Vinaya Texts

SR No.: 007684
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: T W Rhys Davids, Hermann Oldenberg
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1881
Total Pages: 2523
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 47 MB

Page 430

xiv
UPANISHADS.
entirely with him, in attempting to translate a passage without considering the whole chapter of which it forms a part. Mr. Nehemiah Goreh states the beginning of the story rightly when he says that a youth by name Svetaketu went, by the advice of his father, to a teacher to study under him. After spending twelve years, as was customary, with the teacher, when he returned home he appeared rather elated. Then the father asked him:
Uta tam âdesam aprakshol yenâsrutam srutam bhavaty amatam matam avigñâtam vigñatam iti?
I translated this: 'Have you ever asked for that instruction by which we hear what cannot be heard, by which we perceive what cannot be perceived, by which we know what cannot be known?
Mr. Nehemiah Goreh translates : Hast thou asked (of thy teacher) for that instruction by which what is not heard becomes heard, what is not comprehended becomes comprehended, what is not known becomes known?'
I shall not quarrel with my friend for translating man by to comprehend rather than by to perceive. I prefer my own translation, because manas is one side of the common sensory (antahkarana), buddhi, the other; the original difference between the two being, so far as I can see, that the manas originally dealt with percepts, the buddhi with concepts. But the chief difference on which my critic lays stress is that I translated asrutam, amatam, and avigñatam not by 'not heard, not comprehended, not known,' but by what cannot be heard, what cannot be perceived, what cannot be known.'
Now, before finding fault, why did he not ask himself what possible reason I could have had for deviating from the original, and for translating avigñâta by unknowable or
Mr. Nehemiah Goreh writes aprakshyo, and this is no doubt the reading adopted by Roer in his edition of the Khândogya-upanishad in the Bibliotheca Indica, p. 384. In Sankara's commentary also the same form is given. Still grammar requires apraksho.
· The Pankadasi (I, 20) distinguishes between manas and buddhi, by saying, mano vimarsarūpam syâd buddhih syân niskayâtmikâ, which places the difference between the two rather in the degree of certainty, ascribing deliberation to manas, decision to buddhi.
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