Making Hinduism Accessible to the West: Franz Bopp and Pioneer Scholars Studying Sanskrit

In the 1960s, the Beatles went to India as George Harrison studied the sitar with Ravi Shankar. They also met with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and studied some Transcendental Meditation. Their contact made a fine popular cross-cultural exchange that had earlier precedents in Gandhi´s non-violent based Indian War of Independence. At the earliest points of Gandhi´s own campaign was the 1893 Chicago World Parliament of Religions, organized by Swedenborgian CC Bonney.
"Franz Bopp was born in Mainz in 1791, but the political disarray in the Republic of Mainz caused his parents' move to Aschaffenburg, the second seat of the Archbishop of Mainz. There he received a liberal education at the Lyceum and Karl Joseph Hieronymus Windischmann drew his attention to the languages and literature of the East. (Windischmann, along with Georg Friedrich Creuzer, Joseph Görres, and the brothers Schlegel, expressed great enthusiasm for Indian wisdom and philosophy.) Moreover, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel's book, Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Speech and Wisdom of the Indians, Heidelberg, 1808), had just begun to exert a powerful influence on the minds of German philosophers and historians, and stimulated Bopp's interest in the sacred language of the Hindus.[4]
Franz Bopp
Karl von Schlegel
Dorothea von Schlegel (nee Veit) Career: "In 1812, he went to Paris at the expense of the Bavarian government, with a view to devoting himself vigorously to the study of Sanskrit. There he enjoyed the society of such eminent men as Antoine-Léonard de Chézy (his primary instructor), Silvestre de Sacy, Louis Mathieu Langlès, and, above all Alexander Hamilton (1762–1824), cousin of the American statesman of the same name , who had acquired an acquaintance with Sanskrit when in India and had brought out, along with Langlès, a descriptive catalogue of the Sanskrit manuscripts of the Imperial Library.[4]
"In the library, Bopp had access not only to the rich collection of Sanskrit manuscripts (mostly brought from India by Jean François Pons in the early 18th century), but also to the Sanskrit books that had been issued from the Calcutta and Serampore presses.[4] He spent five years of laborious study, almost living in the libraries of Paris and unmoved by the turmoils that agitated the world around him, including Napoleon's escape, the Waterloo campaign and the Restoration.[5]
Mahabharata Kurukshetra
Mahabharata Sauti Recites the Slokas///// "...He had previously published a critical edition, with a Latin translation and notes, of the story of Nala and Damayanti (London, 1819), the most beautiful episode of the Mahabharata. Other episodes of the Mahabharata, Indralokâgama, and three others (Berlin, 1824); Diluvium, and three others (Berlin, 1829); a new edition of Nala (Berlin, 1832) followed in due course, all of which, with August Wilhelm von Schlegel's edition of the Bhagavad Gita (1823), proved excellent aids in initiating the early student into the reading of Sanskrit texts. On the publication, in Calcutta, of the whole Mahabharata, Bopp discontinued editing Sanskrit texts and confined himself thenceforth exclusively to grammatical investigations....."
Have you considered all the effort that has gone into bringing the world into its modern context of fairly convenient intercultural exchange, and its spiritual, religious, social, and societal contexts?

Comments

FACT CHECKER

Search results