期刊名称：Eye of the Heart : A Journal of Traditional Wisdom
印刷版ISSN：1835-4416
出版年度：2008
卷号：2008
期号：1
出版社：La Trobe University
摘要：Every student of Vedic literature will be familiar with what are called by
modern scholars “folk etymologies.” I cite, for example, the Chāndogya
Upaniṣad (VIII.3.3), “Verily, this Spirit is in the heart1 (eṣa ātmā hṛdi). The
hermeneia (niruktam) thereof is this: ‘This is in the heart’ (hṛdayam), and
that is why the ‘heart’ is called ‘hṛdayam.’ Whoever is a comprehensor of
this reaches Heaven every day.” Specimens, of course, abound in Yāska—
for example, Nirukta V.14, “Puṣkaram means ‘mid-world,’ because it
‘fosters’ (poṣati) things that come to be.2 Water is puṣkaram too, because it
is a ‘means of worship’ (pūjākaram), and ‘to be worshipped’
(pūjayitavyam). Otherwise, as ‘lotus’ (puṣkaram) the word is of the same
origin, being a ‘means of adorning’ (vapuṣkaram); and it is a ‘bloom’
(puṣyam) because it ‘blossoms’ (puṣpate).” Explanations of this kind are
commonly dismissed as “etymological triflings” (J. Eggeling), “purely
artificial” (A. B. Keith), and “very fanciful” (B. C. Mazumdar), or as “puns.”
On the other hand, one feels that they cannot be altogether ignored, for as
the last-mentioned author says, “There are in many Upaniṣads very fanciful
explanations … disclosing bad grammar and worse idiom, and yet the
grammarians who did not accept them as correct, did not say anything
about them”;3 that is, the early Sanskrit grammarians, whose “scientific”
abilities have been universally recognized, did not embody these
关键词：“explanations” in their “grammar,” but at the same time never condemned
them.
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