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I don't know anything about the situation in India but I can give you a few reasons why I, as a westerner, am fascinated by the language. First the depth and c

I don't know anything about the situation in India but I can give you a few reasons why I, as a westerner, am fascinated by the language. 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 https://ojs.aaai.org//index.php/aimagazine/article/view/466.

mistermann 4y ago
> 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. 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?
- tgflynn 4y ago
  With respect to advaita vedanta I would recommend the YT videos of Swami Sarvapriyananda. All of his longer talks on advaita say more or less the same thing so recommending a single video is more difficult, but this may be a particularly good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EijmfagFw20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EijmfagFw20. The main figure of classical advaita is Adi Shankara. You can probably find some translated/commented texts of his in book form. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charvaka) was a materialist school.
  - mistermann 4y ago
    Thanks for the tips, I will give them a go!
- sankalp22 4y ago
  Read a Book by swami vivekananda, you will know what you r yearning for.
sidm83 4y ago
Completely agree with what you say. To get through the inertia during the pandemic, I finally got started with reading Upanishads and ended up reading 6. A lot of content may not make sense, but there were such absolute profound gems of wisdom that I was astonished how someone sitting in a forest thousands of years ago could go into the depths of thought in order to produce such deep insights. 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.
rep_movsd 4y ago
I have been stdying the Brhad Yogavaashistam (which my mother has translated to simple English) in the original Sanskrit under her guidance (also helps her proofread). I've got about 60% through since 2020, reading about 10 to 15 verses a day - it isn't a book to read pages at a time even if the Sanskrit is reasonably understandable. 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.

mistermann 4y ago

> 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. 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?

tgflynn 4y ago
With respect to advaita vedanta I would recommend the YT videos of Swami Sarvapriyananda. All of his longer talks on advaita say more or less the same thing so recommending a single video is more difficult, but this may be a particularly good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EijmfagFw20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EijmfagFw20. The main figure of classical advaita is Adi Shankara. You can probably find some translated/commented texts of his in book form. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charvaka) was a materialist school.
- mistermann 4y ago
  Thanks for the tips, I will give them a go!
sankalp22 4y ago
Read a Book by swami vivekananda, you will know what you r yearning for.

sidm83 4y ago

Completely agree with what you say. To get through the inertia during the pandemic, I finally got started with reading Upanishads and ended up reading 6. A lot of content may not make sense, but there were such absolute profound gems of wisdom that I was astonished how someone sitting in a forest thousands of years ago could go into the depths of thought in order to produce such deep insights. 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.

rep_movsd 4y ago

I have been stdying the Brhad Yogavaashistam (which my mother has translated to simple English) in the original Sanskrit under her guidance (also helps her proofread). I've got about 60% through since 2020, reading about 10 to 15 verses a day - it isn't a book to read pages at a time even if the Sanskrit is reasonably understandable. 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.