Book Title: World of Philosophy
Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan
View full book text
________________
Tha
both against the vulgarizing or institutionalizing of a habit of thought only proper to those who understand it and against accusations of hereby. In this connection it is worthwhile to mention a palm-leaf manuscript available in the Kerala University MSS library, Tiruvananthapuram (India), called Jnana-bodhagam in which it is said that some who have made an attempt to study Siddha poetry have left it as a "nuisance," because they could not decipher the meaning. It speaks of the dual meaning of the language of the Siddhas as a "merciless language" since in it they conceive one thing and express another. It warns people not to take the language of the Siddhas at its face value and if one were to do it, it will be like a farmer who wants to plough one's fields on the support of the mist-formation. In short, sandhya-bhasa entails a sort of systematic ambiguity. 2. Sandhya-bhasa - Two views
The Sanskrit term for sunya - sambhasanai (as used by Tirumular) is sandhya-bhasa. There are two views about the correct form of the term sandhya-bhasa. One set of scholars use the term sandhya-bhasa meaning twilight language and another set of scholars use the term sandha-bhasa, meaning intentional language. Hariprasad Shastri uses the term sandhya - bhasa to mean the “language of light and darkness, partly light and partly darkness; some part can be understood while the other cannot?. "Vidhushekhara Bhattacharya (Sastri), says that sandhya is a wrong spelling and it must be sandha-bhasa and interprets it as abhiprayikavacana or neyartha-vacana meaning "intentional speech". He says that it is wrong to call it "twilight language." Intentional language is a purposelycreated mode of communication having a concealed meaning. Following Vidhushekhara Sastri, P.C. Bagchi, Burnouf, Kern, Max Muller, Mircea Eliade and Agehananda Bharathi, use the term sandha-bhasa. Eliade informs us that Burnouf translated it as "enigmatic language," Kern as "mystery," and Max Muller as "hidden sayings” and that he himself prefers as "intentional language." But Lama Angarika Govinda in his Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, Snellgrove in his translation of The Hevajra Tantra (Vol 1) and Alex Wayman in his The Buddhist Tantras: Light on IndoTibetan Esotericism, use the term sandhya-bhasa and its literal meaning is "twilight language", which is said to bear a double meaning, the ordinary and the mystic. It is the great riddle of the yogins, which the disciples and others cannot unravel. Hence Snellgrove translates the term sandhya-bhasa as "secret language". The term "twilight language" is an approximate one to refer to the Siddha writings.
According to Buddhadasa, the Thai-Monk, scholar-meditator, certain aspects of Gotama's teachings as we find them in the Tri-pitaka are couched in a kind of symbolic language. This he terms "dhamma
603
