The Upanishads are a collection of sacred Sanskrit texts that were written over the course of a few centuries. Which texts were written in which centuries is a hotly debated question, but according to Valerie J. Roebuck, the translator and editor of the Penguin edition pictured above, the “consensus view” is that “the principal Upanishads were…
Hello! Welcome to my update on what I have learned about Sanskrit throughout the month of February. This is truly a beautiful, intricately-structured language that I would love to dive into more deeply someday, but for now I’ll sum up what I know. (Image from Wikipedia: Excerpt from a 19th-century Illustrated Bhagavad Gita) Sanskrit is…
The Rig Veda is the oldest surviving text originally written in Vedic Sanskrit, the earliest known version of Sanskrit that was preserved orally until the invention of writing. These hymns probably originated around 1500-1000 BC/BCE, and they have been organized into 10 books, or mandalas, that amount to thousands of pages of hard-to-interpret text. I obviously…
Hello! Welcome to my first Sanskrit post. I’m so excited to learn about this fascinating South Asian language! To begin with, here is what I already know: Sanskrit dates back over 3,000 years as part of the Indo-European language family and, thanks to its religious and ceremonial use in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, it is…