Introductions and such things

śarad-indu-sundara-ruciś cetasi sā me girāṃ devī |

apahṛtya tamaḥ santatam arthān akhilān prakāśayatu ||

Well, I've done it after all. After initially dismissing blogging as an essentially narcissistic activity—what arrogance, the assumption that one's writing and one's thoughts are important enough to be read by the world at large!—I have succumbed to temptation and created my own blog.

I don't know precisely why I'm doing this. Part of it is simply the fact that my instinctive reaction to blogging has given away to increasing admiration for the stellar bloggers whose work I've been following since the last US Presidential election, in particular Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish. (I need hardly say it's highly unlikely that my posts are going to be quite as interesting or as thought-provoking or (sadly) as audience-attracting as his!) Since I often email blog posts and articles accompanied by my comments to my unfortunate friends, I figured that starting my own blog would be a good way to consolidate such posts and my responses to them. This blog would then have the secondary function of allowing me to flesh out my own opinions by providing me with the space to articulate more clearly my responses to external stimuli, so to speak. The goal of such essays (in the original sense of the word) is not to attain some arbitrary level of clarity of opinion, but to continue to explore and to record, through debate with myself and with others who (I hope!) will choose to comment on my posts, the evolution of my own thinking. It is to be hoped that such debates will serve not just to refine my thoughts but also to sharpen the implements that shape good thoughts—close reading, logic, analysis, and rhetoric.

Since this blog is meant to be a collection of my thoughts, I don't promise that there will be any common thread binding the various posts, or that all the posts will be interesting to everyone; after all, these are my own reflections and there is no a priori reason why they should be of interest to anyone but me. However, should any of my ramblings interest you or upset you or infuriate you, Gentle Reader, feel free to hammer away at the comments; I do promise to respond to and sustain engaging conversations through these posts and comments. Be forewarned that I have never considered the lack of a partner to be an obstacle to good conversation, and hence there may be cases of my commenting on my own posts in the scholastic fashion.

(As an aside, I'm quite surprised that I unconsciously chose to begin in this fashion, by attempting to sketch out a telos of sorts for this blog. As they used to say in classical India, prayojanam anuddiśya na mando 'pi pravartate ("even a fool doesn't proceed without pointing out the purpose [of a work]").)

Now that I've drawn classical India into this, I may as well proceed along the same lines. I've chosen to open my first blog post with a famous Sanskrit verse (in the upagīti meter, for those who care about things like chandaḥ) dedicated to Sarasvatī, the Goddess of Words. Seeing as this blog is supposed to be an intellectual endeavor, it's probably not a bad idea to get a few divinities on my side right from the start!

The invoking of divinities before beginning any major endeavor is, of course, a very old practice, and I'm pretty certain that virtually every book ever written in classical India or the Middle East began with an invocation to the divinity of the author's choice. (The only two exceptions that come to mind are the openings of the Diwans of Hafez and of Mirza Ghalib, and due to my ignorance I will say nothing further on the matter!) The verse above dedicated to Sarasvatī is the opening benediction of the Sāhitya-darpaṇa, a major text on Sanskrit poetics written by Viśvanātha, and a translation of it is the epigraph to the enjoyable Dropping the Bow, a translation of Sanskrit and Prakrit love poetry by Andrew Schelling. Word for word, the verse goes:

autumn-moon-beautiful-radiance'd in-the-consciousness she of-me of-words goddess |

having-carried-away darkness eternal meanings entire may-[s]he-illuminate ||

(Gotta love Sanskrit verse!)

Don't be surprised by the awkwardness of the literal English translation; the original is easier to understand despite its free word order, thanks to Sanskrit's extensive case system. The entire verse is a single, heavily scrambled sentence, whose subject is the very last word of the first line (devī) and whose verb is the very last word of the second line (prakāśayatu). The poetic weight falls on the very first word, a compound rather unwieldy in English but quite magical in the original. Acting as an attribute of the goddess, this compound, like most poetic Sanskrit compounds, can be parsed in slightly different ways, each one casting a slightly different light (no pun intended) on the meaning of the verse: "she whose radiance is as beautiful as the autumn moon", "she whose beautiful radiance is [like that of] the autumn moon", "she whose radiance is as beautiful as the autumn moon's". Immediately, the choice of verb stands out more brightly. Pretty, isn't it?

The elaborate attribute's real punch comes in the second line, thanks to another of Sanskrit poetry's strengths—homonymy. The word tamaḥ literally means "darkness" and is almost certainly cognate with the Russian тьма, but it is frequently used figuratively to mean "ignorance". The word artha has a multitude of meanings, including such things as "meaning", "desire", "object", "motive", but in the context of the verse it makes most sense to consider just two: "meaning" and "object". One interpretation of the verse is straightforward and follows directly from the grammar of the verse: "may the Goddess illuminate entire meanings, having carried away eternal ignorance." But what of the autumn moon evoked at the beginning of the verse? Why compare, of all things, the radiance of Sarasvatī to, of all things, the autumn moon? Well, the autumn moon's bright rays do destroy the (literal) darkness of the night, and they do cast light upon the forms of objects (and by doing so, they destroy the ignorance and misperceptions that cloud our consciousness).

Hmm, it seems the simile is more elaborate and more meaningful than it initially seemed! It's no longer simply a comparison of the goddess's radiance to that of the autumn moon, but includes an indirect comparison of the effects of the two sources of illumination, and perhaps, if we use some poetic license here, even an implicit comparison of the manner in which the moon and the goddess go about their respective jobs of illumination. The moon destroys darkness and illuminates objects effortlessly, merely through its presence in the night sky (let's ignore what we know of modern physics and astronomy and eclipses for now!); further, it does so without being limited by the number of objects it illuminates or by the number of people who benefit from its light. Maybe, just maybe, the verse suggests that the act of illuminating meaning is just as effortless, just as natural for Sarasvatī, and maybe she is as gracious in sharing her blessings as the moon is. (I daresay the poet would disagree that Sarasvatī's blessings can be obtained effortlessly, even without prayer, just as the moon illuminates objects for everyone! If that were the case, then literature would be plagued by a major free-rider problem.)

What seemed to be a routine benedictive verse has turned out to be a more complex beast after all. It's sorely tempting to see the "entire meaning" referred to in the verse as being a comment on the verse itself inserted by a too-smart poet testing his audience! Anyway, enough theorizing, and here's a fairly free translation of the verse (I'm trying to find a good way to use lines and spaces to reflect the multiple allusions that Sanskrit pulls off using grammar alone, and any comments / advice / critique would be immensely appreciated):

May that Goddess of Words,

whose beautiful radiance, like that of the autumn moon,

destroys eternal darkness,

illuminate objects completely

in my consciousness.

<UPDATE>

Imagine my surprise upon finding a reference in John D. Dunne's Foundations of Dharmakīrti's Philosophy to the verse fragment

I cited above! The verse is apparently verse 55 in the sambandhākṣepaparihāra section of Kumārila's Śloka-vārttikā, and reads:

prayojanam anuddiśya na mando 'pi pravartate |

evam eva pravṛttiś cec caitanyenāsya kiṃ bhavet ||

(footnote 72 on p. 48, Foundations of Dharmakīrti's Philosophy)

</UPDATE>