| Sanskrit In The West |
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Information AboutSanskrit In The West |
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Goethe and Schopenhauer were riding a crest of scholarly discovery, most notably the work done by Sir William Jones . (Goethe likely read Kalidasa's '' The Recognition Of Sakuntala '' in Jones' translation.) However, the discovery of the world of Sanskrit Literature moved beyond German and British scholars and intellectuals — Henry David Thoreau was a sympathetic reader of the Bhagavad Gita — and even beyond the Humanities . In the early days of the Periodic Table , scientists referred to as yet undiscovered elements with the use of Sanskrit prefixes (see Mendeleev's Predicted Elements ). The nineteenth century was a golden age of Western Sanskrit scholarship, and many of the giants of the field ( Whitney , Macdonnell , Monier-Williams , Grassmann ) knew each other personally. Perhaps the most commonly known example of Sanskrit in the West was also the last gasp of its vogue. T.S. Eliot , a student of Indian Philosophy and Lanham's, ended '' The Waste Land '' with Sanskrit: "Shantih Shantih Shantih". |
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