Widdershins (sometimes withershins , widershins or widderschynnes ) is a term meaning to go counter-clockwise, anti-clockwise, or lefthandwise, or to walk around an object by always keeping it on the left. Literally, it means to take a course opposite the apparent motion of the sun viewed from the Northern Hemisphere (the face of this imaginary clock is the ground the viewer stands upon). The earliest recorded use of the word, as cited by the Oxford English Dictionary , is in a 1513 translation of the Aeneid , where it is found in the phrase "Abaisit I wolx, and widdersyns start my hair." In this sense, "widdershins start my hair" means "my hair stood on end".
32-545: The use of the word also means "in a direction opposite to the usual" and "in a direction contrary to the apparent course of the sun". It is cognate with the German language widersinnig , i.e., "against" + "sense". The term "widdershins" was especially common in Lowland Scots . The opposite of widdershins is deosil , or sunwise , meaning "clockwise". Widdershins comes from Middle Low German weddersinnes , literally "against
64-479: A church , and a number of folk myths make reference to this superstition ; for example, in the fairy tale Childe Rowland , the protagonist and his sister are transported to Elfland after the sister runs widdershins round a church. There is also a reference to this in Dorothy Sayers 's novels The Nine Tailors (chapter entitled The Second Course; "He turned to his right, knowing that it is unlucky to walk about
96-532: A common parent language . Because language change can have radical effects on both the sound and the meaning of a word, cognates may not be obvious, and it often takes rigorous study of historical sources and the application of the comparative method to establish whether lexemes are cognate. Cognates are distinguished from loanwords , where a word has been borrowed from another language. The English term cognate derives from Latin cognatus , meaning "blood relative". An example of cognates from
128-613: A church widdershins ...") and Clouds of Witness ("True, O King, and as this isn't a church, there's no harm in going round it widdershins"). In Robert Louis Stevenson 's tale "The Song of the Morrow," an old crone on the beach dances "widdershins". In the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Churches it is normal for processions around a church to travel in an anticlockwise direction. This remains
160-617: A common origin, but which in fact do not. For example, Latin habēre and German haben both mean 'to have' and are phonetically similar. However, the words evolved from different Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots: haben , like English have , comes from PIE *kh₂pyé- 'to grasp', and has the Latin cognate capere 'to seize, grasp, capture'. Habēre , on the other hand, is from PIE *gʰabʰ 'to give, to receive', and hence cognate with English give and German geben . Likewise, English much and Spanish mucho look similar and have
192-499: A counter-clockwise and 'widdershins' direction, that is to say, a direction that runs counter to the apparent movement of the Sun within the sky from the vantage of the ground. This runs counter to the prevalent directionality of Buddhism (in general) and orthodox Hinduism . This is in keeping with the aspect and directionality of the ' Sauvastika ' (Tibetan: yung-drung ), sacred to the Bönpo. In
224-636: A distinction between the "state of understanding" ( paññā ) and the "act of understanding" ( pajānana ) in a way different from how English does. Paññā is the fourth virtue of ten pāramīs found in late canonic (Khuddaka Nikāya) and Theravādan commentary, and the sixth of the six Mahāyāna pāramitās . It is the third level of the Threefold Training in Buddhism consisting of sīla , samādhi , and paññā . Theravada Buddhist commentator Acariya Dhammapala describes paññā as
256-412: A similar meaning, but are not cognates: much is from Proto-Germanic *mikilaz < PIE *meǵ- and mucho is from Latin multum < PIE *mel- . A true cognate of much is the archaic Spanish maño 'big'. Cognates are distinguished from other kinds of relationships. An etymon , or ancestor word, is the ultimate source word from which one or more cognates derive. In other words, it
288-514: Is a Buddhist term often translated as "wisdom", "insight", "intelligence", or "understanding". It is described in Buddhist texts as the understanding of the true nature of phenomena. In the context of Buddhist meditation , it is the ability to understand the three characteristics of all things: anicca ("impermanence"), dukkha ("dissatisfaction" or "suffering"), and anattā ("non-self" or "egolessness"). Mahāyāna texts describe it as
320-492: Is regular. Paradigms of conjugations or declensions, the correspondence of which cannot be generally due to chance, have often been used in cognacy assessment. However, beyond paradigms, morphosyntax is often excluded in the assessment of cognacy between words, mainly because structures are usually seen as more subject to borrowing. Still, very complex, non-trivial morphosyntactic structures can rarely take precedence over phonetic shapes to indicate cognates. For instance, Tangut ,
352-477: Is the source of related words in different languages. For example, the etymon of both Welsh ceffyl and Irish capall is the Proto-Celtic * kaballos (all meaning horse ). Descendants are words inherited across a language barrier, coming from a particular etymon in an ancestor language. For example, Russian мо́ре and Polish morze are both descendants of Proto-Slavic * moře (meaning sea ). A root
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#1732876769802384-444: Is the source of related words within a single language (no language barrier is crossed). Similar to the distinction between etymon and root , a nuanced distinction can sometimes be made between a descendant and a derivative . A derivative is one of the words which have their source in a root word, and were at some time created from the root word using morphological constructs such as suffixes, prefixes, and slight changes to
416-531: The Visuddhimagga , that there are many different types and aspects of paññā but does not define them all. Buddhaghosa specifies paññā in relation to Buddhist meditation as being specifically vipassanā-paññā ("insight wisdom"), meaning insight knowledge endowed with virtue. Buddhaghosa defines vipassanā-paññā as “knowing in a particular mode separate from the modes of perceiving ( sañjānana ) and cognizing ( vijjānana )”. Buddhaghosa makes
448-789: The Paraguayan Guarani panambi , the Eastern Bolivian Guarani panapana , the Cocama and Omagua panama , and the Sirionó ana ana are cognates, derived from the Old Tupi panapana , 'butterfly', maintaining their original meaning in these Tupi languages . Cognates need not have the same meaning, as they may have undergone semantic change as the languages developed independently. For example English starve and Dutch sterven 'to die' or German sterben 'to die' all descend from
480-778: The Southern Hemisphere , the Bönpo practitioner is required to elect whether the directionality of 'counter-clockwise' ( deosil in the Southern Hemisphere) or running-counter to the direction of the Sun (widdershins in the Southern Hemisphere) is the key intention of the tradition. The resolution to this conundrum is left open to the practitioner, their 'intuitive insight' (Sanskrit: prajna ) and their tradition. Cognate In historical linguistics , cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in
512-706: The Proto-Indo-European *nókʷts 'night'. The Indo-European languages have hundreds of such cognate sets, though few of them are as neat as this. The Arabic سلام salām , the Hebrew שלום shalom , the Assyrian Neo-Aramaic shlama and the Amharic selam 'peace' are cognates, derived from the Proto-Semitic *šalām- 'peace'. The Brazilian Portuguese panapanã , (flock of butterflies in flight),
544-412: The analogy of how a child, villager, and money-changer sees money to explain his definition. The child can perceive ( sañjānana ) coins through the senses but does not know the value, the villager knows the value of the coins and is conscious ( vijjānana ) of the coins' characteristics as a medium of exchange, and the money-changer has an understanding ( paññā ) of the coins that is even deeper than
576-457: The case regardless of which hemisphere they are performed in. In Judaism circles are also sometimes walked anticlockwise. For example, when a bride circles her groom seven times before marriage, when dancing around the bimah during Simchat Torah (or when dancing in a circle at any time), or when the Sefer Torah is brought out of the ark (ark is approached from the right, and departed from
608-405: The comprehension of the characteristics of things or phenomena with skillful means. Dhammapala states that paññā has the attribute of penetrating the true nature of phenomena. Abhidharma commentaries relate that there are three types of paññā : Thai Buddhist monk and meditation-master Ajahn Lee classifies the first two types of paññā as dhamma on the theory-level and
640-730: The darkness of delusion " in order to understand the "individual essence of states". Buddhist-studies scholar Paul Williams states that Mahayana Buddhist tradition considers the analysis of prajñā found in the Abhidharma texts to be incomplete. According to Williams, the Abhidharma description of prajñā stops at the discernment of dharmas as the final reality, but Mahayana and some non-Mahayana schools go on to teach that all dharma s are empty ( dharma-śūnyatā ). Buddhist scholar John Makransky describes dharma s in this sense to mean "phenomena". Williams goes on to say that
672-521: The language of the Xixia Empire, and one Horpa language spoken today in Sichuan , Geshiza, both display a verbal alternation indicating tense, obeying the same morphosyntactic collocational restrictions. Even without regular phonetic correspondences between the stems of the two languages, the cognatic structures indicate secondary cognacy for the stems. False cognates are pairs of words that appear to have
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#1732876769802704-438: The last as dhamma on the practice-level. Ajahn Lee states that this results in two levels of paññā : mundane paññā which is the comprehension of worldly and dhamma subjects, and transcendent paññā which is an awareness of the supramundane that is realized by enlightened beings. Abhidharma commentaries describe seven ways to gain paññā : Buddhaghosa states in his commentary and meditation treatise,
736-579: The left). This has its origins in the Temple in Jerusalem , where in order not to get in each other's way, the priests would walk around the altar anticlockwise while performing their duties. When entering the Beis Hamikdash the people would enter by one gate, and leave by another. The resulting direction of motion was anticlockwise. In Judaism, starting things from the right side is considered to be important, since
768-457: The meaning of prajñā according to Mahayana Prajñāpāramitā sutras is ultimately the state of understanding emptiness ( śūnyatā ). Religious studies scholar Dale S. Wright points to the Heart Sutra which states that those who want "to practice the profound perfection of wisdom ( prajñā ) should view things in this way [as empty]". Wright states this view is not wisdom, but having
800-600: The right side is the side of Chesed (kindness) while the left side is the side of Gevurah (judgment). For example, there is a Jewish custom recorded in the Shulchan Aruch to put on the right shoe first and take off the left shoe first, following the example of Mar son of Ravina whom the Talmud records as putting his shoes on in this way. The Bönpo in the Northern Hemisphere traditionally circumambulate (generally) in
832-983: The same Indo-European root are: night ( English ), Nacht ( German ), nacht ( Dutch , Frisian ), nag ( Afrikaans ), Naach ( Colognian ), natt ( Swedish , Norwegian ), nat ( Danish ), nátt ( Faroese ), nótt ( Icelandic ), noc ( Czech , Slovak , Polish ), ночь, noch ( Russian ), ноќ, noć ( Macedonian ), нощ, nosht ( Bulgarian ), ніч , nich ( Ukrainian ), ноч , noch / noč ( Belarusian ), noč ( Slovene ), noć ( Serbo-Croatian ), nakts ( Latvian ), naktis ( Lithuanian ), nos ( Welsh/Cymraeg ), νύξ, nyx ( Ancient Greek ), νύχτα / nychta ( Modern Greek ), nakt- ( Sanskrit ), natë ( Albanian ), nox , gen. sg. noctis ( Latin ), nuit ( French ), noche ( Spanish ), nochi ( Extremaduran ), nueche ( Asturian ), noite ( Portuguese and Galician ), notte ( Italian ), nit ( Catalan ), nuet/nit/nueit ( Aragonese ), nuèch / nuèit ( Occitan ) and noapte ( Romanian ). These all mean 'night' and derive from
864-452: The same Proto-Germanic verb, *sterbaną 'to die'. Cognates also do not need to look or sound similar: English father , French père , and Armenian հայր ( hayr ) all descend directly from Proto-Indo-European *ph₂tḗr . An extreme case is Armenian երկու ( erku ) and English two , which descend from Proto-Indo-European *dwóh₁ ; the sound change *dw > erk in Armenian
896-400: The surface understanding the villager has because the money-changer can identify which coins are real or fake, which village created them, etc. Paññā in the context of Buddhist meditation is described as the ability to understand the three characteristics of all things, namely impermanence , suffering , and non-self . Buddhaghoṣa states that the function of paññā is "to abolish
928-437: The understanding of śūnyatā ("emptiness"). It is part of the Threefold Training in Buddhism, and is one of the ten pāramīs of Theravāda Buddhism and one of the six Mahāyāna pāramitās . Prajñā is often translated as "wisdom", but according to Buddhist bioethics scholar Damien Keown , it is closer in meaning to "insight", "non-discriminating knowledge", or "intuitive apprehension". The component parts of
960-504: The vowels or to the consonants of the root word. For example unhappy , happily , and unhappily are all derivatives of the root word happy . The terms root and derivative are used in the analysis of morphological derivation within a language in studies that are not concerned with historical linguistics and that do not cross the language barrier. Wisdom in Buddhism Prajñā ( प्रज्ञा ) or paññā ( 𑀧𑀜𑁆𑀜𑀸 )
992-483: The way" (i.e. "in the opposite direction"), from widersinnen "to go against", from Old High German elements widar "against" and sinnen "to travel, go", related to sind "journey". Because the sun played a highly important role in older religions, to go against it was considered bad luck for sun-worshiping traditions. It was considered unlucky in Britain to travel in an anticlockwise (not sunwise ) direction around
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1024-418: The word are: Pali scholars T. W. Rhys Davids and William Stede define paññā ( prajñā ) as "intelligence, comprising all the higher faculties of cognition" and "intellect as conversant with general truths". British Buddhist monk and Pāli scholar Ñāṇamoli Bhikkhu translates prajñā ( paññā ), as "understanding", specifically the "state of understanding". Ñāṇamoli Bhikkhu notes that Pāli makes
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