[INDOLOGY] Sanskrit idiom question

[Ashok Aklujkar]

Martin,

Through ‘provides an opening’ in my last email I have indicated that I took a non-literal meaning for dvāraṁ kurute. You can, if you wish, replace ‘provides an opening’ with ‘provides an opportunity’.

Two statements like 
(a) ‘(Gaining of a kingdom) would not be there if the moon is weak’
and
(b) ‘But if the moon is free from an unfavorable daśama-dṛk planet, (the kingdom-seeker) gains something (similar)’
seem quite plausible to me. The second does not contradict the first; it simply qualifies the first. Access is spoken of as blocked in the first. The second speaks of it being given again under certain special conditions. 

Since my knowledge of astrological texts is close to zero, I am not questioning your rendering of astrologically significant words, but identifying the subject of the second sentence with ‘querent’ does seem problematic to me. That subject should be the same as the (implicit) subject of the first sentence, that is, the same as the agent of the action of acquiring a kingdom.

The secondary sense of dvār/dvāra, ‘access, entry’, is noted in Apte, etc. A well-known example would be the athavā kṛta-vāg-dvāre in the opening verses of Kālidāsa’s Raghu-vaṁśa.

That we are free to coin other phrases of the type ‘object + kṛ’ is indicated by “open class” in my last post.

Incidentally, disabling of the Moon by a krūra-graha and the counteracting of that disabling by the planet Budha is cleverly used in verse 1.6 of Viśākha-datta’s play Mudrā-rākṣasa. 

a.a.


> On Jun 28, 2017, at 11:34 PM, Martin Gansten via INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info <mailto:indology at list.indology.info>> wrote:

> I know that dvāraṃ kurute would mean 'makes a door', but 'the moon makes a door, then/therefore [the querent] gains something' doesn't make much sense if the phrase is taken literally. Thus, my question is whether such an idiomatic expression (perhaps in the sense of 'making an opportunity') is attested elsewhere.
> 
> Personally, I rather suspect that the phrase is a corruption or scribal 'correction', and that the original read something like daśamadṛśendūvāraṃ kurute. (Arabic idbār as the name of an astrological configuration is typically Sanskritized as induvāra with a short u, but authors tend to be rather free with the orthography of such loanwords in order to fit their chosen metres.) But I didn't want to jump to conclusions without first asking if anybody recognized the door-making idiom.



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://list.indology.info/pipermail/indology/attachments/20170629/e733bf1c/attachment.htm>