Padmasana: full lotus pose

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Pashimottanasana: back stretching pose

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Mayurasana: peacock pose

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Mulabandha: root lock

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Nada: inner sound, primeval sound

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Nauli: fifth shatkarma; abdominal massage.

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Neti: the third shatkarmas; nasal cleansing

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Kurmasana: the tortoise pose

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Laghiman - the power to become light; siddhi

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Some important works from the 11th century include the Katha-Saritsagara and Geeta Govinda. The Katha-Saritsagara (An Ocean of Stories) by Somadeva was a poetic adaptation in Sanskrit of Brihat-katha, written in the 5th cent BC in the Paishachi dialect. The Paishachi manuscript of the Brihat-katha has not been found. The thousands of short stories embedded in this book inspired numerous later stories, most notably several stories of the Arabian Nights (note that the Arabian Nights was f ...

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Sanskrit literature, Sanskrit literature - The Vedic Period, Sanskrit literature - The Epics, Sanskrit literature - The Ramayana, Sanskrit literature - The Mahabharata, Sanskrit literature - Panini and Ashtadhyayi, Sanskrit literature - Sanskrit Plays, Sanskrit literature - Mricchakatika The Little Clay Cart, Sanskrit literature - Bhasa's plays, Sanskrit literature - Kalidasa, Sanskrit literature - Bharata's Natyasastra, Sanskrit literature - Classical Poetry, Sanskrit literature - Later Sanskrit literature, Sanskrit literature - Reference

Read more here: » Sanskrit literature: Encyclopedia II - Sanskrit literature - Later Sanskrit literature

The period between approximately the 12th and the 2nd centuries BC saw the composition of the two great Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. They are known to Hindus as itihaas, or "that which occurred" and are both collective works, having evolved through the centuries before finally being put into writing sometime in the 2nd century AD. Sanskrit literature - The Ramayana. While not as big as the Mahabharata, the Ramayana is still twice as big as the Iliad and the Odyssey put together. Tr ...

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Sanskrit literature, Sanskrit literature - The Vedic Period, Sanskrit literature - The Epics, Sanskrit literature - The Ramayana, Sanskrit literature - The Mahabharata, Sanskrit literature - Panini and Ashtadhyayi, Sanskrit literature - Sanskrit Plays, Sanskrit literature - Mricchakatika The Little Clay Cart, Sanskrit literature - Bhasa's plays, Sanskrit literature - Kalidasa, Sanskrit literature - Bharata's Natyasastra, Sanskrit literature - Classical Poetry, Sanskrit literature - Later Sanskrit literature, Sanskrit literature - Reference

Read more here: » Sanskrit literature: Encyclopedia II - Sanskrit literature - The Epics

This refers to the poetry produced from the 3rd to approximately the 7th centuries. Kalidasa is the foremost example of a classical poet. While Kalidasa's Sanksrit usage is simple but beautiful, later Sanskrit poetry shifted towards highly stylized literary accents: stanzas that read the same backwards and forwards, words that can be split in different ways to produce different meanings, sophisticated metaphors, and so on. A classic example is the poet Bharavi a ...

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Sanskrit literature, Sanskrit literature - The Vedic Period, Sanskrit literature - The Epics, Sanskrit literature - The Ramayana, Sanskrit literature - The Mahabharata, Sanskrit literature - Panini and Ashtadhyayi, Sanskrit literature - Sanskrit Plays, Sanskrit literature - Mricchakatika The Little Clay Cart, Sanskrit literature - Bhasa's plays, Sanskrit literature - Kalidasa, Sanskrit literature - Bharata's Natyasastra, Sanskrit literature - Classical Poetry, Sanskrit literature - Later Sanskrit literature, Sanskrit literature - Reference

Read more here: » Sanskrit literature: Encyclopedia II - Sanskrit literature - Classical Poetry

Vedic had a subjunctive absent in Panini's grammar and generally believed to have disappeared by then at least in common sentence constructions. Long-i stems differentiate the Devi inflection and the Vrkis inflection, a difference lost in Classical Sanskrit. ...

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Vedic Sanskrit, Vedic Sanskrit - History, Vedic Sanskrit - Phonology, Vedic Sanskrit - Grammar

Read more here: » Vedic Sanskrit: Encyclopedia II - Vedic Sanskrit - Grammar

Composed between approximately 2000 BC and 500 BC, Vedic literature forms the basis for the further development of Hinduism. There are fours books of Vedas - Rig, Yajus, Sāma and Atharva. Some people consider the first three as the more important ones. Each veda contains four parts - hymns, rituals, meditation and mystical philosophy. The Vedas were not written at any single time, and have been compiled over several centuries by thousands of people. As a result, the Vedas provide an insight into the historical and cultural developmen ...

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Sanskrit literature, Sanskrit literature - The Vedic Period, Sanskrit literature - The Epics, Sanskrit literature - The Ramayana, Sanskrit literature - The Mahabharata, Sanskrit literature - Panini and Ashtadhyayi, Sanskrit literature - Sanskrit Plays, Sanskrit literature - Mricchakatika The Little Clay Cart, Sanskrit literature - Bhasa's plays, Sanskrit literature - Kalidasa, Sanskrit literature - Bharata's Natyasastra, Sanskrit literature - Classical Poetry, Sanskrit literature - Later Sanskrit literature, Sanskrit literature - Reference

Read more here: » Sanskrit literature: Encyclopedia II - Sanskrit literature - The Vedic Period

Originating in a purely oral culture, Sanskrit has no single script associated with it. Since the late Middle Ages, the script by Indian scholars was predominantly Devanagari. Western scholars in the 19th century adopted Devanagari for printed editions of Sanskrit texts. The editio princeps of the Rigveda by Max Müller was in Devanagari, a typographical tour de force at the time. Müller's London typesetters competed with their Petersburg peers working on Böhtlingk's and Roth;s di ...

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Romanization of Sanskrit, Romanization of Sanskrit - History, Romanization of Sanskrit - IAST, Romanization of Sanskrit - ASCII schemes, Romanization of Sanskrit - Harvard-Kyoto, Romanization of Sanskrit - ITRANS

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Sound changes between Proto-Indo-Iranian and Vedic Sanskrit include loss of the voiced sibilant z. Vedic Sanskrit had a labial fricative [f], called upadhmaniya, and a velar fricative [x], called See also:

Vedic Sanskrit, Vedic Sanskrit - History, Vedic Sanskrit - Phonology, Vedic Sanskrit - Grammar

Read more here: » Vedic Sanskrit: Encyclopedia II - Vedic Sanskrit - Phonology

Panini's work had a phenomenal success, and later Sanskrit grammarians were essentially reduced to the role of his commentators, and his predecessors are only known from references in the Ashtadhyayi itself. His work is still used, or at least referred to, in the teaching of Sanskrit today. Panini's grammar consists of several parts, of which the Ashtadhyayi, containing the morphological rules, forms the core: Shiva Sutras: phonology (See also:

Sanskrit grammarians, Sanskrit grammarians - Panini's school, Sanskrit grammarians - Early Accounts, Sanskrit grammarians - Beginning of Western scholarship, Sanskrit grammarians - 19th century, Sanskrit grammarians - Modern period

Read more here: » Sanskrit grammarians: Encyclopedia II - Sanskrit grammarians - Panini's school

The earliest historical accounts of Indian grammatical tradition is from Chinese Buddhist pilgrims to India from the 7th century. Hsüan Tsang (602-664) I Tsing (634-713) Fa Tsang (643-712) The Indica of Abu Raihan al-Biruni (973-1048), dating to ca. 1030 contains detailed descriptions of all branches of Hindu science. Similar to the Chinese Buddhists, Tibetan Buddhism aroused interest in India among its followers. Taranatha (born 1573) in his treatise of the history of Buddhi ...

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Sanskrit grammarians, Sanskrit grammarians - Panini's school, Sanskrit grammarians - Early Accounts, Sanskrit grammarians - Beginning of Western scholarship, Sanskrit grammarians - 19th century, Sanskrit grammarians - Modern period

Read more here: » Sanskrit grammarians: Encyclopedia II - Sanskrit grammarians - Early Accounts

Five chronologically distinct strata can be identified within the Vedic language. Rigvedic. The Rigveda is by far the most archaic of the Vedic texts preserved, and it retains many common Indo-Iranian elements, both in language and in content, that are not present in any other Vedic texts. Its creation must have taken place over several centuries, and apart from the youngest books (1 and 10), it must have been essentially complete by 1500 BC. Mantra language. This period includes both the mantra and prose language of th ...

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Vedic Sanskrit, Vedic Sanskrit - History, Vedic Sanskrit - Phonology, Vedic Sanskrit - Grammar

Read more here: » Vedic Sanskrit: Encyclopedia II - Vedic Sanskrit - History

Arguably, no grammarian has had as much influence over the grammar of any language as much as Panini has had over Sanskrit grammar and phonetics. Panini was a Vaishnava grammarian from approximately the 5th cent BC. The Ashtadhyayi was his magnum-opus. The book completely standardized Sanskrit grammar and phonetics. Panini's grammar became widely accepted and is still the standard (a common way to classify ancient Sanskrit b ...

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Sanskrit literature, Sanskrit literature - The Vedic Period, Sanskrit literature - The Epics, Sanskrit literature - The Ramayana, Sanskrit literature - The Mahabharata, Sanskrit literature - Panini and Ashtadhyayi, Sanskrit literature - Sanskrit Plays, Sanskrit literature - Mricchakatika The Little Clay Cart, Sanskrit literature - Bhasa's plays, Sanskrit literature - Kalidasa, Sanskrit literature - Bharata's Natyasastra, Sanskrit literature - Classical Poetry, Sanskrit literature - Later Sanskrit literature, Sanskrit literature - Reference

Read more here: » Sanskrit literature: Encyclopedia II - Sanskrit literature - Panini and Ashtadhyayi

A possible clue to termination of Sanskrit as a spoken language is provided by Kalhana who describes Samkaravarman (883-902) thus (Stein's trans.): "Thus this [king], who did not speak the language of the gods but used vulgar speech fit for drunkards, showed that he was descended from a family of spirit-distillers". kalyapaalakule janma tattenaiva pramaaNitam kshiivochitaapabhramshokterdaivii vaagasya naabhavat 5-206 This refers to the fact that the power had pas ...

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Termination of spoken Sanskrit, Termination of spoken Sanskrit - Evidence from Rajatarangini, Termination of spoken Sanskrit - Patronage of Sanskrit Literature by Early Rajput Kings

Read more here: » Termination of spoken Sanskrit: Encyclopedia II - Termination of spoken Sanskrit - Evidence from Rajatarangini

The Natyasastra (literally "Scripture of Dance," though it sometimes translated as "Science of Theatre'") is a keystone work in Sanskrit literature on the subject of stagecraft. Almost nothing is known about its author, Bharata. Bharata is also the name of a character in Hindu mythology; though the author of the Natyasastra bears no relationship to the mythological character. The Natyasastra was written somewhere between 500 A.D. and 300 B.C., though it is usually thought to have been composed around the second century A.D. The title is ...

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Sanskrit literature, Sanskrit literature - The Vedic Period, Sanskrit literature - The Epics, Sanskrit literature - The Ramayana, Sanskrit literature - The Mahabharata, Sanskrit literature - Panini and Ashtadhyayi, Sanskrit literature - Sanskrit Plays, Sanskrit literature - Mricchakatika The Little Clay Cart, Sanskrit literature - Bhasa's plays, Sanskrit literature - Kalidasa, Sanskrit literature - Bharata's Natyasastra, Sanskrit literature - Classical Poetry, Sanskrit literature - Later Sanskrit literature, Sanskrit literature - Reference

Read more here: » Sanskrit literature: Encyclopedia II - Sanskrit literature - Bharata's Natyasastra