I wonder if someone might be able to help me find any well-done linguistic or psychological quantitative study of the psychological "dimension" of Sanskrit language/literature. By "Sanskrit" here I mean all classical/ancient Indo-Aryan languages of India, including Prakrits.

It is intuitively obvious to me that Sanskrit is an immensely psychologically rich language, and an extremely psychologically sophisticated tradition of literature. As C. G. Jung and C. A. F. Rhys Davids put it:

"But what we have to show in the way of spiritual insight and psychological technique must seem, when compared with yoga, just as backward as Eastern astrology and medicine when compared with Western science". (C. G. Jung in his "psychological commentary" in "The Tibetan Book of Great Liberation" (W.Y. Evans-Wentz. Oxford University Press, London, 1954))

"Even a superficial inspection of the Manual should yield great promise to anyone interested in the history of psychology. When in the year 1893 my attention was first drawn to it..., I was at once attracted by the amount of psychological material embedded in its pages". (C. A. F. Rhys Davids in the preface to her pioneering translation of the Dhammasaṅgaṇī, tr. "A Buddhist Manual of Psychological Ethics" (Pali Text Society, Oxford, 1900).

But I struggle to find any well methodologically done study, that would quantitatively measure or assess that. 

I dimly remember the study that I read some 15 years ago by an Indian scholar by the last name Basu (or Vasu), that estimated that Sanskrit has about 30-40% more psychologically relevant terms/words, than classical languages (i.e. Greek and Latin), and 80% more than modern European languages.

But all my attempts at finding that study failed. I would be very grateful if someone helped me to identify that study or suggested something recent and authoritative on the subject. I would be grateful for any comments as well.

Kind regards,

Gleb Sharygin

PhD Candidate

Institut fur Indologie und Tibetologie

LMU München