Words for the Heart: A treasury of emotions from classical India | Hacker News Reader

Words for the Heart: A treasury of emotions from classical India

bostonreview.net

70 pointssummoned13 comments

> there are multiple words for shame, but a distinction is drawn between hiri, the sense of shame that prevents one from doing wrong to begin with, and vrida, the shame that sets in after wrong has been done and which prompts actions of repentance. [...] but also new associations. There is a Pali word for self-loathing, omana, but this emotion is interestingly classified as a form of conceit or self-regard because it involves “a subtle form of preoccupation with the self.” Omana is an ironically proud fixation on how low and vile one is—the lowest and most vile of anyone to ever live! This can masquerade as humility, but it actually prevents the kind of humble and open-ended moral self-transformation stimulated by hiri.

Aside: here vrida is clearly Sanskrit vrīḍā (व्रीडा), but hiri puzzled me until I realized it must be hrī (ह्री), that has become hiri either in the review or in the book or already in whatever Pali/Prakrit word the author picked up.

Some of these distinctions are not as clear cut as claimed (there is a lot of semantic overlap etc) but nevertheless this was a great read, of what seems to be an interesting book.

“Instead, Bhartrihari tells us, ordinary language is a crystallization of something already implicit in reality. Reality itself is fundamentally linguistic, and what we think of as language—ordinary language, with its words and conceptual divisions—is just a devolution or fragmentation of this more primordial linguistic totality. This is precisely why, for Bhartrihari, the ultimate reality is shabdabrahman, a linguistic absolute.”

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” — John 1, KJV of the Christian Bible

This is perhaps a simplistic observation, but Bhartrihari’s linguistic idealism connects with how LLMs and their apparent intelligence is fundamentally language-driven. He would argue that is sufficient since our reality is fundamentally linguistic in nature:

“ Bhartrihari tells us, ordinary language is a crystallization of something already implicit in reality. Reality itself is fundamentally linguistic, and what we think of as language—ordinary language, with its words and conceptual divisions—is just a devolution or fragmentation of this more primordial linguistic totality. This is precisely why, for Bhartrihari, the ultimate reality is shabdabrahman, a linguistic absolute. So this is a strong form of idealism: things in our experience, and all things in existence, are fundamentally linguistic. We have no access to anything outside of language and therefore no reason to assume that there is, or ever was, anything separate from it.”

Nice mapping; certainly something to think about.

This is the fundamental conflict behind the linguistic turn in the west, no?

> But for Bhartrihari it goes even further than this. [...] learning new words for experiences is not just learning a new way to communicate. It is, in some sense, gaining new experiences. When we expand our emotional vocabulary, we expand our range of emotional experience, even if the experiences we are acquiring are not radically new, and did not come ex nihilo, but are built out of the stuff of our minds.

This is as good a reason as any for reading poetry, learning Sanskrit, engaging with the culture, etc.

More on the man and his works; Bhartṛhari - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhart%E1%B9%9Bhari

The book The Word and the World: India's Contribution to the Study of Language by Bimal Krishna Matilal gives an overview of Bhartrhari's (and others) ideas - https://archive.org/details/wordandtheworldindiascontributio...

Amongst his works; Śatakatraya - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Aatakatraya which consists of three 100 verses each on Niti(ethics/morality/law), Sringara(pleasure/love) and Vairagya(dispassion/renunciation) is better known. A good and easy translation is Three Hundred Verses: Musings on Life, Love and Renunciation by A N D Haksar published by Penguin.

Google Books links[1], table of contents[2], introduction (~2/3 in preview)[3]. There's a "In Lieu of a Conclusion, Further Reading"[4], but I'm unsure it's previewable. Preview limit 40 pages.

Reminds me of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: https://www.thedictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/

Well written article, am curious to learn more about Bhartihari now.

Criticism: the title of the book is “Words for the Heart: A Treasury of Emotions from Classical India” yet the author of the article tries to shove South Asia everywhere.

Fwiw,

> Sanskrit's celebrated lexicon, the sheer enormity and precision of its vocabulary, together with the scope and centrality of its literatures and intellectual systems in aesthetics, philosophy, politics, medicine, and religion across southern Asia for millennia, put it at the center of the Treasury. [copied from book Introduction, p16]

The writing and clarity of thought in this article is exceptional. I feel smarter for having experienced it.

Lovely, thanks for sharing. A reminder that we still have a humanity within ourselves worthy of being tirelessly sought.

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