Читать книгу Ashtanga Yoga - The Intermediate Series - Gregor Maehle - Страница 51

During the final state of the gunas, called the gross state, the fourth state of sound, called vaikhari, emerges. The term vaikhari comes from the root vac, or “speech,” which also gave rise to the English terms word and verb. Vaikhari is audible sound, and during the vaikhari state all nonmantric languages emerge, as do all other audible sounds. Sounds that happen to be outside the range of human hearing, such as those with an extremely high or low frequency, are also called vaikhari.

The languages that developed during the vaikhari state are nonmantric; these include all the Indo-European languages (such as English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Iranian, Greek, Hindi, and Marathi). Although these nonmantric languages have Sanskrit roots, they are fundamentally different from Sanskrit, in that all nonmantric languages change over time. Words lose their original meanings and take on new ones. In Sanskrit, however, words have a fixed meaning because they are constructed from fixed elements. If a word is lost, it can be reconstructed from precise grammatical and phonetic rules, which are the same today as they were thousands of years ago. Also, whereas modern languages have a limited number of expressions, a nearly endless number of Sanskrit words can be created or reconstructed by following these exact, fixed rules and laws. These rules were defined by the ancient Sanskrit grammarian Panini, whose grammar is known as Ashtadhyayi.