Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [99]
This approach was very much a part of another distinctive feature of Sanskrit linguistic culture, namely a strong ambivalence about the value of writing. Reliance on language in its written form was seen as crippling, and not giving true control over linguistic content. Hence this proverb:
pustakasthā tu yā vidyā parahastagatam dhanam
Knowledge in a book—money in another’s hand.4
In this ancient India was like many cultures as widely divided as the Druids of Gaul in the first century BC5 and modern Guatemala (where Mayans remark that outsiders note things down not in order to remember them, but rather so as not to have to remember them).6 Even Socrates recalled a story that when the the god Thoth first offered the craft of writing to the king of Egypt, the king was not impressed: ‘it will set forgetfulness in the minds of learners for lack of practice in memory’.7 The doyens of Indian learning took this undeniable side effect of book learning very much to heart.
Even though the language had undergone a full phonological analysis by the fifth century BC, which was even incorporated into the official order of letters in the alphabet, reliance on written texts for important (especially spiritually important) documents was decried. Hence another saying:
vedavikrayiaçcāiva vedānācāiva dūaka
vedānā lekhakaścāiva tevāi nirayagāmina
The sellers of the Vedas, the misreaders of the Vedas,
the writers of the Vedas, all go on the path to hell.8
By contrast the ideal was the rote learning of all the principal texts, through judicious use of mnemonic techniques. This learning then made possible true engagement with all aspects of them, including the composition of new texts and commentaries, which might indeed benefit from being written down.
The character of the language that received this attention has already been exhibited in the quotations. It was a typical ancient Indo-European language, with nouns, adjectives, pronouns and verbs all highly inflected in a system that, although susceptible to elegant analysis (as Panini and the grammatical tradition demonstrated), was rife with special exceptions. Words tended to be polysyllabic, and their length was often increased by the propensity of the language to tolerate compounds of almost unlimited length, a feature of Sanskrit that became more extreme (in all genres of literature) as the centuries and millennia wore on.
The vocabulary is vast: there are over ten thousand nominal (i.e. nonverbal) roots in the traditional thesaurus for poets (Amarakoa, ‘the Immortal Treasury’, organised of course into sutras for memorisation) and, when verbs and compounds are allowed in, Monier Williams’ 1899 dictionary runs to 180,000 entries.* This means that there are vast resources in near-synonyms: at an extreme, John Brough claims there are fifty synonyms for ‘lotus’, a favourite concept of Sanskrit poetry in both literal and metaphorical senses.9 Words tend to have multiple senses anyway: the most straightforward word for lotus, padma has eleven extra senses in the neuter gender (lotus-like ornament, form of a lotus, root of a lotus, coloured marks on the face and trunk of an elephant, an army formation, a trillion (10), lead, a tantric chakra, a mole on the body, a spot, part of a column) and eight more in the masculine (temple, quarter-elephant, species of serpent, Rama, a treasure of Kubera, a mode of sexual enjoyment, a posture in meditation, a treasure connected with magic). These lexical resources are exploited to the full in Sanskrit poetry, which is gratuitously allusive and periphrastic, and addicted to ślea or punning.
But we have already noted that a special characteristic of Sanskrit is a complicated system of word liaison. This is known as sandhi (’putting together’). It means that word boundaries are often effaced, and a single stream of syllables, as pronounced or even written, becomes susceptible to multiple interpretations. The combined result of these two properties of Sanskrit is an opportunity for punning on an almost inconceivable