> "This discovery will revolutionise the study of Sanskrit at a time when interest in the language is on the rise."
Why is the interest rising though?
Why is the interest rising though?
I suspect the more likely answer is that we are about slightly more than a generation away from India’s fiscal opening in the 1990s which led to a tremendous rise in wealth, and it’s usually children of wealthier people who can afford to pay the opportunity costs of basing a career in the humanities as opposed to STEM or Finance related, so now there are more Indians who would take up the humanities.
And if you are taking up the humanities, it makes sense to research highly under-researched and yet extremely old areas of the culture your family is from, since it’s a wide open area with a lot of opportunities that you may have an edge in, having been raised in or adjacent to the culture.
In the languages space this would mean more research in Sanskrit and potentially other indigenous languages.
I think your "rise in wealth" answer is correct, but note that it is not just people being able to afford a career in the humanities: it's also people who studied STEM/whatever and now have jobs with a bit of free time to spend on reading, or a bit of wealth to donate to keep their culture alive.
First the depth and clarity of thinking by ancient and medieval Indian scholars writing in Sanskrit in relation to key philosophical and existential questions is extraordinary. Personally I am currently inclined to think that the advaita vedanta tradition may have the most accurate understanding of the nature of consciousness I have yet seen. Moreover this tradition is largely based on purely logical arguments, which, while perhaps not 100% convincing to a modern reader, are I think definitely worth exploring.
The above points are perhaps not unrelated to certain features of the Sanskrit language itself, which seems to have a logical structure that is rare or unheard of in other natural languages. The existence of such structure is in large part due to the work of Panini 2500 years ago, as mentioned in the article, but also to later followers who developed a register of Sanskrit that can be compared to modern frameworks for knowledge representation, as discussed in this paper: https://ojs.aaai.org//index.php/aimagazine/article/view/466.
Can you think of any resource that would provide an overview of what you're getting here that doesn't require months of reading? Something to just get one's feet wet, to know what is out there to be learned if one is willing to invest the time?
If you mean more generally the whole of classical Indian philosophical thought it is really a vast subject of which I have barely begun to scrape the surface, so there's not a lot I can recommend there. I'm mostly still at the stage of reading related wikipedia articles.
EDIT: One more thing I should add is that there were also heterodox schools which explicitly rejected some or all of the assumptions of Hinduism (such as reincarnation). For example Charvaka (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charvaka) was a materialist school.
A few years down the line I hope to enter into a guru-shishya (teacher-disciple) regimen to understand more of it, the way it is supposed to be learnt.
For those interested, Aitareya Upanishad by Swami Chinmayanand would be a pretty good book to get started with, it has commentary which most of us should easily understand.
Sanskrit changes the way your brain works as much as Vedanta itself does. The primary purpose of Sanskrit itself is seen as a way for the knowledge of the self to be expressed to the human world.
Its very hard to not accept that this language and the texts were revealed rather than created.
(Hypothesis: if this explanation is correct, I would imagine there has similarly been a rise in the Latin-speaking community: more attendance at Living Latin etc. Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_Latin gives me the impression this may be true, though I'm not familiar enough to say.)