The Next 1000 Years of Sanskrit

As we reflect on 2022 and dive into 2023, I’d like to invite the Indiaspora community to take a moment and contemplate something out of the ordinary.  I’d like you to think about preserving the world’s Sanskrit heritage for the next 1,000 years.  I recently spoke on this topic at the Indiaspora conference in October.  The theme of the session was titled viraasat.  The word can embody several meanings from heritage, inheritance or simply that which is worth passing on to the next generation.  My talk focused on taking the global knowledge base encoded in Sanskrit into the digital age.   

The Sanskrit language itself evokes a range of thoughts.  For some it is an ancient and deeply respected language confined to respected but poorly understood religious rituals.  To others it represents a “dead language” like ancient Latin or Greek which somehow persists through the efforts of small religious communities.  For others still, it represents a tool of privilege and exclusion whereby a rigid caste order was codified and cemented into Indian society. Sanskrit to a degree is all of those things, but it is also so much more.  Only when common stereotypes are removed, does the incredible story of Sanskrit with its international and multi-cultural impact emerge.  

That impact has many facets.  The first is that three of the world’s great faiths – Hinduism, Buddhism and to a great extent Jainism chose to codify their doctrines and rituals in Sanskrit.  But beyond religion, philosophy and mythology, these great Indian traditions chose Sanskrit to express their thoughts on every field of human endeavor.  These domains included ethics, astronomy, mathematics, law, architecture, medicine, yoga, martial arts, ecology, commerce, painting, music, drama, sculpture, poetry, grammar, metallurgy, hydrology, state craft and more.  Moreover, as Indian monk-scholars, traders, craftsmen and armies traveled across Asia over a span of 25 centuries, Sanskrit became the lingua franca of the Silk Route in the north and the maritime trade routes between India and China in the south.  From the deserts of Turkmenistan to Tokyo, the steppes of Mongolia to the jungles of Malaysia, Sanskrit has had a lasting influence on multiple civilizations.  In total, these territories exceed the land mass and populations of either the British or Mongol empires.  It is this international aspect of the language that is seldom discussed, and many incredible facts about Sanskrit’s astounding cultural influence are not known outside specialized academic circles.  

For example….

• Sanskrit is the only classical language of the ancient world whose exact pronunciation is known to this day.
• Sanskrit has had a profound impact on multiple civilizations internationally
• Afghanistan and Pakistan
• The oldest known Sanskrit manuscripts come from modern day Afghanistan and date to the first century AD.
  1. The Bakhshali manuscript was found in 1881 in modern day Pakistan not far from the city of Takshila.  The manuscript dates to ~200AD.  It expounds on multiple mathematical subjects including, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, fractions and square roots, progressions, profit, loss and interest calculations, quadratic equations, indeterminate equations and other topics.  It is also the oldest recorded use of a written symbol for zero and the use of place value.

China

• The Chinese invented the moveable type over seven hundred years before Guttenberg.  The oldest printed item from China dated to 757 AD is a collection of Sanskrit mantras written for Goddess Pratisara, in ornamental Ranjana script. The world’s oldest printed book, also from China, is dated May 11, 868 and deals with the Vajracchedika-sūtra on transcendental wisdom.

The famed birthplace of Chinese Kung-fu, the Shaolin monastery was built by the Chinese Emperor Xiaowen in 495 AD for the Indian monk Buddhabhadra (佛陀跋陀羅, fó tuó bá tuó luó).  Nearly thirty years later, the monk Bodhidharma (達摩, dá mó) came to the Shaolin monastery and began instructing monks on rigorous physical training which became the basis of Kung-fu.

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  In the seventh century the Chinese were fascinated with Indian texts on science, astronomy and mathematics.  Known as the 婆罗门书（pó luó mén shū jí）or ‘Brahmin books’ an emperor of the Tang Dynasty sent an invasion fleet to Vietnam, then the Indian kingdom of Champa, to bring back their library of 1,350 manuscripts as war booty.  

Japan

• One of Japan’s most famous monks, Kōbō Daishi (弘法大師, “The Grand Master who Propagated the Dharma “, 774-835 AD) traveled to China to study Buddhism and was trained in Sanskrit by the Gandharan pandit Prajñā (734–810 AD?) who had been educated at Nalanda University in India.  It is said that Kōbō Daishi’s training in Sanskrit and its system of alphabets (in the ancient Siddhamātrika script) inspired him to invent the Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries.  These syllabaries enabled the Japanese people to write the sounds of their language for the first time without the use of Chinese characters.  Hiragana and Katakana are used to write Japanese to this day.

Southeast Asia – It’s a time when India conquered without conquistadors.  

• From Myanmar to Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines Indian monks and traders took Sanskrit and Hindu and Buddhist ideas throughout Southeast Asia.
• Many married into local nobility and became sovereigns in their own right, cementing Sanskrit learning and Indian science, ethics and administrative systems in the foundation’s multiple empires.

Figure 9-14 (clockwise from top left).  The temple complex at Angkor Wat.  Sanskrit inscription in Cambodia written in the ancient Pallava script.  A Thai depiction of a scene from the Rāmāyaṇa.  The Shwezigon Pagoda in Bagan, Myanmar.  Aerial view of the Chandi Borobudur Temple in Java, Indonesia, the largest Buddhist structure in the world.  The Po Klong Garai Temple in Phan Rang, Vietnam, formerly known as the kingdom of Panduranga.

• 
  Descendants of the Brāhmī script are used to write languages spoken by nearly 1.7 billion people.
• As a result of the incredible geographic span of Sanskrit, the MacArthur Fellow and Brown University Professor of History of Mathematics and Classics, Dr. David Pingree estimated that the total number of Sanskrit manuscripts in existence exceeds 30 million.  This is roughly 100 times the equivalent for Latin and Greek combined.  No other culture or religious tradition produced so many written works before the advent of the printing press.  

These facts are an infinitesimal sliver of the story of Sanskrit.  Sadly, this tradition is now under existential threat.  The world is undergoing a fundamental media transition – a transition where knowledge was stored and transmitted via handwritten manuscripts and printed books to one where knowledge is stored and transmitted via digital media.  The urgent need is to bring the massive literary and cultural heritage of Sanskrit over this transition and into the digital age.  A failure of Sanskrit to make this transition will condemn the priceless knowledge composed in it to forever slip into oblivion.  Conversely, if we enable the successful transition of Sanskrit into the digital world, we can make it universally accessible, and allow it to contribute to contemporary issues and the future progress of civilization.  The specific threats to Sanskrit’s digital transition are four-fold. 

• The first is time and elements.  Sanskrit works were copied through the ages on birch bark and palm leaves.  These materials deteriorate within two to three centuries if not carefully preserved.  
• The second factor is a lack of trained Sanskrit scholars.  An alarming number of renowned Sanskrit academics in India and the West are retiring without scholars of equal or better skill to replace them. 
• The third centers around the lack of sufficient technical tools to extract characters digitally from scanned Sanskrit manuscripts or printed books.
• The fourth is a lack of high impact research in Sanskrit.  The dwindling number of trained scholars together with the technological shortcomings of digital character extraction tools has led to a dearth of novel research in Sanskrit. 

Why Should We Care?

Sanskrit was the medium to express and transmit Indian knowledge across the ancient world.  That knowledge base of written works is perhaps the largest cultural inheritance of any civilization.  The Sanskrit tradition also embodies values and concepts that are as relevant today as they were at inception.  The word Sanskrit itself means that which is refined or perfected.  When Buddhist monks in China or Japan were taught the Sanskrit alphabet, as in India, the first expression they were asked to copy was “ सिद्धिरस्तु (siddhirastu)” or “let it be perfect”.  

So the real viraasat embodied in the Sanskrit tradition can be summarized by the following attributes.

• A tradition of exacting precision and excellence in every field.  If the only legacy we leave our children is a cultural imperative of personal excellence, we will have served them well.
• The Sanskrit knowledge base holds vital insights for the modern world.  It embodies nearly 3,000 years of our historical experience that gives us wisdom to navigate the future.
• Embedded in the tradition is a long-term view.  
• The spread of Sanskrit beyond India is a story of societal transformation through adopted values and consensus vs. conflict.
• Nations impacted by the Sanskrit tradition span no less than two thirds of humanity.  Passing on that connection to our children is a formidable inheritance.
• The age of Sanskrit represents an age of a confident India whose imagination and ideas were eagerly adopted by others as the global standard to be followed.
• The Sanskrit tradition provides Indians and the diaspora a pan-Indic inheritance.  From Dwarka to Dhaka, Kargil to Kanchipuram, Patiala to Puri, Thiruvananthapuram to Tawang, Sanskrit was a single, uniform medium of communication in all fields of human endeavor across diverse cultures and traditions.
• Above all, the Sanskrit viraasat has the power to give the next generation knowledge of where they come from, the wisdom and historical “rhyme book” to navigate the future and a grounding to give them the confidence to experience the world on equal terms with anyone.

How You Can Help

S.I.D.D.H.I. or the Sanskrit Inter-Disciplinary Digital Humanities Initiative is a once in a generation project that looks to preserve the Sanskrit tradition in a comprehensive manner on a global basis.  While a significant undertaking, the aim is to focus on four priority areas for maximum impact.  

1. Time and Elements
   • Create common conventions to catalog Sanskrit manuscripts around the world as they are digitized.
     1. Create a virtual ‘card catalog’ of all Sanskrit manuscripts and printed books accessible online.
2. Lack of Scholars in Sanskrit
   • Expand the number of Sanskrit scholars globally by training students from religious communities in India and elsewhere in modern computer skills.
     1. Build best in class online courses to teach Sanskrit through a range of Indian, European and East Asian languages.
3. Digitizing Manuscripts and Printed Works
   • Creating best in class algorithms for the accurate and automated digital character extraction of scanned Sanskrit manuscripts & printed tests.
     1. Create high-quality, open source, Unicode fonts for key historical Sanskrit scripts.
4. Lack of High Impact Research in Sanskrit
   1. Create a comprehensive map of Indian knowledge systems.
      1. Complete a computational programming ofPāṇini’s master grammatical treatise, the Aṣṭādhyāyī to enable the automated grammatical analysis of digitally transcribed texts.
      2. BringSanskrit texts currently available on the Web in various incompatible formats together in a uniform well-cataloged, well-indexed and searchable virtual library.
      3. Launch educational programs to train students in Sanskrit digital philology and expand the workforce necessary to bring Sanskrit into digital media.
      4. Met-tag key texts for computer aided linguistic analysis.
      5. Create select endowed professorships in Sanskrit.

Creating a comprehensive map of Indian knowledge systems and digitizing manuscripts and printed works (Item 3) will be the initial priority with an estimated cost of ~$1.5MM over a span of two years.  Other projects will be commenced and expanded upon completion of the first set of deliverables.  We are seeking supporters who can help in three specific ways.

• Donate
• Create awareness
• Make introductions to potential donors and benefactors

As the Indiaspora community we recently commemorated the 75th anniversary of independence of our ancestral homeland, and I am reminded of Pundit Nehru’s first speech to the parliament of free India….

“At the dawn of history, India started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her successes and her failures. Through good and ill fortune alike, she has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength. We end today a period of ill fortune and India discovers herself again.”

The ideals and ideas which gave India and so many throughout the world strength through the ages were conceived and preserved in Sanskrit.  I humbly ask for your help in this most important and urgent mission.  For more information on how to get involved, please e-mail Murali Prahalad at mkp2768@hotmail.com.

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Dr. Prahalad currently is the President and CEO of Iridia, Inc. (Iridia), a venture backed company focused on the use of synthetic DNA as a next generation medium for data storage. Dr. Prahalad began his life sciences career at Sequenom, Inc., a San Diego based genomics company and pioneer in non-invasive prenatal diagnostics.  He went on to hold various roles at Life Technologies Corporation, a global leader in reagents and instruments for biomedical research.  His final role at Life Technologies was VP, Corporate Strategy which culminated in the strategic sale of Life Technologies to ThermoFisher Scientific (NYSE: TMO) in 2013 for $15.5B.  Prior to Iridia, Dr. Prahalad was President and CEO of Epic Sciences (Epic), a company dedicated to the personalization of cancer care through the development of blood-based tests that predict drug response and extend life. Dr. Prahalad received his B.Sc. with Honors from the University of Michigan in 1992. He went on to receive his Masters in Medical Sciences and Doctorate in Biochemistry & Molecular Pharmacology from Harvard University in 1995 and 1998, respectively.