, that’s 1,000 That’s English 1,000 years ago. We can’t read it. Right? We can maybe make out the occasional word if we really look at it. You can actually do better than you think when you work out some of the spelling conventions and whatnot. But, basically, it’s completely inaccessible to us. Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tale, 1,400 years. Whan that April with his shoures soot the droghte of March hath perced to the roote, and bathed every veyne in swich licour of which vertu engendered is the flour. Right? We can do okay with that. Okay? You know, we’re we’re doing okay. That’s That’s all right. So, that’s about 600 years ago. To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. To die, is to sleep no more. Oh, that we can read. That we can definitely read. You can read If you can read Shake- Sanskrit today 2,000 years ago reads at least as easily as we read Shakespeare, probably easier. So, I mean, that’s more than I mean, well, it’s it’s what Shakespeare is 400 years ago. It’s five times older than Shakespeare. This is essentially unique in the history of languages to have that sort of continuity of literacy is astounding. And so, you have this profoundly powerful literary language. Unbelievably complex, by the way. It has every possible ending uh derivation. We’ll talk about this a little bit. It’s just unbelievably complex, but rich and powerful, therefore. Huge vocabulary. Estimated that the number of words in classical Sanskrit is about 115,000. Um that’s that’s that’s massive. The I don’t think I don’t think like French today I don’t think has 115,000 words. And this is you’re going back classical Sanskrit again. So, this is a vast, rich literary language that allows you to write things like Ramayana uh and and the Mahabharata. But, overlaying this also is this difficult social structure, caste system. Half the people or more don’t matter, oppressed, kept out, don’t get to participate. It’s a literary language of the elite. You have to be educated to read it, to speak it. It’s a court language. Very very distant, very divorced. At the time that the grammar is being codified along comes the Buddha. Haha. Here we get this amazing development. Um You have to understand this that the Buddha comes against this tradition. There are four noble truths. Noble, by the way, the exact word in Sanskrit is Arya, the Aryans. They Even the Buddha, who’s got this huge leveling political philosophy, says, “What’s good?” Arya It’s the word for noble. The word for noble is the Aryans. Right? And that what is what noble is. So, the four noble truths Actually, it’s again, that’s even mistranslated cuz it’s really is the truths that make you like the Aryans. That’s That’s what That’s how it should be translated from the Sanskrit. These are the truths that will make you noble like the Aryans are noble. This will make you good like those people who are sort of trying to level. Right? It’s this weird, difficult situation. Um and the Buddha does a couple of things. One, he gets a lot of converts very quickly, not surprisingly. Uh and and early on, they said, “Well, use the vernacular languages cuz that’s how you reach everybody.” And about 10 minutes later, they’re like, “Ah, let’s do it in Sanskrit.” Or Pali, which is an a very close associated offshoot of Sanskrit. And then they created what they call Buddhist Sanskrit, which is sort of a version of classical Sanskrit that a lot of Buddhist scholars used. And then a little later, they just said, “Well, let’s just write it all in classical Sanskrit.” So, it took about 200 years to reestablish precisely the literary hierarchy that had existed when the Buddha said, “Hey, let’s level this out.” Cuz people love Sanskrit. This is one amazing thing about its history. It wasn’t a lot of conquering and warfare. This is what happens right now. Buddhism begins to spread. And as it spreads, it be- Again, the Buddhists didn’t like round up some tanks and roll over their neighbors. They just went, “Hey, we’ve got this idea. You guys want to play along?” And they said, “Yeah, yeah, that’s a great idea.” Um and it spreads all over India. Got started spreading into India. Of course, famously, it spreads into China. It spreads down the coast. It spreads to Sri Lanka by Indian traders traveling to the foreign countries. And as they travel they take not just Buddhism with them, but Pali and Sanskrit. And so, you get this amazing development where in Sri Lanka you have texts in classical Sanskrit being written about Buddhism in an alphabet derived from the Sanskrit alphabet. Almost all the Southeast Asian alphabets that we’re familiar with, the ones that look like all squiggles, they’re they’re developed out of the Sanskrit. If you look at the Sanskrit and then you look at their their alphabets, the Thai, Burmese, you should recognize this They’re because their alphabets were based on this because they were reading the classical Buddhist texts either in the Pali, again, closely associated with Sanskrit, or the traditional Sanskrit. And so, the language spreads everywhere. I mean, all over. Not through war not through conquest or struggle or strive, but originally with a bunch of Buddhist monks. And it’s one of these weird things in history that nobody’s exactly quite sure why everyone didn’t say, “Oh, we’ll just translate it into our language.” Apparently, they said, “Wow. That Sanskrit is really great. We’re going to just learn it. Rather than translate it, we’ll just learn it and use it.” And so, it was adopted basically as the language of Buddhism, and Buddhism spread all over. And so, it just brought Sanskrit way out of where it had originally been, which is sort of in the central area. If you just draw a circle around New Delhi, that’s sort of where the Sanskrit daughter languages were sort of growing and and the Sanskrit written language and literate language existed. And then boom, there’s this explosion. With great histories of China There’s three or four Chinese guys that traveled from China to learn Buddhism back from the mother land. So, Buddhism comes into China, they say, “Well, we should go back to India to get the real stuff.” And then they write back, and some of them stayed and learned Sanskrit. They said, “Wow, we want to learn Sanskrit. This is This is great.” So, they went back, and so we have Buddhist texts being written in Sanskrit in China by Chinese. Which is, you know, they they which is a sort of this amazing development. And so, Sanskrit itself, as a language, just spreads all over the place. Now, notice the commons people It is not a vernacular language. The average man in the street in um Sri Lanka is not speaking Sanskrit or any any anything vaguely remotely associated with Sanskrit. But, it becomes the classical, liturgical, and literary language, nonetheless, all over this region. And when you consider this region that accounts for roughly half of the world’s population today, you know, this this is an incredibly influential idea. Um And so, what’s happening at the same time is the nature of Sanskrit starts coming into play. Sanskrit is this incredibly rich literary language that allows for that you can you can It basically allows you to talk about states of mind better than any language ever besides it. It is, if you want to do self-introspection analysis, uh psychological discovery, feelings, emotions, states of mind, states that you want Sanskrit. They have This is what it’s designed for. Like, scholars have commented on this that you can read the Mahabharata or or or the Ramayana. These people were trading all over the world. They had maps. They they knew distances. They knew where cities were. They knew how canals were built. This was a thriving ancient civilization. You can read a million pages of Sanskrit and no one will ever mention anything like that. They just don’t. I mean, what they talk about is, you know, if the moon is high, I feel a little like this, and then I trade with my god. I mean, it’s this incredible It’s just again, it is so On one hand, it’s vague. It’s like the metaphysical language of all time. And it is so rich in literary possibilities. This is This is astonishing. But there’s this this guy Kaviraja, the the sort of king of the poets, but it’s actually His last name is Kaviraja. I can’t pronounce his first name, so I’m not going to try it. So you have the Mahabharata, which is I think four times as long as the Iliad and Odyssey combined. It’s long. The Ramayana is not quite that long, but it’s close. He wrote a poem that is both simultaneously. So every line is both stories simultaneously. Because it’s so rich in the possibility of allusion and reference and pun that you could do that. And so every line you can read the line and go, “Oh, this is you know, uh Arjuna out trying to get some cattle. Or this is Rama out looking for Sita.” And then of course, because it’s allusions in both directions, it’s also a comment on both of those stories simultaneously in one line. As I I was trying to figure if I could write I could not figure out how to reproduce this in English. Uh cuz what you end up doing is writing it and saying, “Well, this word can mean this or this. And this one combined with that one can mean this or this. And this can mean this or this. Or this can mean this or this. Or you can just read it like this and it’s just literal.” So you just end up writing three lines, one that sounds like it’s from Mahabharata, one that sounds like it’s from the Ramayana, and one that sounds like a commentary on both. But in Sanskrit, you can do this in one line. Or at least he could. I mean, this is even in to them is like one of the great achievements uh in in their literary history. He’s a He’s an aesthetician. He’s famous for one of his works on Sanskrit aesthetics. Um 12th century. This is 12th century AD. So that literary quality on one hand allowed Sanskrit to thrive and pass all over the world, as it did, and seemed to conquer people through desire to learn it and use it, rather than “If you don’t learn it, we’ll kill you.” Right? It’s because Buddhist monks were not killing people much of the time. There was no necessary huge trade reason for learning it. So the close equivalent One of the historians I was reading said the close equivalent is the way English has been adopted by countries because we like their our movies. Right? So we In the ’50s and ’60s we’re pouring out all these movies that people in the world loved, so they learned English. Why? Cuz they like our movies. It seems like the literary history of Sanskrit, the philosophical capacity of the language, the literary capacity of the language had a similar profound impact, where people just encountered it and said, “Oh, well, let’s learn that.” Because we want to be able to read them in the in the original. We want to be able to say the chants correctly uh in the original language. So it’s hugely rich, spreads out. Curiously, as Buddhism spreads out, it begins fading in India itself. Slowly, Hinduism, what we recognize today as as as modern Hinduism, starts to sort of suck Buddhism in. And it starts saying, “Well, sure, that’s right, but you’re just kind of an offshoot of another version of the Hindu program.” Like, “Oh, okay.” You know, and so slowly over the years, this starts to change. Around 300 from 300 BC to 200 AD, another hugely important thing happens for understanding where India and and and our encounter with them is today. And that’s the Greeks show up. The Greeks show up everywhere in world history. You got to get used to it. It’s always the Greeks. Uh so Greeks famously with Alexander, he’s out one of his picnics conquering everything. Um and he he shows up in India and they sort of mutually blew each other away. Uh they the He was very impressed with them. They were very impressed with him and the Greek program. This sends a shockwave through Indian art, Buddhist art, literature, language, but socially um major, particularly when the Persians show up. Um I’m trying to think how do you even So up until that time, all the evidence that we have is one, it’s hot, so nobody wore any clothes. Um two, if you look at Indian temples, they’re famous for their sexually graphic carvings and illustrations. They’re writing books like the Kama Sutra, right? It’s a sex guide. But But a sex guide that focuses on philosophy, right? That’s what Sanskrit’s all about. It’s a sort of philosophical uh cosmological sex guide. Um uh equality, sexual equality very much greater um than we would associate with India today. Again, if you go back to the Upanishads, lots of husbands and wives chatting about things around the dinner table uh in modern speak, right? So there was much greater sense of sexual equality. Well, they encounter a civilization I just encounter in the Persians and the Greeks who, you know, you wear clothes, definite sense of of of decorum. Uh women are kept enclosed in the equivalent of a purdah. They’re not to be seen. Sexual matters aren’t to be discussed. And then when a little later Islam starts rolling in, where it’s like, “Don’t even make images.” Right? Think about this. You have You have Islam coming in that says, “It is a sin, mortal sin, to make an image of an animal.” And of course, I don’t know why you express that in India, where they just have, you know, carvings and reliefs and animals and temples just covered in living symbols. It’s everywhere. It’s totally rich. It’s one of the great things, right? It’s just packed with all of this. And then these people come and say, “No, no, no, that’s wrong. That’s a sin. You can’t do that.” And so it develops all of these, you know, tensions uh start coming to the fore. One, you have this threat of Buddhism, which threatens the hierarchy. Uh if people are familiar with the Bhagavad Gita, um there was this great story where Arjuna is rolling out It says It was a section of the Mahabharata, almost certainly incorporated um later than the main section of the Mahabharata is written. Do you have the Bharata and then the Mahabharata? Um probably includes the uh the the Bhagavad Gita in a later moment. But it’s this big story of Arjuna is rolling out to fight and kill all his family. Uh and he thinks for a moment, “Wow, maybe I shouldn’t kill all my family just to gain a kingdom. What good is that?” And then Krishna, incarnation of God, comes down to earth is riding along with him and says, “Hey, look, no, you should do it cuz it’s your duty. The just, noble, great, wonderful thing to do is do your duty. You’re a warrior caste guy. The warrior caste fights. Here’s a fight, the just fight. You should be happy to have the opportunity to kill your whole family.” It’s one of the great religious texts of all time. Because But this has been read and is probably accurate. One of the reasons for this is your caste society is being undercut by Buddhists. Noble And then again, this is in the in the high language. So noble families, we know this is true, were like princes were going, “Well, Buddhism good. I’m going to leave the family and move out in the woods and pursue a simple Buddhist life.” This is not good for your hierarchy. Uh and so this has been read that the Bhagavad Gita is sort of this propaganda response. No, your duty is to fulfill your caste obligation. That’s the noble path. That’s the true path. That’s what you should be following through. So all these tensions begin to uh enter into the the both the Sanskrit literature and Indian society that we we read through Sanskrit literature. Outside forces, Greek, Persians, and eventually Islam. Internal forces is the right of rise of Buddhism, which is a sort of a dangerous threat, serious threat. At the same time, of course, they keep spreading south. Um if if you look at a map today uh of Indian languages, the Sanskrit-based languages only go about as far south as uh the Godavari River there, just a just north of Hyderabad, if you can see on the map. Um that’s more or less the line. Most of the modern languages spoken south of there today are not derived from Sanskrit. They’re derived from the pre-existing Dravidian tradition, linguistic tradition. North of that, they tend to be much more heavily influenced by Sanskrit. I mean, it’s still there’s, you know, English is one of the official languages of India, so there’s all kinds of mixing and matching, but primarily this is this is accurate. Um and so even when the the Sanskrit elites conquered everywhere, they couldn’t get the language to take everywhere. But as a literary language, it is spread almost entirely over the map. So you have this this amazing uh spread of the language and the culture. Uh Hinduism continues to spread north. It keeps sucking in the the the pre-existing Dravidian traditions. It’s very rich, uh emphasizing, reinforcing the caste system. Always the fair-skinned Brahmins. Originally, the warrior caste was at the top. Eventually, they’re supplanted by the Brahmins. Uh interesting switch. It used to be warriors, priests, um and then at some point it became priests warriors, right? That’s that’s a a great switch. Priests often pull it off. I mentioned this uh with the with the story of ancient Egypt. They they did that in ancient Egypt as well. Uh and and those was very they’re they’re good at that. Um so that that switch takes place as well in the Indian caste system hierarchy. Um which is basically where we are today as a matter of fact. Yeah. And so as this as they they continue to spread the creep the Dravid- Dravidians, they slowly suck up uh Buddhism until Buddhism more or less ceases to exist in its native homeland. By 14 1500 AD, Buddhism may as well not I mean Buddhism in in in India is sort of a done thing. It it’s been it’s been so uh sucked into the Hindu tradition it’s no longer has a separate existence. So the hierarchy, both literary hierarchy of Sanskrit and the cultural hierarchy of the Aryans light-skinned the caste system is completely reestablished Buddhism gone. Um this is again by by earlier than 1500 but certainly by 1500 this has been accomplished. So again this is astounding the rich and and strange mixtures brewing. Uh also in 1500-ish around that date, the Mughal Empire firmly gets firmly established. The the Islam has been coming in continuously. Right? Pressing on the borders pressing on the borders from about 800 or so. Remember the Persians were there first Islam conquers Persia and so it just goes where the Persians were already and brings in Islam with them. But again this is one of these strange moments where the invaders the Mughal invaders spoke a version of Turkic I think amongst themselves. But this is one of those things. Turkic amongst themselves, but of course now that they have to be Islamic, you pray in Arabic. But the language of literature and government is Persian. All right. So that’s why I said our our take on monolingualism and this is the first threat that Sanskrit has had. Cuz up until that time everyone they’ve encountered has a less developed literary language and are less culturally set. When the Persians but really later when the Mughals start pressing in, they have classical Persian very long tradition huge literary language and they’re set in their ways. They they didn’t come to India to acquire Hinduism. Uh although they will as it turns out of course. Uh but but they came they came to conquer and to rule and control. And so you can date the decline of Sanskrit as a primary language to about 1500-ish. You know of course all these dates are very shifty. Cuz now the literary language of Persian starts to battle the Sanskrit for literary primacy and certainly politically it is the language of government because it’s the language of the Persians. And so Sanskrit takes a big step back. This is where the bizarre nature of Sanskrit sort of works against it. It was never a hugely common vernacular language. And other than specifically mostly literary and religious use, you didn’t need Sanskrit for anything. And so it started this slow 500-year retreat to become what you might be like like sort of classical Latin today. It’s a liturgical language of the Catholic Church. It still exists. Lots of Catholic priests have to know it. If you’re at the Vatican it’s probably incredibly useful. Uh but the average run-of-the-mill person does not need classical Latin. Uh the difference would be is that Hinduism is still in classical Sanskrit. This is still the language of the Vedas. Again this has not changed. When you do a chant, when you do a mantra, you do a meditation, when you get these stories, you get classical Sanskrit. And since you have you know quite a few Hindus in India uh so to speak, um this is still very much more widespread than the equivalent of of classical Latin. But nonetheless it lost its currency as the key focus of the literary language of the day. But crucially not its influence. And this is what we’re want to shift to now. So you’ve had again you’ve had this weird mix uh you know couple of thousand years of cultural dominance, a spread with Buddhism again not by violence but but through the acceptance of the Buddhist texts. This mixing with outside forces which it did very well against so did okay with the Greeks did okay with other cultures and societies but until basically classical Persian comes in with with with horses and and uh swords um and creates trouble. Oh I should mention all the way notice how attractive Islam is at this juncture. If you’re the Dravidian, if you’re one of the lower castes or goodness gracious an outcast, like the Buddhist did several hundred years before, if somebody shows up and says, “Hey, there is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet and all men are equal.” Wow. You’re like, “Hey, I like this religion. I don’t You don’t have to tell me anything else. I’ve heard all men are equal. I dig that religion cuz the one we have now sucks, right? Cuz it says I’m nothing I’m dirt I get mistreated there’s all these rules that that tell me I’m a bad person every single day of my life. And you have a religion that says A if I don’t convert to it you’ll kill me and B if I do convert you’ll liberate me and tell me that I’m equal at least in theory of course in practice it never works out but in theory, well that’s a huge promotion. Right? This is a great deal for me. And so it’s not surprising that that a significant percentage of the population was attracted. Actually what’s surprising is that more people weren’t attracted to it. That’s really sort of the shocking thing. To the point where even today in India the population is at 80% at least Hindu and the only place where where Islam has really successfully survived is on the borders of its traditional homeland when it showed up with the Persians. This is sort of a shocking uh uh development in a way. It sucked the Hinduism sucked back a lot of those people again. Uh amazingly somehow it just keeps rolling along. Um so 1500 it’s it starts its slow and steady decline. But by this time remember it’s spread into Tibet. So Tibetan Buddhism. It spread into China. There’s there’s pockets of of of Buddhist uh Sanskrit literary tradition in China. You know Sri Lanka all over Southeast Asia all those alphabets and their literacy heavily impacted by um the stories the literature of of the Sanskrit tradition. So then who famously who shows up? The British. The British start showing up, right? They’re like, “Hello.” Notice one of the great things Yes. That’s right. One of the great things about the British, incredibly fair skin. I’ve always thought this must have blown their minds, right? Cuz they have a 2,000 or 3,000 or 4,000-year tradition that says fair skin good. And then one day some people show up who are really white, right? We We just thought we were the white people. HOLY CRAP LOOK AT THOSE PEOPLE. THOSE people are super white. They must be good, right? I mean this is always this great historical moment. And but but clearly this played into their caste system because if if fair skinness is good, I you know it’s hard to beat a bunch of people from northern Europe. Uh so here they show up, right? And they start trading First they start trading, excuse me. Opium. Opium all kinds of things. Tea, opium and then they start conquering but this is mostly a business proposition for a while. Um they start cutting deals with the Mughals. It’s very complicated. But they discover Sanskrit. And man the British are like, “Sanskrit this is the greatest language ever.” If you ever want to hear some happy philologist, if you read this the material of the time when they discover SANSKRIT THEY’RE LIKE, “WOW. THIS IS THIS is the greatest language of all time.” And what they recognize is what they had suspected for a while is there must be a mother tongue. And it turns out that when you find Sanskrit, you’re close. It’s not the original language but it’s so close to the original language that they immediately they went, “Oh yeah, this is it. Indo-European language family. We’re all one.” Imagine how bizarre this is. You’ve just sailed from Great Britain to India. Long ways. They’ve got temples they don’t dress this I mean it’s culturally different as you could possibly imagine. And this language I what what language is this? And you start learning to read it and you go, “It’s ours.” Or at least it’s sufficiently close that we recognize it. Lots of the same roots, lots of the same ideas, lots of the same concepts. And this again I mean one blew their minds, two they’re really happy. And so they started to insist this is the birth by the way of comparative philology or comparative linguistics. Where they go, “Oh we can look and we can say, ‘Oh well this word means this in Sanskrit.’ That’s the same almost the same word in Latin. They just changed the M or something.” And so then they can trace it back and go, “Oh if we change all the Ms in all the Latin words, look we find like a thousand more Sanskrit words.” So all that happened was this M changed at some point in the past. I mean you can do it. So we have all kinds of words uh in English something like like uh like pregnant one of my favorite ones which has the Latin prefix pre just meaning before and then nunt. All right, what the hell is gununt? And and and this is this is there’s there’s some debate about this and there’s two ways of looking at it, but one of the major suspicions that comes from the Sanskrit janati. Uh which is, you know, before seed, before origin, before birth. Also related to the word gnosis and genius. Right? To know, to come alive, to give birth to. All from the Sanskrit janati or janti. So, you can trace these roots back through the Greek, through the Persian, through the Latin. For and then remember we’re going back in Sanskrit text several thousand years. Oral traditions that go back several thousand years before that. And so it opened up this vast territory for linguistic understanding, experiment, comparison. And then we began to realize, “Hey, we come from England, we come from a long ways away. We’re really light-skinned. You guys are really dark-skinned comparatively. We’re we’re pretty much the same people.” Very closely allied. So, this is one of the amazing things when we come to to to in the contact in the modern world with Indian tradition. Then the text starts coming out. This is another great thing to read. When the text start rolling out of India, people start getting blown away. The Mahabharata, the Ramayana, the Upanishads. The Vedic literature. I mean, people are like, “Wow.” Famously, just to just throw out some names, you have Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer’s just he couldn’t believe it. He’s like, “Here are some ways to escape many of the the kind of tensions, the paradoxes that he kept encountering in in Western philosophical tradition.” Cuz these people think about it completely different. So, to go back to why I introduced the concepts of the Brahman and the Atman from the Upanishads. So, we’re going way back. Well, the Western conception, which we get from Egypt, which we talked about last time, you see it in Plato, you see it in Christianity, is the notion that you’re you die, but some part of you continues. For the Egyptians, this was perfectly literal. In the afterworld, it’s just like this except for you don’t die anymore, but it’s you and you you continue. In Christianity, you have this idea that you go up to heaven. But but it’s you and you’re going to like meet your relatives there. Um and you’re going to I don’t know what you’re going to do with them. Probably dislike them for eternity. Uh just like just like here, right? Shouldn’t be any different. Uh But in India, they did not have this concept. This is not the idea. The Brahman is immortal. This is one of the great things about the Bhagavad Gita. If if I recommend one text for this, is read the Bhagavad Gita cuz it just it’s like a tour de force. That’s why it’s one of the reasons it’s famous. Um and it’s short, unlike all the rest of Indian literature. Um but it the notion is no. Everything that is is always is. The the Brahman never ends. It never begins. It just is. You’re a part of that. If death is anything, which it probably isn’t anyway, it is simply a returning to the state of the Brahman, which you never left anyway. So, the whole concept that you are a sort of individualized person walking around with an identity is an illusion. That’s where Buddhism comes from, right? Buddhism is not this far off of many of the philosophical roots of Hinduism, if you you know, the Upanishads. You are this illusory sense thing wandering around confusing yourself. That’s not the real. The real is this other thing. Famously, the transcendentalists in America got a hold of some of these Indian religious texts and it blew their minds, you know, famously, right? They’re like, “Wow. This is great.” Because they’d been suspecting this. We know our senses deceive us. We know the world is changeable and weird. And then coming out of India, again starting when the when the British show up and the Germans Germans did a lot of this translation work early on, by the way. A lot of great German linguists and philologists who were responsible for a good deal of this discovery and sort of creation of these texts early on. Um People were like they just like I said, just kind of changed everybody’s thinking. Oh, this is another way. Entirely different way of thinking about what does it mean to have a soul? What does it mean to be an individual? That basically has A, nothing to do with the Western philosophical tradition. And B, is unbelievably well developed. Because the the they’ve been very smart people who’ve been working on this for a couple of thousand years. And so they you know, they had some insight. In fact, if you go to any major um Indian text, say the Upanishads. By the way, there’s many Upanishads. The I I I keep saying the Upanishads like there’s a book that is the Upanishad. There are many Upanishads, but there’s some major Upanishads. So, if you pick one of the major Upanishad texts written down and sort of firmed up before say right around 800-ish uh well, let’s say 200 BC. Um you can get the text, say, you know, a passage that big. Say a paragraph or so. And then you can get a 12-volume commentary. I I know, I’m not kidding you. A 12-volume commentary on a passage or two or three. And then you turn the page and then you’ll get another 12-volume commentary. Cuz they’ve been working on this for a long time. And they have things to say and they’re smart people. And so this fully developed, rigorous cosmological system that had to be None of the assumptions that we made. Think about a concept like you’re a citizen of the United States of America, right? All the things that we just take for granted. I’m a citizen. What does citizen mean? I’m an divided individual. You know, that’s who I am. Individual rights, yay. What about a culture that says, “Well, you’re not really an individual. That’s just you’re just confusing yourself.” It’s you’re just sort of That’s not right. You’re That’s what weird, right? So, they they’re So, we show up there, right? The British show up with sort of the Western tradition and say, “Oh, hi. Well, we’re going to give the every man, every woman of the Well, not every woman, of course. Every man a vote.” They’re like, “What?” Number one, the untouchables, you know, they aren’t people. Uh so, get that straight just from the get-go. So, you can’t give them the vote. Uh and you know, it’s just like and you’re not going to count those as people and you’re going to count that group as different or those are one person. Maybe. Maybe not. Right? And so there’s this Right? Because that that notion is just not correct. Also, we have this notion of oh, you’re going to earn heaven, right? Or if you’re good, you get heaven. If you’re bad, you don’t. Well, there is no place to go. Right? There is no cuz there was no beginning, there is no end, right? It’s just So, everything tends to be cyclical. The great famous example that my that famous example my my Sanskrit teacher used, he says in in Western drawing, you know, you use circles, right? And then you you use you know, maybe a triangle. And then this is how you create everything. It’s a series of circles and triangles and then that’s how you draw people, right? Squares, triangles, circles. Geometric. The same tradition in India is lotus. Everything is based on the lotus, which I can’t draw cuz I can’t draw anything, obviously. But that it’s continuous. It’s looping. It’s not it’s not segregated. It’s not divided. Everything’s in cycles. Everything loops around. What’s the beginning? Well, the beginning is just the end of the previous beginning. What’s the end? The end is the beginning of the new end. Right? This is just these continuous themes run through the entirety of the literary collection. Again, if you read the Bhagavad Gita, the first thing he says he says Arjuna against goes to Krishna, he says, “Well, I don’t really want to kill my family cuz it seems like, you know, that would be wrong.” And then Krishna says to him, God again says back to him, “Oh, but you’re not really killing them cuz of death and life are just an illusion. So, you just kill. Don’t worry about it. Really kill them.” Cuz it doesn’t matter. It’s pointless. You’re deluded if you think you’re actually killing them. You’re deluded if you think death and life are things. So, let this fall from you. Let this delusion fall for you and go out and slaughter them like you’re supposed to. Uh Arjuna doesn’t go for this. Arjuna’s like, “Are you sure? Cuz it seems like I shouldn’t do that.” Actually, what he says is, “Well, if it’s just deluded, how about I not kill them?” And then then then the argument has to move on again. That’s why it is interesting cuz it is a dialogue. The Bhagavad Gita is great for that. But so these very foreign concepts come pouring into our society. Um couple of other ones like nirvana. Right? We have the the concept of nirvana, which is hilarious because nirvana is in Sanskrit essentially like to blow out a candle, blown out. It’s the nothing. And because it has such great associations, they said, “Oh, well, nirvana’s like that’s the perfect the bliss, the great.” And And so, our imagination is It is, you know, the golden palace with the hearts. I don’t know, whatever it it’s a place with stuff. For them, it is the candle going out. Poof. It’s the end of delusion. It’s the recognition that you don’t exist. That the Atman and the Brahman are the same. That that that nothingness that is permeates everything. Right. “What the hell are you talking about? No, Nirvana is going to be a place. We’re going to have cars. I don’t know. We’re going to have a big TV. We’re going to have big TVs. That’s what we’re going to have.” Uh you know, a word like Zen. Like we have Zen Buddhism. Zen Buddhism is the is is is is Dhyana, Jhana. It’s It’s the It’s the Sanskrit word for meditate. It just traveled all the way around. It took about a thousand years to get to Japan. Literally, about a thousand years to get to Japan. And then when they got there, they said, “Oh, the word meditate is Zen. Zen meditation.” It just It’s for them it’s the word sort of to meditate, to think, to reflect. Um so, these sorts of influences and ideas just been pouring out of India ever since. Again, influence our literature. Uh uh Midnight uh Sa- Salman Rushdie. Right? He’s He’s He’s been mining this for for his entire career. Very well, actually. Nobel laureate, right? He won the Nobel Prize, didn’t he? Uh you know, influential. And the richness is the other thing that is uh going on. Sorry. Uh cuz again, there’s so much going fast and going long. Um but my favorite quote maybe on this is uh V. S. Naipaul. V. S. Naipaul, Indian writer. He says, “When When the Western world showed up in India, they said, ‘Oh, we need to civilize you. We need to civilize the Indians.’” And he said V. S. Naipaul said, “No, no, the here’s the thing. No, we are so over-wrought with civilization. We’ve been so civilized for so long, we need to get rid of some civilization. We need to export it, get rid of it, mine it, get We clear it out. Clear the decks.” Right? Cuz we’ve had three or four thousand years of continuous civiliz- civilized development in a relatively small space. Um yeah, which brings us back to today. Four or five thousand years later, still in India, still all over the world, spreading, by the way. Om Namah Shivaya. Still pronounced. Still chanted. Still the key mantra. A key mantra. They have many, but one of the key mantras. Buddhism is spreading. Buddhism is not contracting. Buddhism is spreading all over the world. Um it’s going to be fascinating to see now that China is slowly opening up. Will they revert more to the Daoist Confucian tradition? Many many people say, “Oh, certainly that’s it.” I don’t know. If they go, it may be Buddhist. There’s a lot of evidence suggests that that Buddhism may be very very popular indeed in China when they open up. If that happens, uh look for look for Sanskrit to come storming back. Cuz that’s the language. It’s It’s the language that’s there. And right now in India today, the BJP, fundamentalist Hindu um party By By the way, they had the presidency. They’re not like a small party. They’re like the Republicans or the Democrats. They’re a major political force in India. Um they’re promoting Hinduism, and hence, not surprisingly, they’re suppor- supporting and promoting Sanskrit. Uh Sanskrit is making a major comeback in India. Um there It’s be- It’s an official language. It’s not spoken as a mother language by very many people, probably only a few hundred thousand. Um but now there’s a newspaper that’s published in Sanskrit every day. There’s radio broadcastings broadcast in Sanskrit. Uh and so, it’s maybe one of these weird things where you see a revival. Buddhism starts to spread into China. If the BJP continues powerful in India, um you may really see a a return of a language that has been continuous at least for 2,500 years. Uh and probably longer, which again, would be truly remarkable. So, stay tuned, cuz the story of Sanskrit not done yet. THANK YOU VERY MUCH. WOW.