INDOLOGY Digest - 7 Feb 2001 to 8 Feb 2001 (#2001-40)

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

>-ta is a passive participle forming suffix.
>Root cit means (MW 395.2) to percieve, fix mind upon, attend to, observe,
>notice, etc.  This is a transitive root.
>"That which mind is fixed upon" has a passive participle meaning derived
>from transitive "cit".  So what's the problem with it?

Nothing, till one realizes that words like manas, buddhi and
citta can have different meanings based on context. In some
places, they refer to "internal organ", which is a material
entity, and in other places, they can just refer to such
things as "awareness", "will", "cognition" etc. One doesn't
have to impose saa.mkhya upon the yogasuutras to realize this.

Take the compound citta-v.rtti, which you take as "v.rttis
beginning with citta". However, YS 1.5 says v.rttis are of
five types, and 1.6 lists them as pramaa.na, viparyaya etc.
This is a straightforward pointer to interpret citta-v.rtti
as "v.rttis of the citta" - a different kind of tatpuru.sa.

>As far as agreement with other pAdas, I tried to make SamAdhi PAda coherent
>first. The major problem for "citta" as "mind" is I.37.  All rendering of
it
>that use "mind" meaning are quite a stretch.

Aren't you imposing a very Western mind vs. matter duality on
an Indian school of thought? Similarly with your comment on the
word aagama, on which you have imposed a Cartesian presumption.
Beyond that, no comment. But see below.

>>"That which mind is fixed upon" presumes a mind, which
>>has not yet been introduced anywhere in the first few sUtras.
>YS is anuzAsana not zastra. Therefore, not all concepts are introduced, but
>only those, requiring special definition.

In that case, the words kli.s.ta and akli.s.ta are introduced
in YS 1.5, but the corresponding noun, kleza, is not defined
till YS 2.3. Needs to be studied carefully, with respect to
taking samaadhi-paada to be entirely independent of the rest
of the text.

>>And similarly, also the word pratyaya.
>Meaning of pratyaya I use is an analogy with its use in Panini's grammar --
>an affix that gives the word its final meaning.

samaadhi-paada has the following compounds - abhaava-pratyaya,
viraama-pratyaya and bhava-pratyaya. Other compounds occur in
the other three paadas. Are these merely different kinds of
verbal affixes?

>>Other grammar can wait ...
>I'd like to hear about other grammar.

Well, to take just one early case - your interpretation of YS
1.6 takes its list of nouns ending in the plural number as a
copulative compound, but in 1.7, it takes a related list of
nouns ending in the plural number as a different kind of
compound. Again, without getting into saa.mkhya, and without
getting into the possible identity of patanjali, why so?

Best wishes,
Vidyasankar