As life is so short, should we spend it in learning Sanskrit or just focus on chanting?
Podcast:
Should devotees study Sanskrit? There are some letters where Prabhupada recommends studying Sanskrit, whereas others he says better to focus on chanting as life is short. Won’t studying these help us deeper understand the original scriptures as they are written in the language, in their original language, not just Sanskrit, but say Bengali and Odia also? Should that life is short be a reason for not studying them? Answer, no. Certainly, that life is short argument could be used for anything.
Then why build temples? Why make art? Life is short. Why learn music? We could just chant whatever we can, we sing whatever we can. The point of life is short argument is that we don’t distract ourselves from the essential or the things that matter, the activities that matter to the activities that don’t matter so much.
So, now does studying Sanskrit matter? Well, it depends. There are broadly four varanas and we could say these are four broad human types. Some people are more intellectual than others and for them, for those who are more brahmanically oriented, intellectual endeavour is the way they can actually connect with Krishna and help others connect with Krishna.
For some others, that may not be their main ability and that may not be the main way they serve Krishna. So, for somebody who is an intellectual, who delights in studying and learning and sharing, to deprive them of opportunity to study, learn and share in the name of saying that life is short will be to actually deprive them of the very things that will make that short life meaningful. In contrast, for say somebody is not that much of an intellectual and for them, study is extreme labour with not much reward.
That means somebody tries to study Sanskrit and then they find that they can’t memorize the rules, they can’t understand, they can’t apply the rules of grammar. They struggle to do that and in general, many people will fall in that category and even in the past, Sanskrit was the language of the elite, literally speaking. It is not that everybody in the past spoke Sanskrit.
It is a difficult language. It is an elegant language but it’s a difficult language. So, there are two things.
One is those who have the inclination, the inspiration and the ability to study it should not be deprived of the opportunity to study and those who do not have that inclination, inspiration and especially the ability, they should not be pressured into studying it. They should not think either socially. Social pressure should not maybe put on them that if you don’t study Sanskrit, what are you doing in your life? What is your service? Nor should they think that if I study Sanskrit, then people will respect me more, people will treat me as a scholar and therefore, they should study it.
So, that either social pressure or personal ego, those are the things which we should avoid. So, we encourage those who would like to study it. If nobody studies Sanskrit, then what is going to happen? Two things.
Either Sanskrit as a language itself will die and according to many linguists, those who study language, they consider Sanskrit as an almost dead language because the number of people who speak it is so less or Sanskrit scholarship will become the monopoly of non-devotees. If the devotees don’t study it, then the legacy of Sanskrit will be continued by either Advaitic scholars or Smartha scholars or academic scholars and they will be interpreting scripture in a non-devotional way, sometimes intentionally to support their philosophy or sometimes unintentionally because those interpretations will make the most sense to them and that way, the intellectual legacy that the saints have given, the acharyas have given will all be lost. So, certainly, it is the responsibility of some devotees to continue the tradition and to preserve the legacy by studying Sanskrit and those who have that sense of responsibility should be