117-642: Svaha ( Sanskrit : स्वाहा, IAST : Svāhā), also referred to as Manyanti , is the Hindu goddess of sacrifices featured in the Vedas . She is the consort of Agni , and the daughter of either Daksha or Brihaspati , depending on the literary tradition. According to the Brahmavaivarta Purana , she is an aspect of Prakriti (nature), an element without which Agni cannot sustain. Additionally, in Hinduism and Buddhism ,
234-542: A crocodile or enthroned surrounded by crocodiles. In one of the iconography in Maha Virat-rupa, she holds a jar of amrita , rosary, lotus and varada mudra. She may be depicted in other ways holding only a kalasha (or 2 replacing lotus) and lotus, while other 2 hands in varada and abhaya mudra . Another depiction popular especially in Bengal shows her holding shankha , chakra ( discus ), lotus and abhaya mudra, with
351-650: A daughter of Daksha and his consort Prasuti . She is thought to preside over burnt offerings. Her body is said to consist of the four Vedas and her six limbs are considered to be the six Angas of the Vedas. In the Mahabharata Vana Parva , Markandeya narrates her story to the Pandavas . Svaha was the daughter of Daksha . She fell in love with the God of Fire, Agni, and was pursuing him. Agni did not notice her. He presided over
468-472: A dead language in the most common usage of the term. Pollock's notion of the "death of Sanskrit" remains in this unclear realm between academia and public opinion when he says that "most observers would agree that, in some crucial way, Sanskrit is dead." Ganga in Hinduism Ganga ( Sanskrit : गङ्गा , IAST : Gaṅgā ) is the personification of the river Ganges , who is worshipped by Hindus as
585-433: A focus on Indian philosophies and Sanskrit. Though written in a number of different scripts, the dominant language of Hindu texts has been Sanskrit. It or a hybrid form of Sanskrit became the preferred language of Mahayana Buddhism scholarship; for example, one of the early and influential Buddhist philosophers, Nagarjuna (~200 CE), used Classical Sanskrit as the language for his texts. According to Renou, Sanskrit had
702-510: A hole in its covering with the nail of his big toe. Through the hole, the pure water of the causal ocean entered this universe as the Ganges river. Having washed the lotus feet of the lord, which are covered with reddish saffron, the water of the Ganga acquired a very beautiful pink colour. Because the Ganges directly touches the lotus feet of Vishnu ( Narayana ) before descending within this universe, it
819-581: A language competed with numerous, less exact vernacular Indian languages called Prakritic languages ( prākṛta - ). The term prakrta literally means "original, natural, normal, artless", states Franklin Southworth . The relationship between Prakrit and Sanskrit is found in Indian texts dated to the 1st millennium CE. Patañjali acknowledged that Prakrit is the first language, one instinctively adopted by every child with all its imperfections and later leads to
936-643: A limited role in the Theravada tradition (formerly known as the Hinayana) but the Prakrit works that have survived are of doubtful authenticity. Some of the canonical fragments of the early Buddhist traditions, discovered in the 20th century, suggest the early Buddhist traditions used an imperfect and reasonably good Sanskrit, sometimes with a Pali syntax, states Renou. The Mahāsāṃghika and Mahavastu, in their late Hinayana forms, used hybrid Sanskrit for their literature. Sanskrit
1053-454: A natural part of the earliest Vedic language, and that these developed in the centuries after the composition had been completed, and as a gradual unconscious process during the oral transmission by generations of reciters. The primary source for this argument is internal evidence of the text which betrays an instability of the phenomenon of retroflexion, with the same phrases having sandhi-induced retroflexion in some parts but not other. This
1170-479: A negative evidence to Pollock's hypothesis, but it is not positive evidence. A closer look at Sanskrit in the Indian history after the 12th century suggests that Sanskrit survived despite the odds. According to Hanneder, On a more public level the statement that Sanskrit is a dead language is misleading, for Sanskrit is quite obviously not as dead as other dead languages and the fact that it is spoken, written and read will probably convince most people that it cannot be
1287-546: A pan-Indo-Aryan accessibility to information and knowledge in the ancient and medieval times, in contrast to the Prakrit languages which were understood just regionally. It created a cultural bond across the subcontinent. As local languages and dialects evolved and diversified, Sanskrit served as the common language. It connected scholars from distant parts of South Asia such as Tamil Nadu and Kashmir, states Deshpande, as well as those from different fields of studies, though there must have been differences in its pronunciation given
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#17328589995731404-515: A quarrel between his three wives, whom he loved equally. When Lakshmi attempted to soothe Saraswati's anger by reasoning with her, the jealous goddess grew angry with her as well, accusing her of disloyalty towards her. She cursed Lakshmi to be born as the Tulasi plant upon the earth. Ganga, now enraged that Lakshmi had been cursed because she had defended her, cursed Saraswati that she would be incarnated as
1521-573: A refined and standardized grammatical form that emerged in the mid-1st millennium BCE and was codified in the most comprehensive of ancient grammars, the Aṣṭādhyāyī ('Eight chapters') of Pāṇini . The greatest dramatist in Sanskrit, Kālidāsa , wrote in classical Sanskrit, and the foundations of modern arithmetic were first described in classical Sanskrit. The two major Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and
1638-534: A restrained language from which archaisms and unnecessary formal alternatives were excluded". The Classical form of the language simplified the sandhi rules but retained various aspects of the Vedic language, while adding rigor and flexibilities, so that it had sufficient means to express thoughts as well as being "capable of responding to the future increasing demands of an infinitely diversified literature", according to Renou. Pāṇini included numerous "optional rules" beyond
1755-399: A river on earth. Saraswati issued the same curse against Ganga, informing her that sinful men would cleanse themselves of their sins with her water. To prevent further conflict among the goddesses, Vishnu declares Lakshmi as his only wife and sends Saraswati to Brahma and Ganga to Shiva. The Mahabharata narrates that there was once a war between the devas and the asuras . The leader of
1872-439: A similar phonetic structure to Tamil. Hock et al. quoting George Hart state that there was influence of Old Tamil on Sanskrit. Hart compared Old Tamil and Classical Sanskrit to arrive at a conclusion that there was a common language from which these features both derived – "that both Tamil and Sanskrit derived their shared conventions, metres, and techniques from a common source, for it is clear that neither borrowed directly from
1989-692: Is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages . It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late Bronze Age . Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism , the language of classical Hindu philosophy , and of historical texts of Buddhism and Jainism . It was a link language in ancient and medieval South Asia, and upon transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia, East Asia and Central Asia in
2106-508: Is akin to that of Latin and Ancient Greek in Europe. Sanskrit has significantly influenced most modern languages of the Indian subcontinent , particularly the languages of the northern, western, central and eastern Indian subcontinent. Sanskrit declined starting about and after the 13th century. This coincides with the beginning of Islamic invasions of South Asia to create, and thereafter expand
2223-618: Is considered by the Mauritian Hindus equivalent to Ganga. In 1972, the then Prime Minister of Mauritius , Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam brought Holy water from the Ganga's source – Gomukh in India and mixed it with the water of the Grand Bassin and renamed it as Ganga Talao. Ganga is invoked with Hindu deities Shiva, Bhumi , Surya and Chandra in Thailand 's royal Triyampawai ceremony . She
2340-452: Is found in the writing of Bharata Muni , the author of the ancient Natya Shastra text. The early Jain scholar Namisādhu acknowledged the difference, but disagreed that the Prakrit language was a corruption of Sanskrit. Namisādhu stated that the Prakrit language was the pūrvam ('came before, origin') and that it came naturally to children, while Sanskrit was a refinement of Prakrit through "purification by grammar". Sanskrit belongs to
2457-504: Is known as Bhagavat-Padi or Vishnupadi, which means e manating from the feet of Bhagavan (God) . It finally settles in Brahmaloka or Brahmapura , the abode of the Brahma, before descending to the planet earth at the request of Bhagiratha , and held safely by Shiva on his head, to prevent the destruction of Bhumi Devi (the earth goddess). Then, Ganga was released from Shiva's hair to meet
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#17328589995732574-425: Is known by is Jahnavi, because she flooded the ashram of Sage Jahnu while being led by Bhagiratha. Her waters extinguished the ritual fire there, which angered the sage Jahnu, so he drank up all of Ganga's waters. Sage Jahnu later released the water out of his left ear after Bhagiratha explained his mission for Ganga's descent. Due to this incident, Ganga is known as Jahnavi, which means daughter of Sage Jahnu. In
2691-524: Is rare in the later version of the language. The Homerian Greek, like Ṛg-vedic Sanskrit, deploys simile extensively, but they are structurally very different. The early Vedic form of the Sanskrit language was far less homogenous compared to the Classical Sanskrit as defined by grammarians by about the mid-1st millennium BCE. According to Richard Gombrich—an Indologist and a scholar of Sanskrit, Pāli and Buddhist Studies—the archaic Vedic Sanskrit found in
2808-479: Is taken along with evidence of controversy, for example, in passages of the Aitareya-Āraṇyaka (700 BCE), which features a discussion on whether retroflexion is valid in particular cases. The Ṛg-veda is a collection of books, created by multiple authors. These authors represented different generations, and the mandalas 2 to 7 are the oldest while the mandalas 1 and 10 are relatively the youngest. Yet,
2925-531: Is ten years old. The Ganga is also called the Ganga Mata (Mother), and is revered in Hindu worship and culture, venerated for her forgiveness of sins and capacity to cleanse mankind. Unlike various other goddesses, she has no destructive or fearsome aspect, destructive though she might be as a river in nature. She is also a mother to other gods. On this day, Ganga is regarded to have been reborn. According to legend,
3042-601: Is the Dhyānam (meditation) of Svāhā Devī :-- O Devī Svāhā! Thou art embodied of the Mantras; Thou art the success of the Mantras; Thou art Thyself a Siddhā; Thou givest success and the fruits of actions to men; Thou dost good to all. Thus meditating, one should offer Pādya (water for washing the feet), etc., uttering the basic Mantra; success then comes to him. Now hear about the Radical Seed Mantra. The said mantra (Mūla mantra)
3159-580: Is the predominant language of one of the largest collection of historic manuscripts. The earliest known inscriptions in Sanskrit are from the 1st century BCE, such as the Ayodhya Inscription of Dhana and Ghosundi-Hathibada (Chittorgarh) . Though developed and nurtured by scholars of orthodox schools of Hinduism, Sanskrit has been the language for some of the key literary works and theology of heterodox schools of Indian philosophies such as Buddhism and Jainism. The structure and capabilities of
3276-1234: Is this :-- “Om Hrīm Śrīm Vahnijāyāyai Devyai Svāhā.” If the Devī be worshipped with this Mantra, all the desires come to a successful issue. in Hinduism in Thailand Call her Mae Phra pheling ( แม่พระเพลิง ) Which means goddess of Fire in Thai Language, She is generally respected along with goddess ganga and Mae Phra phay ( wife of vayu ) from hinduism with Phra Mae Thorani and Phosop from tai folk religion , They five are usually worshipped or mentioned together., Her famous and much talked about sculptures in Thailand include Kuan Yin Inter-Religious Park Phu Sawan sub district , Kaeng Krachan district , Phetchaburi province. and Baan Sukhawadee , Sukhumvit Road , Bang Lamung district , Chonburi province. Sanskrit Sanskrit ( / ˈ s æ n s k r ɪ t / ; attributively 𑀲𑀁𑀲𑁆𑀓𑀾𑀢𑀁 , संस्कृत- , saṃskṛta- ; nominally संस्कृतम् , saṃskṛtam , IPA: [ˈsɐ̃skr̩tɐm] )
3393-652: Is worshipped together with goddess Phra Mae Thorani within Thai Bushhism and goddess Phosop in Tai folk religion . The four sacred pools of Suphan Buri Province have waters from the Ganga and the Yamuna rivers and are used for rituals. Ganga has been revered in Cambodia since the Khmer empire . In Shiva's iconographical form Uma-Gangapatisvarar ( Khmer : ព្រះឧមាគង្គាបតិស្វរ ), Shiva
3510-526: The Bhagavata Purana , the Panchatantra and many other texts are all in the Sanskrit language. The Classical Sanskrit with its exacting grammar was thus the language of the Indian scholars and the educated classes, while others communicated with approximate or ungrammatical variants of it as well as other natural Indian languages. Sanskrit, as the learned language of Ancient India, thus existed alongside
3627-499: The Mahabharata , Ganga is the wife of Shantanu as well as the mother of the eight Vasus , including Bhishma . Ganga and Shantanu were cursed by Brahma to be born on earth. Shantanu met Ganga on the banks of the Ganges and asked her to marry him. She accepted the proposal on the condition that Shantanu would not question any of her actions. Shantanu agreed and they married. They lived together peacefully and had eight sons who were
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3744-760: The Bagmati Province . In Sri Lanka , Ganga with other Hindu deities assumes a Buddhist persona. Her sculpture is seen in Kelaniya Raja Maha Vihara . In Balinese Hinduism , she is worshipped together with the goddess Danu . Her waters are considered holy in Bali . Her maternal association with Bhishma is known in Bali. Religious sites associated with her in Bali are Tirta Gangga , Pura Taman Mumbul Sangeh , and Kongco Pura Taman Gandasari . Ganga Talao in Mauritius
3861-568: The Dalai Lama , the Sanskrit language is a parent language that is at the foundation of many modern languages of India and the one that promoted Indian thought to other distant countries. In Tibetan Buddhism, states the Dalai Lama, Sanskrit language has been a revered one and called legjar lhai-ka or "elegant language of the gods". It has been the means of transmitting the "profound wisdom of Buddhist philosophy" to Tibet. The Sanskrit language created
3978-512: The Devi Bhagavata Purana describes Ganga as originally being one of the three wives of Vishnu, together with Lakshmi and Saraswati . In the midst of a conversation, Saraswati observed Ganga playfully glancing at Vishnu. Frustrated, Saraswati launched a furious tirade against Ganga, accusing her of stealing Vishnu's love away from her. When Ganga appealed to her husband to help her, he chose to remain neutral, not wishing to participate in
4095-471: The Hindu pantheon . Ganga is represented as a fair-complexioned woman, wearing a white crown and sitting on a crocodile. She holds a water lily in her right hand and a flute in her left. When shown with four hands she carries a water-pot, a lily, and a rosary, and has one hand in a protective mode. The Rigveda mentions Ganga but more of her is said in the Puranas . Ganga is depicted four-armed and mounted on
4212-613: The Indo-European family of languages . It is one of the three earliest ancient documented languages that arose from a common root language now referred to as Proto-Indo-European : Other Indo-European languages distantly related to Sanskrit include archaic and Classical Latin ( c. 600 BCE–100 CE, Italic languages ), Gothic (archaic Germanic language , c. 350 CE ), Old Norse ( c. 200 CE and after), Old Avestan ( c. late 2nd millennium BCE ) and Younger Avestan ( c. 900 BCE). The closest ancient relatives of Vedic Sanskrit in
4329-445: The Kuru king Shantanu . In Hinduism, Ganga is seen as a mother to humanity. Pilgrims immerse the ashes of their kin in the river Ganga, which is considered by them to bring the souls (purified spirits) closer to moksha , the liberation from the cycle of life and death. Festivals like Ganga Dussehra and Ganga Jayanti are celebrated in her honour at several sacred places, which lie along
4446-744: The Rigveda had already evolved in the Vedic period, as evidenced in the later Vedic literature. Gombrich posits that the language in the early Upanishads of Hinduism and the late Vedic literature approaches Classical Sanskrit, while the archaic Vedic Sanskrit had by the Buddha 's time become unintelligible to all except ancient Indian sages. The formalization of the Saṃskṛta language is credited to Pāṇini , along with Patañjali's Mahābhāṣya and Katyayana's commentary that preceded Patañjali's work. Panini composed Aṣṭādhyāyī ('Eight-Chapter Grammar'), which became
4563-532: The Rigveda , a collection of 1,028 hymns composed between 1500 BCE and 1200 BCE by Indo-Aryan tribes migrating east from the mountains of what is today northern Afghanistan across northern Pakistan and into northwestern India. Vedic Sanskrit interacted with the preexisting ancient languages of the subcontinent, absorbing names of newly encountered plants and animals; in addition, the ancient Dravidian languages influenced Sanskrit's phonology and syntax. Sanskrit can also more narrowly refer to Classical Sanskrit ,
4680-526: The Rāmāyaṇa , however, were composed in a range of oral storytelling registers called Epic Sanskrit which was used in northern India between 400 BCE and 300 CE, and roughly contemporary with classical Sanskrit. In the following centuries, Sanskrit became tradition-bound, stopped being learned as a first language, and ultimately stopped developing as a living language. The hymns of the Rigveda are notably similar to
4797-452: The Sanskrit lexical item svāhā (romanized Sanskrit transcription; Devanagari : स्वाहा; Khmer: ស្វាហា; Thai: สวาหะ; Chinese: 薩婆訶, sà pó hē , Japanese: sowaka ; Tibetan: སྭཱ་ཧཱ་ sw'a h'a ; Korean: 사바하, sabaha ; Vietnamese : ta bà ha) is a denouement used at the end of a mantra , which is invoked during yajna fire sacrifices and worship. Svāhā is chanted to offer oblation to
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4914-467: The Upanishads , Svaha confesses to be enamoured by Agni and wishes to dwell with him. Hence, the deities state that oblations would be offered to Agni while invoking her name during hymns, allowing Svaha to dwell with Agni in perpetuity. In some versions, she is one of the many divine mothers of Kartikeya (Skanda). She is also the mother of Agneya (Aagneya) — the daughter of Agni. She is considered to be
5031-401: The kalasha releasing her holy water. In Brahma Vaivarta Purana , Ganga is often depicted with her divine mount, the makara – an animal with the head of a crocodile and tail of a dolphin. Varying myths of Ganga's birth is found in Hindu scriptures. According to the Bhagavata Purana , Vishnu , in his incarnation as Vamana , extended his left foot to the end of the universe, and pierced
5148-406: The sandhi rules, both internal and external. Quite many words found in the early Vedic Sanskrit language are never found in late Vedic Sanskrit or Classical Sanskrit literature, while some words have different and new meanings in Classical Sanskrit when contextually compared to the early Vedic Sanskrit literature. Arthur Macdonell was among the early colonial era scholars who summarized some of
5265-500: The verbal adjective sáṃskṛta- is a compound word consisting of sáṃ ('together, good, well, perfected') and kṛta - ('made, formed, work'). It connotes a work that has been "well prepared, pure and perfect, polished, sacred". According to Biderman, the perfection contextually being referred to in the etymological origins of the word is its tonal—rather than semantic—qualities. Sound and oral transmission were highly valued qualities in ancient India, and its sages refined
5382-414: The 13th century, a premier center of Sanskrit literary creativity, Sanskrit literature there disappeared, perhaps in the "fires that periodically engulfed the capital of Kashmir" or the "Mongol invasion of 1320" states Pollock. The Sanskrit literature which was once widely disseminated out of the northwest regions of the subcontinent, stopped after the 12th century. As Hindu kingdoms fell in the eastern and
5499-521: The 7th century where he established a major center of learning and language translation under the patronage of Emperor Taizong. By the early 1st millennium CE, Sanskrit had spread Buddhist and Hindu ideas to Southeast Asia, parts of the East Asia and the Central Asia. It was accepted as a language of high culture and the preferred language by some of the local ruling elites in these regions. According to
5616-425: The Classical Sanskrit language launched ancient Indian speculations about "the nature and function of language", what is the relationship between words and their meanings in the context of a community of speakers, whether this relationship is objective or subjective, discovered or is created, how individuals learn and relate to the world around them through language, and about the limits of language? They speculated on
5733-521: The Dravidian languages borrowed from Sanskrit vocabulary, but they have also affected Sanskrit on deeper levels of structure, "for instance in the domain of phonology where Indo-Aryan retroflexes have been attributed to Dravidian influence". Similarly, Ferenc Ruzca states that all the major shifts in Indo-Aryan phonetics over two millennia can be attributed to the constant influence of a Dravidian language with
5850-513: The Dravidian words and forms, without modifying the word order; but the same thing is not possible in rendering a Persian or English sentence into a non-Indo-Aryan language. Shulman mentions that "Dravidian nonfinite verbal forms (called vinaiyeccam in Tamil) shaped the usage of the Sanskrit nonfinite verbs (originally derived from inflected forms of action nouns in Vedic). This particularly salient case of
5967-469: The Indo-Aryan language underwent rapid linguistic change and morphed into the Vedic Sanskrit language. The pre-Classical form of Sanskrit is known as Vedic Sanskrit . The earliest attested Sanskrit text is the Rigveda , a Hindu scripture from the mid- to late-second millennium BCE. No written records from such an early period survive, if any ever existed, but scholars are generally confident that
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#17328589995736084-507: The Indo-European languages are the Nuristani languages found in the remote Hindu Kush region of northeastern Afghanistan and northwestern Himalayas, as well as the extinct Avestan and Old Persian – both are Iranian languages . Sanskrit belongs to the satem group of the Indo-European languages. Colonial era scholars familiar with Latin and Greek were struck by the resemblance of
6201-521: The Muslim rule in the form of Sultanates, and later the Mughal Empire . Sheldon Pollock characterises the decline of Sanskrit as a long-term "cultural, social, and political change". He dismisses the idea that Sanskrit declined due to "struggle with barbarous invaders", and emphasises factors such as the increasing attractiveness of vernacular language for literary expression. With the fall of Kashmir around
6318-489: The Muslim rulers. Hindu rulers such as Shivaji of the Maratha Empire , reversed the process, by re-adopting Sanskrit and re-asserting their socio-linguistic identity. After Islamic rule disintegrated in South Asia and the colonial rule era began, Sanskrit re-emerged but in the form of a "ghostly existence" in regions such as Bengal. This decline was the result of "political institutions and civic ethos" that did not support
6435-488: The Saṃskṛta language, both in its vocabulary and grammar, to the classical languages of Europe. In The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World , Mallory and Adams illustrate the resemblance with the following examples of cognate forms (with the addition of Old English for further comparison): The correspondences suggest some common root, and historical links between some of
6552-616: The South India, such as the great Vijayanagara Empire , so did Sanskrit. There were exceptions and short periods of imperial support for Sanskrit, mostly concentrated during the reign of the tolerant Mughal emperor Akbar . Muslim rulers patronized the Middle Eastern language and scripts found in Persia and Arabia, and the Indians linguistically adapted to this Persianization to gain employment with
6669-447: The Vedic Sanskrit in these books of the Ṛg-veda "hardly presents any dialectical diversity", states Louis Renou – an Indologist known for his scholarship of the Sanskrit literature and the Ṛg-veda in particular. According to Renou, this implies that the Vedic Sanskrit language had a "set linguistic pattern" by the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE. Beyond the Ṛg-veda, the ancient literature in Vedic Sanskrit that has survived into
6786-451: The Vedic Sanskrit's bahulam framework, to respect liberty and creativity so that individual writers separated by geography or time would have the choice to express facts and their views in their own way, where tradition followed competitive forms of the Sanskrit language. The phonetic differences between Vedic Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit, as discerned from the current state of the surviving literature, are negligible when compared to
6903-407: The alphabet, the structure of words, and its exacting grammar into a "collection of sounds, a kind of sublime musical mold" as an integral language they called Saṃskṛta . From the late Vedic period onwards, state Annette Wilke and Oliver Moebus, resonating sound and its musical foundations attracted an "exceptionally large amount of linguistic, philosophical and religious literature" in India. Sound
7020-463: The asuras, Vritra , was killed by Indra , and so his followers hid in the sea, causing the devas to be unable to find them. The devas requested Sage Agastya to help. He used his divine powers and swallowed the ocean to reveal where the asuras were hiding. The devas defeated the remaining asuras, and asked Sage Agastya to restore the water. However, the sage was unable to release the water, despite trying several times. This caused drought conditions upon
7137-633: The banks of the Ganges, including Gangotri , Haridwar , Prayagraj , Varanasi and Kali Ghat in Kolkata . Alongside Gautama Buddha , Ganga is worshipped during the Loy Krathong festival in Thailand . Ganga is mentioned in the Rigveda , the earliest and theoretically the holiest of the Hindu scriptures. Ganga is mentioned in the Nadistuti (Rigveda 10.75), which lists the rivers from east to west. In RV 6.45.31,
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#17328589995737254-440: The capacity to understand the old Prakrit languages such as Ardhamagadhi . A section of European scholars state that Sanskrit was never a spoken language. However, evidences shows that Sanskrit was a spoken language, essential for oral tradition that preserved the vast number of Sanskrit manuscripts from ancient India. The textual evidence in the works of Yaksa, Panini, and Patanajali affirms that Classical Sanskrit in their era
7371-517: The close relationship between the Indo-Iranian tongues and the Baltic and Slavic languages , vocabulary exchange with the non-Indo-European Uralic languages , and the nature of the attested Indo-European words for flora and fauna. The pre-history of Indo-Aryan languages which preceded Vedic Sanskrit is unclear and various hypotheses place it over a fairly wide limit. According to Thomas Burrow, based on
7488-438: The coils of his hair, so that her force would not shatter the earth. When Ganga descended, Bhagiratha led her to the sea. From there, the river reached the netherworld , and liberated the sixty thousand sons of King Sagara. Because of Bhagiratha's efforts, the river is also known as Bhagirathi . She is also known as Tripathaga because she flows in the three worlds, heaven, earth, and the netherworld. Another epithet that Ganga
7605-609: The context of a speech or language, is found in verses 5.28.17–19 of the Ramayana . Outside the learned sphere of written Classical Sanskrit, vernacular colloquial dialects ( Prakrits ) continued to evolve. Sanskrit co-existed with numerous other Prakrit languages of ancient India. The Prakrit languages of India also have ancient roots and some Sanskrit scholars have called these Apabhramsa , literally 'spoiled'. The Vedic literature includes words whose phonetic equivalent are not found in other Indo-European languages but which are found in
7722-639: The crystallization of Classical Sanskrit. As in this period the Indo-Aryan tribes had not yet made contact with the inhabitants of the South of the subcontinent, this suggests a significant presence of Dravidian speakers in North India (the central Gangetic plain and the classical Madhyadeśa) who were instrumental in this substratal influence on Sanskrit. Extant manuscripts in Sanskrit number over 30 million, one hundred times those in Greek and Latin combined, constituting
7839-418: The detailed and sophisticated treatise then transmitted it through his students. Modern scholarship generally accepts that he knew of a form of writing, based on references to words such as Lipi ('script') and lipikara ('scribe') in section 3.2 of the Aṣṭādhyāyī . The Classical Sanskrit language formalized by Pāṇini, states Renou, is "not an impoverished language", rather it is "a controlled and
7956-418: The differences between the Vedic and Classical Sanskrit. Louis Renou published in 1956, in French, a more extensive discussion of the similarities, the differences and the evolution of the Vedic Sanskrit within the Vedic period and then to the Classical Sanskrit along with his views on the history. This work has been translated by Jagbans Balbir. The earliest known use of the word Saṃskṛta (Sanskrit), in
8073-409: The distant major ancient languages of the world. The Indo-Aryan migrations theory explains the common features shared by Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages by proposing that the original speakers of what became Sanskrit arrived in South Asia from a region of common origin, somewhere north-west of the Indus region , during the early 2nd millennium BCE. Evidence for such a theory includes
8190-427: The early medieval era, it became a language of religion and high culture , and of the political elites in some of these regions. As a result, Sanskrit had a lasting impact on the languages of South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, especially in their formal and learned vocabularies. Sanskrit generally connotes several Old Indo-Aryan language varieties. The most archaic of these is the Vedic Sanskrit found in
8307-429: The earth, but Vishnu assured that the ocean would be filled by the flow of Ganga on the planet. The story about Ganga's descent on earth through the efforts of Bhagiratha , a descendant of King Sagara , is narrated in the Ramayana, Mahabharata, and various Puranas. Wanting to show his sovereignty, King Sagara performed a ritual known as ashvamedha , where a horse was left to wander for one year. However, Indra stole
8424-429: The eternally pure, the delightful, the body that is full of fish, affords delight to the eye and leaps over mountains in sport, the bedding that bestows water and happiness, and the friend or benefactor of all that lives. Since the Vedic period, the Ganges river has been considered the holiest of all rivers by Hindus . Ganga is also personified as a goddess and worshipped as Goddess Ganga. She holds an important place in
8541-543: The first language of the respective speakers. The Sanskrit language brought Indo-Aryan speaking people together, particularly its elite scholars. Some of these scholars of Indian history regionally produced vernacularized Sanskrit to reach wider audiences, as evidenced by texts discovered in Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Maharashtra. Once the audience became familiar with the easier to understand vernacularized version of Sanskrit, those interested could graduate from colloquial Sanskrit to
8658-451: The firstborn of Himavat , the personification of the Himalayas , and the sister of the mother goddess Parvati . However, other texts mention her origin from the preserver deity, Vishnu . Legends focus on her descent to earth, which occurred because of a royal-sage Bhagiratha , aided by the god Shiva . In the epic Mahabharata , Ganga is the mother of the warrior Bhishma in a union with
8775-707: The forms of Adishakti during the duration of the festivities. Thais use the Krathong to thank the Goddess of Water, the Hindu goddess Ganga, Phra Mae Khongkha ( Thai : พระแม่คงคา ). Ganga is respected in Nepal as a guardian water goddess, worshipped together with another river goddess Yamuna . Her sculptures are found in Patan Durbar Square and Gokarneshwar Mahadev temple is a municipality in Kathmandu District in
8892-412: The foundation of Vyākaraṇa, a Vedānga . The Aṣṭādhyāyī was not the first description of Sanskrit grammar, but it is the earliest that has survived in full, and the culmination of a long grammatical tradition that Fortson says, is "one of the intellectual wonders of the ancient world". Pāṇini cites ten scholars on the phonological and grammatical aspects of the Sanskrit language before him, as well as
9009-435: The goddess is regarded to have accidentally destroyed the hut of Sage Jahnu during her descent upon the earth. In retort, the sage drank the entirety of the river's water. At the request of Bhagiratha and Ganga herself, he released the river from his ear, and she earned the epithet Jahnavi. Ganga Jayanti falls on the seventh day of the month of Vaishakha 's first fortnight . Ganga is worshipped during Navaratri as all
9126-545: The goddess of purification and forgiveness. Known by many names, Ganga is often depicted as a fair, beautiful woman, riding a divine crocodile-like creature called the makara . Some of the earliest mentions of Ganga are found in the Rigveda , where she is mentioned as the holiest of the rivers. Her stories mainly appear in post-Vedic texts such as the Ramayana , Mahabharata , and the Puranas . The Ramayana describes her to be
9243-537: The gods Varuna, Mitra, Indra, and Nasatya found in the earliest layers of the Vedic literature. O Bṛhaspati, when in giving names they first set forth the beginning of Language, Their most excellent and spotless secret was laid bare through love, When the wise ones formed Language with their mind, purifying it like grain with a winnowing fan, Then friends knew friendships – an auspicious mark placed on their language. — Rigveda 10.71.1–4 Translated by Roger Woodard The Vedic Sanskrit found in
9360-501: The gods. As a feminine noun, svāhā in the Rigveda may also mean oblation (to Agni or Indra). Svaha is also considered to mean an auspicious ending. Etymologically, the Sanskrit term derives from the root words सू sū- "good" and आहा -āhā "to call". Svaha is personified as a goddess and as the consort of Agni . According to the Brahmavidya Upanishad , Svaha represents the shakti or power that cannot be burned by Agni. In
9477-431: The historic Sanskrit literary culture and the failure of new Sanskrit literature to assimilate into the changing cultural and political environment. Sheldon Pollock states that in some crucial way, "Sanskrit is dead ". After the 12th century, the Sanskrit literary works were reduced to "reinscription and restatements" of ideas already explored, and any creativity was restricted to hymns and verses. This contrasted with
9594-415: The horse to prevent the ritual from being successful. Learning that the horse had disappeared, King Sagara sent his sixty thousand sons to look for it. They eventually found the horse at the ashrama of Sage Kapila , in the netherworld. Thinking that Sage Kapila had stolen the horse, the sons interrupted him while he was in a deep meditation. This infuriated Kapila, and with his ascetic's gaze, he burned all
9711-400: The incarnation of the eight Vasus. They too had been cursed and had asked Ganga to end their life when they were born to her on earth. Due to their request, Ganga began drowning each son upon birth while Shantanu watched without questioning. However, when she was about to drown their eighth son, Bhishma, Shantanu stopped her. Ganga later leaves with Bhishma but gives him back to Shantanu when he
9828-478: The intense change that must have occurred in the pre-Vedic period between the Proto-Indo-Aryan language and Vedic Sanskrit. The noticeable differences between the Vedic and the Classical Sanskrit include the much-expanded grammar and grammatical categories as well as the differences in the accent, the semantics and the syntax. There are also some differences between how some of the nouns and verbs end, as well as
9945-432: The largest cultural heritage that any civilization has produced prior to the invention of the printing press. — Foreword of Sanskrit Computational Linguistics (2009), Gérard Huet, Amba Kulkarni and Peter Scharf Sanskrit has been the predominant language of Hindu texts encompassing a rich tradition of philosophical and religious texts, as well as poetry, music, drama , scientific , technical and others. It
10062-412: The linguistic expression and sets the standard for the Sanskrit language. Pāṇini made use of a technical metalanguage consisting of a syntax, morphology and lexicon. This metalanguage is organised according to a series of meta-rules, some of which are explicitly stated while others can be deduced. Despite differences in the analysis from that of modern linguistics, Pāṇini's work has been found valuable and
10179-402: The literary works. The Indian tradition, states Winternitz , has favored the learning and the usage of multiple languages from the ancient times. Sanskrit was a spoken language in the educated and the elite classes, but it was also a language that must have been understood in a wider circle of society because the widely popular folk epics and stories such as the Ramayana , the Mahabharata ,
10296-501: The modern age include the Samaveda , Yajurveda , Atharvaveda , along with the embedded and layered Vedic texts such as the Brahmanas , Aranyakas , and the early Upanishads . These Vedic documents reflect the dialects of Sanskrit found in the various parts of the northwestern, northern, and eastern Indian subcontinent. According to Michael Witzel, Vedic Sanskrit was a spoken language of
10413-429: The more advanced Classical Sanskrit. Rituals and the rites-of-passage ceremonies have been and continue to be the other occasions where a wide spectrum of people hear Sanskrit, and occasionally join in to speak some Sanskrit words such as namah . Classical Sanskrit is the standard register as laid out in the grammar of Pāṇini , around the fourth century BCE. Its position in the cultures of Greater India
10530-401: The most advanced analysis of linguistics until the twentieth century. Pāṇini's comprehensive and scientific theory of grammar is conventionally taken to mark the start of Classical Sanskrit. His systematic treatise inspired and made Sanskrit the preeminent Indian language of learning and literature for two millennia. It is unclear whether Pāṇini himself wrote his treatise or he orally created
10647-593: The most archaic poems of the Iranian and Greek language families, the Gathas of old Avestan and Iliad of Homer . As the Rigveda was orally transmitted by methods of memorisation of exceptional complexity, rigour and fidelity, as a single text without variant readings, its preserved archaic syntax and morphology are of vital importance in the reconstruction of the common ancestor language Proto-Indo-European . Sanskrit does not have an attested native script: from around
10764-410: The needs of the country. The Ramayana narrates a different version of the myth. Ganga is described as the eldest child of Himavat , son of Brahma and the king of the Himalayas , and his Menavati, the daughter of Meru . Her younger sister is Parvati , who latter marries Shiva. When Ganga attained youth, the devas took her to Svarga , where she took a form of a river and flowed. A legend in
10881-535: The numbers are thought to signify a wish to be aligned with the prestige of the language. Sanskrit has been taught in traditional gurukulas since ancient times; it is widely taught today at the secondary school level. The oldest Sanskrit college is the Benares Sanskrit College founded in 1791 during East India Company rule . Sanskrit continues to be widely used as a ceremonial and ritual language in Hindu and Buddhist hymns and chants . In Sanskrit,
10998-403: The oral transmission of the texts is reliable: they are ceremonial literature, where the exact phonetic expression and its preservation were a part of the historic tradition. However some scholars have suggested that the original Ṛg-veda differed in some fundamental ways in phonology compared to the sole surviving version available to us. In particular that retroflex consonants did not exist as
11115-431: The other." Reinöhl further states that there is a symmetric relationship between Dravidian languages like Kannada or Tamil, with Indo-Aryan languages like Bengali or Hindi, whereas the same relationship is not found for non-Indo-Aryan languages, for example, Persian or English: A sentence in a Dravidian language like Tamil or Kannada becomes ordinarily good Bengali or Hindi by substituting Bengali or Hindi equivalents for
11232-414: The possible influence of Dravidian on Sanskrit is only one of many items of syntactic assimilation, not least among them the large repertoire of morphological modality and aspect that, once one knows to look for it, can be found everywhere in classical and postclassical Sanskrit". The main influence of Dravidian on Sanskrit is found to have been concentrated in the timespan between the late Vedic period and
11349-439: The previous 1,500 years when "great experiments in moral and aesthetic imagination" marked the Indian scholarship using Classical Sanskrit, states Pollock. Scholars maintain that the Sanskrit language did not die, but rather only declined. Jurgen Hanneder disagrees with Pollock, finding his arguments elegant but "often arbitrary". According to Hanneder, a decline or regional absence of creative and innovative literature constitutes
11466-480: The problems of interpretation and misunderstanding. The purifying structure of the Sanskrit language removes these imperfections. The early Sanskrit grammarian Daṇḍin states, for example, that much in the Prakrit languages is etymologically rooted in Sanskrit, but involves "loss of sounds" and corruptions that result from a "disregard of the grammar". Daṇḍin acknowledged that there are words and confusing structures in Prakrit that thrive independent of Sanskrit. This view
11583-596: The regional Prakrit languages, which makes it likely that the interaction, the sharing of words and ideas began early in the Indian history. As the Indian thought diversified and challenged earlier beliefs of Hinduism, particularly in the form of Buddhism and Jainism , the Prakrit languages such as Pali in Theravada Buddhism and Ardhamagadhi in Jainism competed with Sanskrit in the ancient times. However, states Paul Dundas , these ancient Prakrit languages had "roughly
11700-490: The relationship between various Indo-European languages, the origin of all these languages may possibly be in what is now Central or Eastern Europe, while the Indo-Iranian group possibly arose in Central Russia. The Iranian and Indo-Aryan branches separated quite early. It is the Indo-Aryan branch that moved into eastern Iran and then south into South Asia in the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE. Once in ancient India,
11817-558: The role of language, the ontological status of painting word-images through sound, and the need for rules so that it can serve as a means for a community of speakers, separated by geography or time, to share and understand profound ideas from each other. These speculations became particularly important to the Mīmāṃsā and the Nyaya schools of Hindu philosophy, and later to Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism, states Frits Staal —a scholar of Linguistics with
11934-516: The sacrificial rituals of the Saptarishis . The deity became highly besotted with the wives of the Saptarishis who were so ravishing that he kept staring at them. Finally, Agni could not bear the guilt of longing for wives belonging to someone else and he went to the forests to perform penances. Svaha followed him and understood his desire. She took the forms of the wives of the Saptarishis (though she
12051-491: The same relationship to Sanskrit as medieval Italian does to Latin". The Indian tradition states that the Buddha and the Mahavira preferred the Prakrit language so that everyone could understand it. However, scholars such as Dundas have questioned this hypothesis. They state that there is no evidence for this and whatever evidence is available suggests that by the start of the common era, hardly anybody other than learned monks had
12168-551: The semi-nomadic Aryans . The Vedic Sanskrit language or a closely related Indo-European variant was recognized beyond ancient India as evidenced by the " Mitanni Treaty" between the ancient Hittite and Mitanni people, carved into a rock, in a region that now includes parts of Syria and Turkey. Parts of this treaty, such as the names of the Mitanni princes and technical terms related to horse training, for reasons not understood, are in early forms of Vedic Sanskrit. The treaty also invokes
12285-446: The sixty thousand sons to ashes. King Sagara sent his grandson, Amshuman , to ask the sage Kapila what could be done to bring deliverance to their souls. Sage Kapila advised that only the water of the Ganges, which flowed from Svarga, could liberate them. Bhagiratha, Amshuman's grandson, undertook severe ascetic practices, and won the favour of Brahma and Shiva. Brahma allowed Ganga to descend on earth, while Shiva broke Ganga's fall in
12402-594: The social structures such as the role of the poet and the priests, the patronage economy, the phrasal equations, and some of the poetic metres. While there are similarities, state Jamison and Brereton, there are also differences between Vedic Sanskrit, the Old Avestan, and the Mycenaean Greek literature. For example, unlike the Sanskrit similes in the Ṛg-veda, the Old Avestan Gathas lack simile entirely, and it
12519-641: The turn of the 1st-millennium CE, it has been written in various Brahmic scripts , and in the modern era most commonly in Devanagari . Sanskrit's status, function, and place in India's cultural heritage are recognized by its inclusion in the Constitution of India 's Eighth Schedule languages . However, despite attempts at revival, there are no first-language speakers of Sanskrit in India. In each of India's recent decennial censuses, several thousand citizens have reported Sanskrit to be their mother tongue, but
12636-457: The variants in the usage of Sanskrit in different regions of India. The ten Vedic scholars he quotes are Āpiśali, Kaśyapa , Gārgya, Gālava, Cakravarmaṇa, Bhāradvāja , Śākaṭāyana, Śākalya, Senaka and Sphoṭāyana. In the Aṣṭādhyāyī , language is observed in a manner that has no parallel among Greek or Latin grammarians. Pāṇini's grammar, according to Renou and Filliozat, is a classic that defines
12753-564: The vernacular Prakrits. Many Sanskrit dramas indicate that the language coexisted with the vernacular Prakrits. The cities of Varanasi , Paithan , Pune and Kanchipuram were centers of classical Sanskrit learning and public debates until the arrival of the colonial era. According to Lamotte , Sanskrit became the dominant literary and inscriptional language because of its precision in communication. It was, states Lamotte, an ideal instrument for presenting ideas, and as knowledge in Sanskrit multiplied, so did its spread and influence. Sanskrit
12870-526: The word Ganga is also mentioned, but it is not clear if the reference is to the river. RVRV 3.58.6 says that "your ancient home, your auspicious friendship, O Heroes, your wealth is on the banks of the Jahanvi". This verse could refer to the Ganga. In RV 1.116.18–19, the Jahanvi and the Ganges river dolphin occur in two adjacent verses. Ganga is described as the melodious, the fortunate, the cow that gives much milk,
12987-497: The Ṛg-veda is distinctly more archaic than other Vedic texts, and in many respects, the Rigvedic language is notably more similar to those found in the archaic texts of Old Avestan Zoroastrian Gathas and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey . According to Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton – Indologists known for their translation of the Ṛg-veda – the Vedic Sanskrit literature "clearly inherited" from Indo-Iranian and Indo-European times
13104-408: Was a spoken language ( bhasha ) used by the cultured and educated. Some sutras expound upon the variant forms of spoken Sanskrit versus written Sanskrit. Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang mentioned in his memoir that official philosophical debates in India were held in Sanskrit, not in the vernacular language of that region. According to Sanskrit linguist professor Madhav Deshpande, Sanskrit
13221-427: Was a spoken language in a colloquial form by the mid-1st millennium BCE which coexisted with a more formal, grammatically correct form of literary Sanskrit. This, states Deshpande, is true for modern languages where colloquial incorrect approximations and dialects of a language are spoken and understood, along with more "refined, sophisticated and grammatically accurate" forms of the same language being found in
13338-472: Was adopted voluntarily as a vehicle of high culture, arts, and profound ideas. Pollock disagrees with Lamotte, but concurs that Sanskrit's influence grew into what he terms a "Sanskrit Cosmopolis" over a region that included all of South Asia and much of southeast Asia. The Sanskrit language cosmopolis thrived beyond India between 300 and 1300 CE. Today, it is believed that Kashmiri is the closest language to Sanskrit. Reinöhl mentions that not only have
13455-722: Was also the language of some of the oldest surviving, authoritative and much followed philosophical works of Jainism such as the Tattvartha Sutra by Umaswati . The Sanskrit language has been one of the major means for the transmission of knowledge and ideas in Asian history. Indian texts in Sanskrit were already in China by 402 CE, carried by the influential Buddhist pilgrim Faxian who translated them into Chinese by 418 CE. Xuanzang , another Chinese Buddhist pilgrim, learnt Sanskrit in India and carried 657 Sanskrit texts to China in
13572-402: Was unable to take the form of Arundhati , wife of Vashishtha) and approached Agni six times, seducing him and throwing the seed of each union into a golden pot, from which Skanda was born. The Brahmanda Purana mentions the names of the children of Svaha: Pavamāna, Pāvaka, and Śuci. In the Devi Bhagavata Purana , Narayana offers Narada the procedure to meditate upon Svaha: The following
13689-442: Was visualized as "pervading all creation", another representation of the world itself; the "mysterious magnum" of Hindu thought. The search for perfection in thought and the goal of liberation were among the dimensions of sacred sound, and the common thread that wove all ideas and inspirations together became the quest for what the ancient Indians believed to be a perfect language, the "phonocentric episteme" of Sanskrit. Sanskrit as
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