Here are a few remarks from my Sanskrit teacher, Deepak Dongre Bhat, that I found particularly amusing over these months.
One was a comment on the 2 “abstract expressionist” paintings hanging on the wall in the living room where we do class. They are bold colors and swirls and your usual not-so-good art that in this case I’m sure was really more of an emotional and creative release in some angst-filled moment of yogism than any attempt at an artistic statement. After weeks of having class in the same room, one day he blurts out while entering the room, “I don’t understand these paintings! This is not a painting of anything: I cannot see God or animals or plants or anything!” I responded, “Yes, you’re completely right.” Hindus are the complete opposite of Muslims: if there is no form they start to worry.
One comment was when I was asking some finer points about the idea of the imperishable in some Sanskrit terms. Although he publicly only tells people he has degrees in vyakarana (Sanskrit grammar) and jyotisa (Vedic astrology), he completed the same degree of vidvan in Vedanta that Guruji did. He doesn’t tell people he has this degree because, according to him, you have to study Vedanta individually with a guru to be an expert in it and you have to dedicate your whole life studies to it. So Deepak (my teacher) is like a secret pool of Vedantic knowledge covered in a shell of boring grammar and the ambrosia only sometimes leaks out without him realizing. As we’ve been reading Shankara commentary of Gita these days, I’ve coerced a lot of Vedic ideas and philosophy out of him without him realizing as he helps me understand the text. At one point I was trying to ascertain how he was so sure that in one context this “imperishable” (akshara – which is coincidentally the name of the restaurant in Dasa Prakash, which I think is the bomb, yum yum) meant “Om” and not God or Brahma or anything else which "imperishable" sometimes refers to, and his immediate response was, “Is it not Om that is everywhere in the universe and has always been? Omkara has no beginning and no end!” I think I answered, “Yeah, alright.”
Another one was last week and my favorite (this is the lead-in to my next blog entry). There’s a Sanskrit term “praja” which generally is understood to be offspring or men or people/subjects of a king (like in “svasti prajabhyaha”. But really praja can be any living thing or being (which I didn’t realize) so my teacher defines praja as “that which is born through heavy effort”. I was making some silly and unthinking comment about how it didn’t seem to me that something like a frog was born through particularly HEAVY effort (egg to tadpole floating in the water seems nice and light and easy to me but probably quite heavy to the wee frog itself!) so I was clarifying this idea of heavy effort (prakṛṣţa), like “How heavy? What do you mean by heavy?” His explanation is, “If you take some wheat kernels or rice and put it in a vessel and put on a tight lid and you leave it for eight, nine months. Then you come back and open the lid, will there not be some few small beings in the vessel?” (and he’s showing with his fingers how some of the kernel germs will have shot up green shoots – he doesn’t mean any vermin or insects that will be moving around in there). And me, “Yes, yes, now I understand.” That’s heavy effort for the green shoot to sprout out of the germ, just like the tiny tadpole, struggling to break free of the egg remains which nourished him while growing.
प्रकृष्टेन = through heavy effort
Prakṛṣţa = long, drawn forth, protracted, heavy/great effort, how one’s yoga practice should be before things are effortless, which I think it also fitting because prakṛṣţa also can also suggest a transcendent excellence in some references. Prakṛṣţa is the toil or effort, like ploughing a field (kṛṣţa) which sets up or prepares for a thing (you may be aware that the body is considered to be a field in Hindu thought, as in kṣetrajña = the knower of the field, ie. the soul [the soul knows the field of the physical body]).
More to follow on my idea of asana as prakṛṣţa…
One was a comment on the 2 “abstract expressionist” paintings hanging on the wall in the living room where we do class. They are bold colors and swirls and your usual not-so-good art that in this case I’m sure was really more of an emotional and creative release in some angst-filled moment of yogism than any attempt at an artistic statement. After weeks of having class in the same room, one day he blurts out while entering the room, “I don’t understand these paintings! This is not a painting of anything: I cannot see God or animals or plants or anything!” I responded, “Yes, you’re completely right.” Hindus are the complete opposite of Muslims: if there is no form they start to worry.
One comment was when I was asking some finer points about the idea of the imperishable in some Sanskrit terms. Although he publicly only tells people he has degrees in vyakarana (Sanskrit grammar) and jyotisa (Vedic astrology), he completed the same degree of vidvan in Vedanta that Guruji did. He doesn’t tell people he has this degree because, according to him, you have to study Vedanta individually with a guru to be an expert in it and you have to dedicate your whole life studies to it. So Deepak (my teacher) is like a secret pool of Vedantic knowledge covered in a shell of boring grammar and the ambrosia only sometimes leaks out without him realizing. As we’ve been reading Shankara commentary of Gita these days, I’ve coerced a lot of Vedic ideas and philosophy out of him without him realizing as he helps me understand the text. At one point I was trying to ascertain how he was so sure that in one context this “imperishable” (akshara – which is coincidentally the name of the restaurant in Dasa Prakash, which I think is the bomb, yum yum) meant “Om” and not God or Brahma or anything else which "imperishable" sometimes refers to, and his immediate response was, “Is it not Om that is everywhere in the universe and has always been? Omkara has no beginning and no end!” I think I answered, “Yeah, alright.”
Another one was last week and my favorite (this is the lead-in to my next blog entry). There’s a Sanskrit term “praja” which generally is understood to be offspring or men or people/subjects of a king (like in “svasti prajabhyaha”. But really praja can be any living thing or being (which I didn’t realize) so my teacher defines praja as “that which is born through heavy effort”. I was making some silly and unthinking comment about how it didn’t seem to me that something like a frog was born through particularly HEAVY effort (egg to tadpole floating in the water seems nice and light and easy to me but probably quite heavy to the wee frog itself!) so I was clarifying this idea of heavy effort (prakṛṣţa), like “How heavy? What do you mean by heavy?” His explanation is, “If you take some wheat kernels or rice and put it in a vessel and put on a tight lid and you leave it for eight, nine months. Then you come back and open the lid, will there not be some few small beings in the vessel?” (and he’s showing with his fingers how some of the kernel germs will have shot up green shoots – he doesn’t mean any vermin or insects that will be moving around in there). And me, “Yes, yes, now I understand.” That’s heavy effort for the green shoot to sprout out of the germ, just like the tiny tadpole, struggling to break free of the egg remains which nourished him while growing.
प्रकृष्टेन = through heavy effort
Prakṛṣţa = long, drawn forth, protracted, heavy/great effort, how one’s yoga practice should be before things are effortless, which I think it also fitting because prakṛṣţa also can also suggest a transcendent excellence in some references. Prakṛṣţa is the toil or effort, like ploughing a field (kṛṣţa) which sets up or prepares for a thing (you may be aware that the body is considered to be a field in Hindu thought, as in kṣetrajña = the knower of the field, ie. the soul [the soul knows the field of the physical body]).
More to follow on my idea of asana as prakṛṣţa…
1 comment:
Everything you said is true..
I was once his roommate for 3 years..
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