Sanskrit to the rescue (video)

Dr. Katy Poole, Sanskrit scholar (SanskritforYoga.com) via ElephantJournal.com

There’s a secret I’d like to share with you about why you feel the way you do: It’s not about the other person.

But before I describe how your feelings have everything to do with the blockage of prana (life-force) in your body, I have another secret that will help put my explanation in context: In any yoga teaching composed in Sanskrit, the first word of the text expresses the meaning and feeling of the whole teaching.

The yoga of sacred sound: Lesson 1, Increasing Life-force with Sanskrit

For example, the first word of the Bhagavad Gita is dharma. The entire discussion between Krishna and Arjuna on the battlefield between good and evil was about doing the right thing -- the thing most aligned with the divine purpose guiding your birth -- your dharma.

We all want to do the right thing, but sometimes we just don’t feel like it. We eat the wrong food, hang out with the wrong people, think the wrong thoughts, and say all the wrong things. And most often, we don’t even know why we feel so off when we should feel so on. More

Pali and Buddhist Sanskrit

Seven, Ven. Karunananda, PhD., Wisdom Quarterly

Buddhism was not originally taught in beautiful Sanskrit, even if the majority school of Buddhism clings to this notion.

Sanskrit was the sacred language of the elite caste, the brahmins who had cornered the religious marketplace in ancient India.

They were the temple priests, the only ones "pure" enough to learn and speak it -- much like Latin, a related language, in the Western world.

The Catholic Church had its liturgy in Latin until an upstart named Martin Luther said no and spoke German. And while the Jewish temple priests might have coveted Hebrew (or proto-Hebrew), Jesus of Nazareth said no and spoke Aramaic or some such language of the people.

In just the same way, the Buddha Gautama did not teach the Dharma in some elegant and exalted idiom of an exclusive caste of educated intellectuals. He spoke the language of the people. What that language was exactly is disputed. It was certainly related to Vedic Sanskrit of Brahmanism, just as Hindi -- the modern language of India -- is.

It is believed to have been Magadhi, the language of Magadha, a "Prakrit" or Pali-Sanskrit hybrid.

Much later, after Brahmanism had co-opted Buddhism to maintain religious power, it recorded many of the teachings in Sanskrit, and likely altered them to accord with Vedic texts and themes of many extraterrestrial gods now recast as an infinite number of buddhas to be worshiped.

When Buddhism, or the "Buddha-Dharma," had reached many northern countries, they sent emissaries to India to find out more. What they found were those Middle Sanskrit texts and copied them into their own languages, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and so on. Southeast Asia had retained the historical Buddha's original teachings in Pali, which had no script of its own, being an oral language, a lingua franca of the people.

Monastics in Sri Lanka, the Khmer Empire and elsewhere, wrote it in their scripts in ancient ola palm leaf sheafs. Great teachers and commentators, a long and venerable tradition in India, like Buddhaghosa gathered those texts to form the Pali Canon, considered the oldest redaction of what the Buddha actually taught.