Appayya Dīkṣita on pratīpam (“upstream”)

Continuing our series on arthâlaṅkāras from Appayya Dīkṣita’s Kuvalayānanda, let’s look at the figure called pratīpam. It’s usually called “reversal” or “contradiction” or, perhaps most accurately, “inversion”, but I’ve chosen the etymologically accurate “upstream” instead. “Against the flow”, “against the grain” would all fit in with what the name means. But why is it used here?

[pratīpam]

[1]
pratīpam upamānasyôpameyatva-prakalpanam |
tval-locana-samaṃ padmaṃ tvad-vaktra-sadṛśo vidhuḥ ||

[2]
anyôpameya-lābhena varṇyasyânādaraś ca tat |
alaṃ garveṇa te vaktra kāntyā candro bhavādṛśaḥ ||

[3]
varṇyôpameya-lābhena tathânyasyâpy anādaraḥ |
kaḥ kraurya-darpas te mṛtyo tvat-tulyāḥ santi hi striyaḥ ||

[4]
varṇyenânyasyôpamāyā aniṣpatti-vacaś ca tat |
mithyā-vādo hi mugdhâkṣi tvan-mukhâbhaṃ kilâmbujam ||

[5]
pratīpam upamānasya kaimarthyam api manyate |
dṛṣṭaṃ ced vadanaṃ tanvyāḥ kiṃ padmena kim indunā ||

The figure called pratīpa has five different, but related, definitions:
[1] When the yardstick of comparison is imagined to be the thing being described. Thus: “the lotus is like your eye; the moon like your face.” Here the natural order of things (i.e., the thing being described is compared to the yardstick) is inverted.

[2] When the thing being described is treated with contempt because of another (i.e., the yardstick) being obtained. Thus: “Enough of your arrogance, o Face; the moon is your rival in terms of beauty.”

[3] When the other (i.e., the yardstick) is treated with contempt because of the thing being described. Thus: “What’s is your cruelty, Death? Women are your rivals.”

[4] When the impossibility of the other being a yardstick is established by the thing being described. Thus: “O girl with lovely eyes, it’s totally false that the lotus is like your face.” (This essentially comes down to negating an assertion of the type [1].)

[5] When the pointlessness of any yardstick is indicated. Thus: “when the slender girl’s face is seen, who cares about the lotus? who cares about the moon?”

Auxiliary verbs, a roadmap

Nothing of substance is discussed here. I just want to collect hyperlinks to all of my posts on auxiliary verbs in one place.

We began with auxiliary verbs in English.

We then turned to French, beginning with an overview of the French verbal system, and then turned to compound verbs, and finally concluded with a session on the vagaries of the French passive.

Finally, we moved to German, beginning with an overview of the German verbal system, and then finally getting down to auxiliaries, modal and non-modal, in German.

Fin.

Auxiliary verbs, in German, part two

Too long have I tarried; I shall finish this series ere dawn.

So what are the various forms that a German verb can take? We’re talking here not of specific conjugations but of different combinations of tense, aspect, and mood (usually abbreviated tam). Like  English, these are usually listed in infinitive form, but the sequence of infinitives in German is the reverse of the English sequence. In addition to the Präsens and Präteritum, we will see forms generated from (a) the non-modal complex infinitive, (b) the future infinitive, and from it, (c) the future perfect infinitive.

Participial Past Tense

The non-modal complex infinitive takes one of two forms: 
past participle sein, or past participle haben.

Like French, but unlike modern English (if you exclude Tolkien-esque “Out of the Great Sea unto Middle-earth I am come” sentences), German uses both sein and haben as auxiliary verbs to give rise to the non-modal complex infinitive. Verbs strictly take one or the other (more or less—but this being German, less rather than more).

When haben is conjugated in the Präsens, the verbal form so generated is the Perfekt; when it is conjugated in the Präteritum, the verbal form so generated is the Plusquamperfekt. 

The highest reality of all

vaṃśī-vibhūṣita-karān nava-nīradâbhāt

pītâmbarād aruṇa-bimba-phalâdharôṣṭhāt |

pūrṇêndu-sundara-mukhād aravinda-netrāt

kṛṣṇāt paraṃ kim api tattvam ahaṃ na jāne ||

This is an oft-recited verse in praise of Kṛṣṇa, but I stumbled across Pandit Jasraj’s version of it for the first time recently. The verse is quite straightforward, but possesses great beauty in its simplicity. Here is an attempt at a translation.

A hand ornamented by a bamboo-flute,
A complexion like a fresh monsoon rain-cloud,
A yellow garment,
A lower lip, red as the red bimba fruit,
A face, beautiful like the full moon,
A pair of eyes, like lotuses

        ——greater than that Kṛṣṇa,
        there’s simply nothing I know.



I was pleasantly surprised to learn that this verse was by the great Mughal-era Advaita scholar Madhusūdana Sarasvatī. Digging a little deeper, I found this verse to be part of his upasaṃhāra (conclusion) to his Gūḍârtha-dīpikā (“Lamp for Hidden Meanings”), a commentary on Śaṅkarācārya’s commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā. It turns out that Madhusūdana Sarasvatī, in addition to / despite his Advaitic leanings (depending on which way you swing), was a fervent devotee of Kṛṣṇa and held that bhakti to Kṛṣṇa was a path fully equal to, and distinct from, the renunciatory path leading to the Advaitic ideal of kaivalya. 

A dialogue between Man and God

This is another one of the songs from the hauntingly beautiful soundtrack of the movie Bab'Aziz, interleaving verses in Bengali (from a Baul song, according to a friend) and verses in Persian by Muhammad Iqbal. I don’t know any Bengali, but I can translate the Persian here. It’s part of his Payām-i Mashriq, a collection of Persian poems that is among the last works composed by South Asians in Persian that achieved renown in Iran and Afghanistan.




The original actually begins with three verses in the voice of God, after which follow the three verses that are sung in the video by Salar Aghili, in the voice of Man.

خدا:

جهان را ز یک آب و گل آفریدم

تو ایران و تاتار و زنگ آفریدی

من از خاک پولاد ناب آفریدم

تو شمشیر و تیر و تفنگ آفریدی

تبر آفریدی نهال چمن را

قفس ساختی طائر نغمه‌زن را

“The most beautiful verse in Sanskrit”

Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt, towards its end, cites a verse from Kālidāsa’s Abhijñānaśākuntalam, accompanied by the Merton & Moussaief translation. The original Sanskrit reads:

ramyāṇi vīkṣya madhurāṃś ca niśamya śabdān

paryutsuko bhavati yat sukhito ’pi jantuḥ |

tac cetasā smarati nūnam abodha-pūrvam

bhāva-sthirāṇi jananântara-sauhṛdāni ||

In the words of Merton & Moussaief:

Even the man who is happy glimpses something

Or a thread of sound touches him

And his heart overflows with a longing

he does not recognize

Then it must be that he is remembering

a place out of reach people he loved

In a life before this their pattern

Still there in him waiting

I would translate it slightly differently:

    Seeing something beautiful,

    Hearing something sweet,

He begins to yearn for something—

although he was happy before this.

Surely he remembers something,

if only subconsciously:

        Loves from lost lives

        Indelibly imprinted in Being

We may call it nostalgia; the Germans, Sehnsucht; the Portuguese, saudade; the Persians, دلتنگی; Proust, a remembrance of things past that draws you into une recherche du temps perdu.  Kālidāsa sees in this form of recognition (which, not-so-incidentally, is fundamental to the plotline of the Śākuntalam) something deeply and fundamentally part of being human. Our old loves are never really lost; if they were true loves, sauhṛdāni, minglings of hearts, then they transform who we are for eternity. (And for Kālidāsa, it really is eternity!) They are fixed points within the flux of Being—within human beings, and within Being itself, shot through with human experiences.

What Kālidāsa does not say in this one verse is what we should do with this insight. We may choose to cling on to these points of stability, and to thus anchor ourselves in the past. Or we may choose to cast ourselves into the flow of being, while nonetheless retaining our knowledge of these fixed points, using them like stars to help us navigate uncharted waters.

Are tangent vectors contravariant or covariant?

Correct but annoying answer I: Neither! They simply are.

Correct but annoying answer II: Both! It depends on the person you ask.

More to come on this once I find the time to write up stuff in LaTeX.

UPDATE:
No, I haven’t found time to write things up in LaTeX yet. But I did come up with a great analogy to explain why CBAA-II says, “it depends.”

The core idea underlying the difference between the two is that of active transformations versus passive transformations. What that means is something I’ll get into later. For now, just the analogy:

If I’m wearing jeans that are too short for my legs, there are two ways to understand why this might be the case (other than the possibility that I have very poor taste in clothing, of course):

1. I may have had a growth spurt overnight. (This would be the active transformation as far as my legs are concerned. It would also be the passive transformation as far as the jeans are concerned.)
2. My jeans might have shrunk after going through the washer-dryer. (This would be the passive transformation, as far as my legs are concerned. It would also be the active transformation as far as the jeans are concerned.)

My legs thus covary with my height (assuming I grow evenly, of course), and contravary with my jeans’ length. Are my legs covariant or contravariant? It depends on whether the transformation is active or passive!