Sri Aurobindo
Early Cultural Writings
(1890 — 1910)
Part Eight. Reviews
“Sanskrit Research”1
The appearance of this Anglo-Sanskrit Quarterly “devoted to research work in all fields of Indian Antiquity” is a welcome sign of the recent development towards a wider culture, a more flexible and strenuous scholarship and a more original thinking which promises to lift the Indian mind out of the rut of secondhand provincialism and sterile repetition of commonplaces into which the vices of its school and university education had betrayed it and to equip it for the important contribution we may expect it to make to the world’s increasing stock of knowledge.
There has been a considerable expansion in this country, both in English and the vernaculars, of that ordinary periodical literature which caters for the popular mind and supplies it with snippets of knowledge, facile information and ready but not always very valuable opinions on all sorts of subjects.
But there has been hitherto little or nothing corresponding to those more serious publications common in every European country which appeal to a more limited audience but succeed in popularising within those limits a more serious and original thinking and a more thorough knowledge in each branch of human enquiry.
Attempts have been made but, outside the field of religion and philosophy, they have usually foundered in their inception for want of adequate support; they have not found, as they would have found elsewhere, an interested circle of readers.
Now, however, there ought to be a sufficient number of cultivated minds interested and competent in Sanskrit scholarship and the research into Indian antiquity to ensure an adequate support and an increasing usefulness for this new Quarterly.
The second (October) number of the Quarterly is before me and its sound editing and the value and interest of its contents promise well for its future.
There are especially two very solid articles, one by Mr. Tilak on “A Missing Verse in the Sankhya Karikas”, and another by Professor R. D. Ranade of the Ferguson College headed “Greek and Sanskrit: a Comparative Study”, but there is no article without its interest and value.
I note that in this number all the contributors, with one exception, are either from Maharashtra or the Madras Presidency.
It is to be hoped that the editor will be able to secure the cooperation of Sanskrit scholars in the north so that this Review may become an All-India organ of Indian research.
Mr. Tilak’s article shows all the thoroughness and acuteness which that great scholar brings to his work great or small whether he is seeking for the original home of the Aryans in the cryptic mass of the Rig Veda or restoring with his rare powers of deduction a lost verse in the Karikas.
The point he seeks to establish, though apparently a small one, has really a considerable importance.
He points out that there is a consensus of authority for the existence of 70 verses in Ishwarakrishna’s Sankhya-Karikas, but, if we exclude the last three which do not belong to the doctrinal part of the text, we have both in the Indian text and in the Chinese version only 69; at the same time he shows that both Gaudapada’s Bhashya and the commentary in the Chinese version contain a passage developing a refutation of four possible subtler causes of the world, Ishwara, Purusha, Kala and Swabhava (God, the Soul, Time and Nature) rejected by the Sankhyas, a refutation which logically ought to be but is not found in the text itself.
From the passage in the Bhashya he seeks to reestablish the sense and even the language of the missing verse.
It seems to me that he has established both the fact of the missing verse and its substance.
But the interesting point is the reason assigned by him for the loss of the verse; it was, he thinks, no accident, but a deliberate suppression made at a time when the Sankhya philosophy was being re-explained by thinkers like Vijnanabhikshu in a Vedantic sense.
If so, the point made sheds a very 
interesting light on the historic course of philosophical thought in India.
The general line which that development followed arises more indirectly from an interesting and carefully reasoned article by Mr. Y. Subbarao on the question of the originality of Shankara’s philosophy.
Mr. Subbarao seeks to establish his point that it was no new system of thought which Shankara created, but only the re-statement perhaps in a more developed form of a very ancient school of Vedantic interpretation.
Certainly, it cannot be supposed that Shankara invented a new philosophy out of his own brain; he believed himself to be establishing against attack the real sense of the Vedantic philosophy founded on the original texts of its canon and supported by the best tradition.
Nor does any greater thinker really invent a system new-born from his own intellect; what he does is to take up the material available to him in the past history of thought, to choose, select, reject, to present new lights2 on old ideas, to develop latent suggestions, to bring into prominence what was before less prominent or not so trenchant and definite, to give a fresh, striking and illuminating sense to old terms, to combine what was before not at all or else ill-combined; in doing so he creates; his philosophy, though not new in its materials, is new in the whole effect it produces and the more powerful light that in certain directions it conveys to the thinking mind.
The question is whether Shankara’s system was not new in this sense and, though the previous material still subsisting is insufficient to decide the question, it must, I think, be answered provisionally in the affirmative.
Adwaitavada undoubtedly existed before, but it was the form Shankara gave it which made it a clear, well-thought-out and powerfully trenchant philosophy and put his name at the head of Indian metaphysicians.
Mr. Subbarao admits that it is impossible to establish an exclusive Adwaitavada, much less the Mayavada, from the Veda, Upanishads, Brahmasutras or the Gita.
It is impossible not because the great thinkers who gave us these writings thought confusedly or without a clear grasp of principles, but because theirs was an entirely different method.
India began with a synthetic and intuitive manner of thinking based not upon logical distinctions and verbal oppositions, but upon the facts of spiritual experience and vision.
In such synthetic and intuitive philosophies truths are arranged according to the place of each in the actual fact of things, as different laws and generalisations are arranged in Science, each positive in its own field and each having its proper relation to the others.
The perfection of this method is to be found in the Upanishads and the Gita; and that is the reason why all attempts to interpret these great works by the methods of logical debate and the rigorous exclusions dear to the analytic metaphysician always fail even in the strongest hands; they raise questions about the sense of these works which cannot be conclusively solved, but must necessarily lead to eternal debate, because the method is wrong and the original work itself never intended to cause or countenance such discussions.
Only a synthetic method of interpretation can explain a synthetic and intuitive philosophy.
The analytical tendency began with the gradual divisions which ended in the establishment of the six philosophical schools.
Each of them claims to be justified by the Veda and from its own point of view each is quite in the right, for the primary data of each are there in the sacred writings.
It is where they press to exclusive conclusions and deny and refute each other that they can no longer truly claim Vedic authority.
Even the Buddhists could, if they had chosen, have based themselves on the Veda, for there are passages which, if taken by themselves, seem to deny the Atman and attribute all to Karma or to assert the Non-Existent as the source of things.
The perfect resort to the analytical method came later; it was employed with great effect though often rather naively by the Buddhists, but it was Shankara who applied rigorously the analytical method of the intellectual reason in all its trenchant clearness and force to metaphysics.
Hence the greatness of his position in the history of Indian thought.
From his time forward Indian metaphysics was bound to the wheels of the analytical and intellectual mind.
Still, it is to be noted that while the philosophers thus split the catholicity of the ancient Truth into warring schools, the general Indian mind was 
always overpoweringly attracted by the synthetical tendency.
The Gita seems to be in part the expression of such a synthetic reaction, the Puranas show constantly the same tendency and even into the philosophical schools it made its entry.
Prof. Ranade’s article on Greek and Sanskrit carries us into another field, that of Comparative Philology.
His object is in a brief scope to establish the identical origin of Greek and Sanskrit in that which is most essential in the growth of a language, its grammatical forms and syntactical peculiarities.
He has had to allow himself only a very small space for so large and important a subject, but within these narrow limits he has done his work with great thoroughness and, subject to a few minor reservations, with a minute accuracy.
It is to be regretted that by printing the Greek words in their proper character instead of in Roman type Mr. Ranade has made this interesting essay unintelligible to all but a very few Indian readers.
He lays down the principle that the words of each language should be printed in its own type and that anyone who wishes to study Comparative Philology must take the trouble to familiarise himself with the original alphabets.
This is a counsel of perfection which is not practicable in India, nor indeed on any large scale in Europe either.
If for instance a scholar were dealing with the philology of the Aryan languages and had to cite largely verbal forms both from the European tongues and from Sanskrit and its Indian descendants he would be compelled on this principle to require at least nine different types from the Press to which he entrusted his work.
No Press would be able to meet the demand and very few even of his learned readers but would be baffled by the variety.
Mr. Ranade himself gives us German words and a German sentence, but not in the Gothic character which alphabetical purism would demand.
There are three or four statements in the article to which objection can be taken and, since in philology even the smallest details are of importance, the learned writer will not object to my pointing them out with some emphasis; in one case at least he has fallen into a serious error by correcting which he may add an interesting and not unimportant subsection to his 
array of grammatical and syntactical identities between the two languages.
I do not understand in the first place what is meant by the statement that “in Greek no difference is made between the dentals and the linguals and they are fused together.”
If it is meant that the Greek language possessed both dental and lingual sounds but expressed them by the same characters, I do not think this can be correct.
The distribution of dentals and linguals in the various languages is one of the most curious phenomena in the history of linguistic phonetics and deserves a closer inquiry than has been accorded to it.
The Latin and Celtic languages reject the lingual and use only the dental; English on the other hand prefers the linguals, though it uses occasionally the dental t, th and d, all of which it represents by th, as in with, thin, though, — a desperately clumsy device thoroughly in keeping with the chaotic wildness of English orthography.
Everyone in India knows the difficulty an Englishman finds in pronouncing the Indian dentals; he turns them resolutely into linguals.
On the contrary a Frenchman who has not educated himself into the right English pronunciation, will turn the English lingual into a dental; he will say feasth instead of feast, noth instead of not, and pronounce do as if it were the English though.
A similar peculiarity is one of the chief features of the brogue, the Irish mispronunciation of English speech; for the natural Irish tongue cannot manage the hard lingual sound in such words as Peter and shoulder, it mollifies them into true dentals.
I have noticed the same peculiarity in the pronunciation of a Spanish actress playing in English on a London stage; otherwise perfect, it produced a strange impression by its invariable transformation of the harder English into the softer Latin sound.
Now Greek must certainly have belonged to the Latin-Celtic group in this phonetic peculiarity; otherwise the difference would have been too striking to escape the sensitive ear of the ancient poets and scholars.
It seems to me therefore that in the comparative scheme of the two alphabets the Sanskrit linguals should be marked as absent in the Greek and, not as Mr. Ranade represents them, correspondent equally with the dentals to the Greek tau, theta, and delta.
In the comparison of the declensions Mr. Ranade asserts that Greek feminine nouns in long a like chōrā correspond in their endings to Sanskrit nouns of the type of bhāryā and Greek nouns in long e like tīmē to Sanskrit nouns of the type of dāsī.
Surely this is an error.
The writer has fallen into it because he was looking only at the Attic dialect, but the Attic is only one variation of the Greek language and it is misleading to study it by itself.
As a matter of fact, this ā and this ē both represent the same original sound which must have been the feminine termination in ā; only the Doric dialect prefers always the original ā, the Ionic modifies it into ē, and the Attic standing between the Doric and the Ionic belts makes a compromise.
In the Attic when this feminine ā is preceded by a vowel it remains unmodified, as also usually when it is preceded by r, but if it is preceded by a consonant it becomes ē; thus philiā, chōrā, but
tîmē, kōmē.
Ionic will say philiē and not philiā; Doric tīmā and not
tîmē.
This is enough to negative Mr. Ranade’s identification of this Attic ē with the Sanskrit feminine ī.
Certainly there are cases in which Sanskrit uses this ī termination where Attic has the ē, as in caturthī and tetartē; but this simply means that the Greek has rejected the Sanskrit deviation into the ī form and kept to the more regular ā which here too will appear in its pure form in the Doric.3
In the comparison of
tenses Mr. Ranade makes the rather curious assertion that the Sanskrit Conditional does not occur in any other language except perhaps German; but surely if the German “wurden getodet worden sein” corresponds to the Sanskrit abhaviṣyat, the French conditionals e.g. auraient été tués and the English “would have been killed” ought equally to be considered as parallel syntactical constructions; they have the same sense and with a slight difference the same form as the German.
Finally, Mr. Ranade tells us that there are no such compounds in Greek as in Sanskrit and again that there are no dvandva, karmadhāraya and bahuvrīhi compounds in Greek, 
although there are verbs compounded with prepositions.
I am at a loss to understand how so sound a scholar can have come to make a statement so contrary to all the facts.
The power of the Greek language to make compounds is one of its most notable characteristics and its rich though never intemperate use is one of the great beauties of the Greek poetical style.
When the Romans came into contact with Greek literature, their earlier poets tried to introduce this faculty into Latin and even Virgil describes the sea as velivolum, sail-flying, i.e. with sails flying over it like the wings of birds through the air, but the usage was too contrary to the Latin genius to succeed.
Not only did the Greek compound prepositions with its verbs, but it compounded nouns and verbs together.
Thus from nau-archos, ship-ruler, i.e. admiral, they made nau-archein, to be an admiral; nor did they hesitate before such forms as paido-poiein, to beget children, paido-tribein, to train boys, mnēsikakein, to remember wrongs, neotto-tropheisthai, to be brought up like the young of a bird.
In fact with the exception of nominal dvandvas the Greek illustrates all the main varieties of the Sanskrit compound.
For it is capable of such compounds as pseudo-martur4, a false witness, pseudo-christos, a false Christ, chauno-politēs, a silly citizen5; as andro-phonos, man-killing, paid-oletor, a destroyer of one’s children, phusi-zoos, life-producing, koruth-aiolos, helmet-glancing, lao-kataratos, cursed by the people, thumoleōn, heart-lion, as anabadēn and katabadēn answering to the Sanskrit avyayībhāva; as oxu-thumos, sharp-passioned, oxu-schoinos, having sharp reeds, polu-teknos, having many children, io-stephanos, violet-crowned.
The language indeed pullulates with compounds.
It is true that they are usually composed of two members only, but compounds of three members are found, as tris-kako-daimōn, thrice-evil-fated and Aristophanes even perpetrates such forms as glischr-antilog-exepitriptos and sphragid-onuch-argo-komētēs.
I have dwelt on these points because they leap to the eye in the perfection otherwise complete of an admirable essay which, I hope, is only the first sketch of a more important treatise.
But with the exception of the last they are minor points and do not seriously detract from the completeness of the exposition.
Especially new and interesting are the parallel between Greek and Vedic accents and the rearrangement of Greek conjugations according to the Sanskrit classification.
The common origin of Greek and Sanskrit is apparent enough, but like other philologists Mr. Ranade is far too sure of the conclusion he draws from it.
I believe him to be right in thinking that the Indian Aryans and the Greeks6 came from one stock, but when he says that this has been proved beyond dispute by the discoveries of the philologist he is going much too fast.
Common origin of language or even common language does not prove common ethnic origin.
The French and Spaniards are not Latins nor the Irish of Dublin and Munster Anglo-Saxons.
From the possible causes of linguistic similarity which the writer has given he has omitted one, conquest and cultural pressure.
According to the theory of the Italian ethnologist, Sergi, all the Mediterranean races of Northern Africa and Southern Europe belong to one “Mediterranean” stock ancient and highly civilised which was conquered by Aryan savages and this accounts for their “Aryan” languages.
It is the same theory that now prevails in a different form with regard to the Aryan conquest of a highly civilised Dravidian India.
Philology can bring no sufficient argument to contradict it.
Mr. Ranade deprecates the scorn of the linguistically ignorant for philology, but we must not forget that in Europe it is not the ignorant alone who feel this contempt, but the scientists, and that there is a certain justification for their contempt; this was admitted by so great a philological scholar as Renan when in the evening of his days he had to apologise for his favourite pursuits as “our petty conjectural sciences”.
Philology is in fact not yet a science, but rather far too largely a structure of ingenuities and plausible conjectures.
It set out with the hope of discovering the origin of language and the scientific laws of its development, but it has failed entirely; and it failed not because they are undiscoverable, — I believe the clue is there lying ready to our hands in the Sanskrit language, — but because it strayed off to the facile pursuit of obvious similarities and identities instead of delving patiently and scrupulously, as all true Science must do, 
behind the outward appearances of things to get back at origins and embryonic indices.
And on its scanty and uncertain data it began to build up enormous structures of theory such as the common origin of Aryan-speaking races, their original habitat, their common form of culture before separation, etc.
Such facile play of an ingenious imagination is still the failing of the scholar and justifies to a certain extent the scorn of the patient, accurate and scrupulous physical scientist for the freaks and pretentions of the “philolog”.
Not altogether is it justified, for philology has made several interesting and useful discoveries, established a few minor generalisations and, above all, substituted a sounder though not yet entirely sound critical method for the fantastic licence of the old unscientific philology which, once it left the sure ground of grammar, was capable of anything and everything however absurd or impossible.
But much has to be learned and a great deal more unlearned before we can measure ourselves with the physical scientist or deserve his approval.
It is here that much is to be hoped from the Indian intellect which is more accustomed than the European to move with a penetrating subtlety and accuracy in the things of the mind.
But to justify the hope it must first get rid on one side of its attachment to the methods of the Pundit and his subservience to traditional authority and on the other not give itself bound hand and foot to the method of the European scholar or imitate too freely that swiftly leaping ingenious mind of his which gives you in a trice a Scythian or a Persian Buddha, identifies conclusively Murghab and Maurya, Mayasura and Ahura Mazda and generally constructs with magical rapidity the wrong animal out of the wrong bone.
We have to combine the laboriousness of the Pundit, the slow and patient conscientiousness of the physical scientist abhorrent of a too facile conclusion and the subtlety of the psychologist in order to deserve the same success in these other sciences and to lift them beyond the shifting field of conjecture.
Sanskrit Research gives us Sanskrit articles as well as English with the laudable object of bringing together with a view to mutual helpfulness the old and the new scholarship.
Sanskrit 
ought still to have a future as a language of the learned and it will not be a good day for India when the ancient tongue ceases entirely to be written or spoken.
But if it is to survive, it must get rid of the curse of the heavy pedantic style contracted by it in its decline with the lumbering impossible compounds and the overweight of hair-splitting erudition.
The Sanskrit articles in this number are learned and laborious, but they suffer heavily from this defect of style.
If the contact established by the Sanskrit Research can teach the new scholarship the patient thoroughness of the old and the old the flexibility and penetrating critical sense of the new, it will have done to both a great and much-needed service.