the varieties of religious experience audiobook

Some scholars-Descartes, Darwin, Ekman-arrive at tidy lists of six or seven basic emotions (though they disagree about which six or seven). In this sense, the Treasury should be seen as a modern enterprise too, especially at a time when lists and lexica of emotions have great currency. My Treasury continues this long-standing Indian love of collecting words and their meanings and then casting them abroad int the world-but unlike Amara, I focus exclusively on words related to emotion. Amara’s Trea sury, already valued by poets in India, traveled far beyond its shores-eastward as a seventh-century translation in Chinese, southward as it was rendered into Pali in Sri Lanka, northward as a Tibetan version in the medieval period, and westward to Europe as an Italian translation in the late eighteenth century. The study of language had been under way for at least a millennium before Amara, and he cites precursors to his lexicon that have been lost to us. In the fifth century, Amarasimha, himself a gem at the court of the emperor Chandragupta II, composed the Treasury of Amara, a thesaurus providing synonyms for words used in nearly every sphere of life. Three thousand years of Indian intellectual history have generated alternative possibilities for how we might come to know what we feel.Ī treasury is an ancient genre in India, where words, poems, or philosophical ideas are gathered into a collection. Before that, people got along quite well interpreting their experience without it.

The word “emotion” may seem universal enough today, but it may not be so when we consider that the way we use it is only about two hundred years old. Part of the pleasure of encountering these words is exploring the ways people living under different skies have conceptually carved up experience. I say “emotion-like” because no single term in Sanskrit and related languages from classical India correlates exactly with the modern English word “emotion.” India’s sophisticated traditions of philosophical reflection on experience yield their own categories, exploring the nuances of felt experience with fine-grained particularity.

The “I-will-come-to-know-what-is-unknown faculty” is just one of 177 emotion-like terms I have collected in Words for the Heart, a “treasury” of words from ancient and classical India with vignettes that spring them to life. It can be the starting place for new knowledge. This faculty is an inner prompting to curiosity about things important for one’s life, a lifeline that clues us into the very fact that we don’t know something that may become valuable to us. Ever have the feeling that you should know something, but you don’t yet know what it is? But wait, if it is unknown to you, then how do you know that you should know it? The ancient Buddhist sources from India have a name for this experience-the “I-will-come-to-know-what-is-unknown faculty” ( anannatannassamitindriya).

The varieties of religious experience audiobook