As most of us residing in Austin are aware, Austin Hindu temple conducts Sanskrit speaking classes on weekends. A few days ago a question arose in me, Sanskrit is such an ancient language, all the ancient texts we Indians can think of are in Sanskrit. The language is so powerful that a few lines of verses in Sanskrit demands pages of explanation in other languages like English, Hindi, Kannada and so on.
After bouncing this thought off of my wife, I realized that the reason ancients texts are in Sanskrit stems from the fact that it was the medium of mass communication in ancient India. Over time the language evolved and the poets used this language and wrote some awesome poetry (like Kalidasa, Valmiki among others). The enlightened souls used the language to spread their message on meaning of life and beyond life.
All was well and I could see how reviving a language meant starting to use in day to day communication and hope it will survive long enough to give rise to poets and writers. So, that takes care of the prose and the poetry. There is still one thing remaining and that is the Shlokas or vedic chants. Apart from the fact that they are used during worship and only certain people are trained to chant, I do not know much beyond that.
The following posts from our own dear Bawa on facebook has shed more light on Shlokas.
Khurshed Batliwala What's the meaning of Shloka? Apart from the obvious?
G: Let's ask Swami Pragyanandji about it...
SP: There is an ancient language, Sanskrit. There are 2 basic styles in it, prose and poetry. When you use Sanskrit as Poetry then you go towards the meaning of Shloka... But it's not just poetry
Khurshed Batliwala Poetry which is full of Knowledge, with excellent use of the language, which either brings some gain some profit or inspires one into action or brings about some light on a difficult subject is getting even closer to the meaning of Shloka...
Khurshed Batliwala When excellent language made into poetry brings about all of the above together, then this is the perfect Shloka!
Brings light, brings gain or profit for the listener (possibly even the speaker) AND inspires chivalrous, courageous, good action... This is Shloka
PS: Bawa posts lot of knowledge on his facebook page, you can link to it here or follow him on his webpage.
1 comment:
Slokas is much more than the language and its literal meaning. For example, the Gayatri Mantra has a very straight forward meaning. But the significance of Sanskrit is that it allows encoding much more information that one realizes as one looks more at it.
The 24,000 slokas of Ramayan are one of the vyakhyas of the Gayatri Mantra. That each letter there could give an explanation worth 1000 slokas (in sanskrit) is amazing !
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