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Sanskrit: A Scientific Language Created by Spiritual Intelligence
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Science and Spirituality
Sanskrit: A Scientific Language Created by Spiritual Intelligence
Sanskrit is honored as the foremost natural language known to mankind. Since the post-Vedic times of yore, it had been the principal language of communication and literary creations and expressions for more than thousand years. All the original spiritual texts of ancient India including the Vedic Hymns, Upanishads and Bhagvat Gita available today are written in Sanskrit. Modern researchers are amazed at the Scientific Structure of this ancient language and the compact formulation of Mathematical Intricacies hidden in it.
We the Indians may neglect our great cultural heritage, but several scholars of West have revived the efforts of rediscovering it. Keen interest in grasping the Vedic Indian texts and understanding the spiritual science of life and the cosmos had driven Prof. Max Muller and Sir John Woodroffe and the likes to the galactic Himalayas. They spent decades in learning Sanskrit and the Shastric Literature from the sagacious masters.
Mesmerized by the phonetic-based diversity of coded scripts of Sanskrit-Sutras, Sir John Woodroffe underlines the capacity of Sanskrit vowels and syllables as having the potential to generate all the sounds of all words or sounds spoken in any language[1]. This finding implies Sanskrit as universal source of linguistic expression and the mother of all spoken or written languages. While the Indian intellectuals and political leaders battle each other on whether Sanskrit should be included in the school curricula at least as an optional language or not, many of the top-ranking universities in USA and Europe have been producing research dissertations on Panini’s AÌÚ³dhy³yº, Mah³bh³Ìya, Kalidas’s Meghaduta's Bana Bhatta’s Kadambar's, Pingla’s Chhanda Shastra, Bhrathari’s and Patanjali’s logic, etc. Way back in 1786, Sir William Jones remarked in a research paper presented to the Royal Asiatic Society that – the wonderful structure of the Sanskrit language is more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either of them. This had triggered great interest for Sanskrit among the western scholars. The occidental passion for the oriental classics is not confined to Peter Brook’s eloquent dramatic presentation of the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata or to romantic poetic creations of Kalidasa, or Sanskrit scriptures on Tantras or Kamastra, etc.
There has been a much more systematic tradition of Sanskrit-learning of past two centuries in the West[2]. In the present scenario, we find two prominent modes of teaching of Sanskrit in the West. One is scholastic, as a classical subject taught in the universities. The other pertains to teaching of Vedic texts and other scriptures of Indian Philosophy and religion. The classes of the latter type are run by temples and philosophical schools or societies, mostly created by Non-Resident Indians. Many of these, especially the ones dealing with Patanjali’s Yoga Treatise or with Upanishads, are quite popular among the westerners. There is a remarkable trend of increasing fascination of youths in learning these ancient texts. As far as the scholastic teaching and research is concerned, Sanskrit language is recognized by top-level universities and academic institutions the world over. This is clearly reflected in the comments and observations of some experts interviewed by Mr. AK Jha[2]. Views of Noted Academicians: The first chair-professorship in Sanskrit in England, namely the Boden Chair was founded at Oxford in 1831. It continues till today with addition of two more faculty positions. Some more chair-professorships have been set up in other prestigious institutions like the University College, London, and the Edinburgh and Cambridge Universities.
Professor Richard Gombrich who occupies the Boden Chair remarks – “The reasons for studying Sanskrit today are the same as they ever were: that the vast array of Sanskrit texts preserves for us a valuable part of cultural heritage of mankind, including much beautiful literature and many interesting, even fascinating ideas.” Oxford University offers three kinds of degrees in Sanskrit – a three-year BA, two-year M Phil (in classical Indian religion) for which Sanskrit is taught intensively, and a D Phil. Most of the undergraduates are British students.
The researchers include significant number of foreigners including Buddhist monks and nuns from South-East Asia. Experts like Prof. Gombrich are also associated with new publication ventures, on the line of Loeb classical library of Latin and Greek, of popularizing Sanskrit by bringing out series of simple translations of Sanskrit texts along with the originals on topics of wider interest. Professor John L Brockington who teaches Sanskrit at the School of Asian Studies at the University of Edinburgh is a graduate of Oriental Studies from the Oxford University. He observes that Sanskrit is regarded as a classical subject among most scholars in UK. In his views – “There is a future for Sanskrit both in Britain and in Europe because of its value in studying Indian culture as a whole.” According to him the research in Sanskrit in the British universities mostly pertains to – critical editions of Sanskrit texts, studies of Sanskrit epics, studies of Hindu pilgrimage places as shown in textual sources and in contemporary practices.
Growing interest (and even craze!) for Sanskrit is most visible in the United States of America. Unlike Britain, and unlike its own past, the tradition of Sanskrit teaching and research in the USA is totally demand-driven. The Yale University was the first American University to have started teaching of Sanskrit. This initiative was taken in the late 1890, as part of the Oriental languages. Prof. Salisbury was the first Professor to teach Sanskrit. His student William Dwight Whitney is recognized as the pioneer in development of Sanskrit studies in America. Gradually the study of Sanskrit was incorporated in the curricula of the esteemed universities of Harvard, and Berkeley followed by the universities of Chicago, Michigan, Pennsylvania and several others. Today, Sanskrit is taught in several American institutions along with modern Indian languages. Dr. Madhav Deshpande, Professor of Sanskrit and Linguistics at the University of Michigan, has guided Ph Ds in wide ranging topics including — comparative studies of Panini with modern linguistics; Indian Philosophy in comparison with Western Philosophy; Buddhism, thoughts and works of ancient philosophers like Nagarjuna, art-historical and literary background of Ajanta caves. The interest and demand for Sanskrit is no longer confined to researchers of oriental topics or undergraduate students of linguistic departments. Young students majoring in engineering, medicine, and business studies also choose Sanskrit as an additional elective or as part of the four-term foreign language requirement.
Campuses of Texas at Austin and some universities in California have even witnessed hunger strike by students’ unions, demanding more departments or more enrollment in the existing department. As per the records of 2001[2], the University of Chicago attracts 30 or more undergraduate students every year to study Sanskrit. There are five faculty members teaching Sanskrit. Similar is the scenario at Harvard, which has a full-fledged department of Sanskrit. In most of the other universities it is part of South-Asian departments and is very popular among the Indo-American students. However, interest in Sanskrit persists even in those campuses where there is no demand. This eye-opening fact, according to Prof. Brockington, was observed in the recent conference of the International Association of Sanskrit studies held in Turin, Italy. Several scholars from the Eastern European countries including Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Bulgaria and Russia attended the conference. Unlike UK or USA, these countries hardly have any NRI population. In spite of this, there is a wave of significant interest in Sanskrit. Considering these trends and scholastic remarks, Ajit Jha rightly concludes[2] — “While we in India today consider Sanskrit a ‘dead’ language, the Westerners consider it as simply a fascinating language, a language in which the genius of the human civilization was perfected to its fullest”.
Scope in Intelligent Computers and Coding Theory: Decipheration of some Sanskrit scriptures has unfolded many amazing facets of spiritual acumen of ancient India. Apart from the much-publicized ancient Indian inventions of ‘zero’, the decimal system, Vedic Mathematics, and sage Aryabhatta’s and Bhaskar’s astronomical developments, there are many more remarkable findings that have attracted the modern Mathematicians and Computer Scientists in recent decades. Most fascinating of these findings lies at the interface of Artificial Intelligence, Cryptography, Mathematics and Music. Major revolution in computer technology began in the early 1980’s with promising development of microprocessors and parallel computers on the hardware side and advent of Artificial Intelligence (science for developing self-learning computers or intelligent systems) on the software fronts. Natural Language Processing2 is prominent among the bottlenecks on way of development of Intelligent Computers. A major challenge to development of feasible algorithm for this purpose is – unambiguous representation of natural languages to make them accessible to computer processing. Other applications of computers are executed with the help of information storage and retrieval and logical processing, all of which can be carried out using schematic designs, frameworks and formal (mathematically devised) languages coded in binary forms.
However attempting a parallel for natural languages is cumbersome and ambiguous because of the syntax, grammar, semantics and context dependent implications of sentences in natural languages. This is why natural languages were considered unsuitable for computer processing and most research in the area of computer-aided natural language processing relied on formal machine-language type constructs only. These efforts have not rendered any significant success so far. Unlike other natural languages prevalent in the ancient or modern human society, Sanskrit, as investigated by Dr. Rick Briggs of NASA’s Computation Research Centre (RIACS) in California, USA, has unique structure that makes it suitable for computer processing too. In his pioneering paper[3] Briggs pointed out that Sanskrit was, for more than thousand years, a living spoken language with a monumental literature of its own. Besides works of literary value, there was a long philosophical and grammatical tradition (in ancient India) that has continued to exist with undiminished vigor until the present century.
Among the accomplishments of the grammarians can be reckoned a method for paraphrasing Sanskrit is a manner that is identical not only in essence but in form also with the advanced works in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Brigg’s paper[3] demonstrated that much of the work attempted in AI, for example semantic network designs to represent a sentence, was already used in Sanskrit millennia ago. Successive research carried out by him and others in the early 1990’s showed that Sanskrit can also serve as a formal-language. This gave new direction to successful developments in computer aided natural language processing and some other kinds of intelligent computer processing.
Modern researchers have also found important mathematical formulae of Musical Patterns and Coding Theory in Sanskrit scriptures[4]. For example the “Fibonacci Sequence of numbers” (1, 2, 3, 5, 8,…) were well known to Indian poets and drummers since 12th Century as “Hemachandra numbers”, after the name of scholar Acharya Hemachandra who, along with studies of Vedic texts, also studied poetic meter. For Indian musicians, these numbers continue to serve as a mnemonic to remember rhythm patterns. Pingala’s (300-200 BC) Chhanda Shastra presents the designs and algorithms for “Mer¿prast³ra” which was rediscovered thousands of years later by mathematicians as “Pascal Triangle”. This is a compact representation of coding of some important mathematical results. Pingala’s thesis and earlier Sanskrit scriptures also contain many short, cryptic verses, or s¿tr³s, which served as memory aids for a larger set of concepts passed on orally. These, likewise the Hemchandra Numbers and Mer¿prast³ra, offer rich background for further developments in Cryptography and Coding Theory, the mathematical and computing sciences that are used for security programs in cyberspace of internet, satellite communications, and also in wide ranging applications in computational geometry, computational musicology, crystallography, physics, statistics and economics.
References:
[1]Sir John Woodroffe: The Garland of Letters. Ganesh and Company, Madras, 2001. [
2]AK Jha: Why is the West Crazy About A ‘Dead’ Language? Article in Indian Express. June 10, 2001.
[3]Rick Briggs Rick: Knowledge Representation in Sanskrit and Artificial Intelligence. The AI Magazine, Spring 1985, pp 32-39.
[4]Rachel Wells Hall: The Sound of Numbers – A Tour of Mathematical Music Theory, (book preprint) Univ. Philadelphia, USA, 2008.
Glossary:
1.Natural Language Processing: This term refers to computer-aided learning and communication in a language spoken or read by humans or automatic translation of any piece of oral or written text (including literature) of one natural language into another 2.Chhanda Shastra: A Sanskrit treatise on prosody (distinctive variations of stress, tone, and timing) of singing Vedic hymns.
Mesmerized by the phonetic-based diversity of coded scripts of Sanskrit-Sutras, Sir John Woodroffe underlines the capacity of Sanskrit vowels and syllables as having the potential to generate all the sounds of all words or sounds spoken in any language[1]. This finding implies Sanskrit as universal source of linguistic expression and the mother of all spoken or written languages. While the Indian intellectuals and political leaders battle each other on whether Sanskrit should be included in the school curricula at least as an optional language or not, many of the top-ranking universities in USA and Europe have been producing research dissertations on Panini’s AÌÚ³dhy³yº, Mah³bh³Ìya, Kalidas’s Meghaduta's Bana Bhatta’s Kadambar's, Pingla’s Chhanda Shastra, Bhrathari’s and Patanjali’s logic, etc. Way back in 1786, Sir William Jones remarked in a research paper presented to the Royal Asiatic Society that – the wonderful structure of the Sanskrit language is more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either of them. This had triggered great interest for Sanskrit among the western scholars. The occidental passion for the oriental classics is not confined to Peter Brook’s eloquent dramatic presentation of the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata or to romantic poetic creations of Kalidasa, or Sanskrit scriptures on Tantras or Kamastra, etc.
There has been a much more systematic tradition of Sanskrit-learning of past two centuries in the West[2]. In the present scenario, we find two prominent modes of teaching of Sanskrit in the West. One is scholastic, as a classical subject taught in the universities. The other pertains to teaching of Vedic texts and other scriptures of Indian Philosophy and religion. The classes of the latter type are run by temples and philosophical schools or societies, mostly created by Non-Resident Indians. Many of these, especially the ones dealing with Patanjali’s Yoga Treatise or with Upanishads, are quite popular among the westerners. There is a remarkable trend of increasing fascination of youths in learning these ancient texts. As far as the scholastic teaching and research is concerned, Sanskrit language is recognized by top-level universities and academic institutions the world over. This is clearly reflected in the comments and observations of some experts interviewed by Mr. AK Jha[2]. Views of Noted Academicians: The first chair-professorship in Sanskrit in England, namely the Boden Chair was founded at Oxford in 1831. It continues till today with addition of two more faculty positions. Some more chair-professorships have been set up in other prestigious institutions like the University College, London, and the Edinburgh and Cambridge Universities.
Professor Richard Gombrich who occupies the Boden Chair remarks – “The reasons for studying Sanskrit today are the same as they ever were: that the vast array of Sanskrit texts preserves for us a valuable part of cultural heritage of mankind, including much beautiful literature and many interesting, even fascinating ideas.” Oxford University offers three kinds of degrees in Sanskrit – a three-year BA, two-year M Phil (in classical Indian religion) for which Sanskrit is taught intensively, and a D Phil. Most of the undergraduates are British students.
The researchers include significant number of foreigners including Buddhist monks and nuns from South-East Asia. Experts like Prof. Gombrich are also associated with new publication ventures, on the line of Loeb classical library of Latin and Greek, of popularizing Sanskrit by bringing out series of simple translations of Sanskrit texts along with the originals on topics of wider interest. Professor John L Brockington who teaches Sanskrit at the School of Asian Studies at the University of Edinburgh is a graduate of Oriental Studies from the Oxford University. He observes that Sanskrit is regarded as a classical subject among most scholars in UK. In his views – “There is a future for Sanskrit both in Britain and in Europe because of its value in studying Indian culture as a whole.” According to him the research in Sanskrit in the British universities mostly pertains to – critical editions of Sanskrit texts, studies of Sanskrit epics, studies of Hindu pilgrimage places as shown in textual sources and in contemporary practices.
Growing interest (and even craze!) for Sanskrit is most visible in the United States of America. Unlike Britain, and unlike its own past, the tradition of Sanskrit teaching and research in the USA is totally demand-driven. The Yale University was the first American University to have started teaching of Sanskrit. This initiative was taken in the late 1890, as part of the Oriental languages. Prof. Salisbury was the first Professor to teach Sanskrit. His student William Dwight Whitney is recognized as the pioneer in development of Sanskrit studies in America. Gradually the study of Sanskrit was incorporated in the curricula of the esteemed universities of Harvard, and Berkeley followed by the universities of Chicago, Michigan, Pennsylvania and several others. Today, Sanskrit is taught in several American institutions along with modern Indian languages. Dr. Madhav Deshpande, Professor of Sanskrit and Linguistics at the University of Michigan, has guided Ph Ds in wide ranging topics including — comparative studies of Panini with modern linguistics; Indian Philosophy in comparison with Western Philosophy; Buddhism, thoughts and works of ancient philosophers like Nagarjuna, art-historical and literary background of Ajanta caves. The interest and demand for Sanskrit is no longer confined to researchers of oriental topics or undergraduate students of linguistic departments. Young students majoring in engineering, medicine, and business studies also choose Sanskrit as an additional elective or as part of the four-term foreign language requirement.
Campuses of Texas at Austin and some universities in California have even witnessed hunger strike by students’ unions, demanding more departments or more enrollment in the existing department. As per the records of 2001[2], the University of Chicago attracts 30 or more undergraduate students every year to study Sanskrit. There are five faculty members teaching Sanskrit. Similar is the scenario at Harvard, which has a full-fledged department of Sanskrit. In most of the other universities it is part of South-Asian departments and is very popular among the Indo-American students. However, interest in Sanskrit persists even in those campuses where there is no demand. This eye-opening fact, according to Prof. Brockington, was observed in the recent conference of the International Association of Sanskrit studies held in Turin, Italy. Several scholars from the Eastern European countries including Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Bulgaria and Russia attended the conference. Unlike UK or USA, these countries hardly have any NRI population. In spite of this, there is a wave of significant interest in Sanskrit. Considering these trends and scholastic remarks, Ajit Jha rightly concludes[2] — “While we in India today consider Sanskrit a ‘dead’ language, the Westerners consider it as simply a fascinating language, a language in which the genius of the human civilization was perfected to its fullest”.
Scope in Intelligent Computers and Coding Theory: Decipheration of some Sanskrit scriptures has unfolded many amazing facets of spiritual acumen of ancient India. Apart from the much-publicized ancient Indian inventions of ‘zero’, the decimal system, Vedic Mathematics, and sage Aryabhatta’s and Bhaskar’s astronomical developments, there are many more remarkable findings that have attracted the modern Mathematicians and Computer Scientists in recent decades. Most fascinating of these findings lies at the interface of Artificial Intelligence, Cryptography, Mathematics and Music. Major revolution in computer technology began in the early 1980’s with promising development of microprocessors and parallel computers on the hardware side and advent of Artificial Intelligence (science for developing self-learning computers or intelligent systems) on the software fronts. Natural Language Processing2 is prominent among the bottlenecks on way of development of Intelligent Computers. A major challenge to development of feasible algorithm for this purpose is – unambiguous representation of natural languages to make them accessible to computer processing. Other applications of computers are executed with the help of information storage and retrieval and logical processing, all of which can be carried out using schematic designs, frameworks and formal (mathematically devised) languages coded in binary forms.
However attempting a parallel for natural languages is cumbersome and ambiguous because of the syntax, grammar, semantics and context dependent implications of sentences in natural languages. This is why natural languages were considered unsuitable for computer processing and most research in the area of computer-aided natural language processing relied on formal machine-language type constructs only. These efforts have not rendered any significant success so far. Unlike other natural languages prevalent in the ancient or modern human society, Sanskrit, as investigated by Dr. Rick Briggs of NASA’s Computation Research Centre (RIACS) in California, USA, has unique structure that makes it suitable for computer processing too. In his pioneering paper[3] Briggs pointed out that Sanskrit was, for more than thousand years, a living spoken language with a monumental literature of its own. Besides works of literary value, there was a long philosophical and grammatical tradition (in ancient India) that has continued to exist with undiminished vigor until the present century.
Among the accomplishments of the grammarians can be reckoned a method for paraphrasing Sanskrit is a manner that is identical not only in essence but in form also with the advanced works in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Brigg’s paper[3] demonstrated that much of the work attempted in AI, for example semantic network designs to represent a sentence, was already used in Sanskrit millennia ago. Successive research carried out by him and others in the early 1990’s showed that Sanskrit can also serve as a formal-language. This gave new direction to successful developments in computer aided natural language processing and some other kinds of intelligent computer processing.
Modern researchers have also found important mathematical formulae of Musical Patterns and Coding Theory in Sanskrit scriptures[4]. For example the “Fibonacci Sequence of numbers” (1, 2, 3, 5, 8,…) were well known to Indian poets and drummers since 12th Century as “Hemachandra numbers”, after the name of scholar Acharya Hemachandra who, along with studies of Vedic texts, also studied poetic meter. For Indian musicians, these numbers continue to serve as a mnemonic to remember rhythm patterns. Pingala’s (300-200 BC) Chhanda Shastra presents the designs and algorithms for “Mer¿prast³ra” which was rediscovered thousands of years later by mathematicians as “Pascal Triangle”. This is a compact representation of coding of some important mathematical results. Pingala’s thesis and earlier Sanskrit scriptures also contain many short, cryptic verses, or s¿tr³s, which served as memory aids for a larger set of concepts passed on orally. These, likewise the Hemchandra Numbers and Mer¿prast³ra, offer rich background for further developments in Cryptography and Coding Theory, the mathematical and computing sciences that are used for security programs in cyberspace of internet, satellite communications, and also in wide ranging applications in computational geometry, computational musicology, crystallography, physics, statistics and economics.
References:
[1]Sir John Woodroffe: The Garland of Letters. Ganesh and Company, Madras, 2001. [
2]AK Jha: Why is the West Crazy About A ‘Dead’ Language? Article in Indian Express. June 10, 2001.
[3]Rick Briggs Rick: Knowledge Representation in Sanskrit and Artificial Intelligence. The AI Magazine, Spring 1985, pp 32-39.
[4]Rachel Wells Hall: The Sound of Numbers – A Tour of Mathematical Music Theory, (book preprint) Univ. Philadelphia, USA, 2008.
Glossary:
1.Natural Language Processing: This term refers to computer-aided learning and communication in a language spoken or read by humans or automatic translation of any piece of oral or written text (including literature) of one natural language into another 2.Chhanda Shastra: A Sanskrit treatise on prosody (distinctive variations of stress, tone, and timing) of singing Vedic hymns.
