मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Friday, December 05, 2025

यक्ष पिंपळ आणि यक्षी कडुलिंब ... The Pipal and the Neem: The Greek Experience of India

Richard Stoneman writes in his wonderful  'The Greek Experience of India: from Alexander to the Indo-Greeks':

"... It may be possible to add to the list of trees observed by the Greeks the two that occur in the Latin Letter of Alexander to Aristotle about India. After his conquest of India,

Some of the wise men of the kingdom came to Alexander and said, ‘Your majesty, we have something to show you which deserves your special attention. We will take you to the trees that speak with a human voice’. So they brought Alexander to a place where there was a sanctuary of the Sun and the Moon. There was a guardpost here, and two trees closely resembling cypresses. Around these stood trees that resembled what in Egypt is called the myrrh-nut [this is the myrobalan tree, or amala, ambla, amlaki in Hindi], and their fruits were also similar. The two trees in the middle of the garden spoke, the one with a man’s voice, the other with a woman’s. The name of the male one was Sun, and of the female one Moon, or in their own language, Moutheamatous....

...Of the many sacred trees in India, two stand out for importance, the pipal and the neem. The pipal is perhaps the holiest tree in India, further sanctified by its association with the Buddha, who achieved enlightenment sitting under one at Bodhgaya, known as the bodhi tree. It is regarded as a masculine tree. The neem is widely regarded as a beneficent and friendly tree, and is usually thought of as a feminine. Many trees in fact have a feminine aspect, being the home of a yakṣī or (feminine) tree spirit. (Yakṣas, masculine, are equally common.)

Haberman reports a conversation with two Hindu workers who were in charge of sweeping the temple at Bodhgaya:

For us there are two sacred trees. One is a god [devata]; the other is a goddess [devi]. The first is the pipal; the second is the neem. The pipal is Vasudeva; the neem tree is Shervahani.

 

A pipal and a neem tree entwined (‘married’), near the Rock inscription of Aśoka at East of Kailash, Delhi

Sometimes the trees even intertwine, or are said to be ‘married’, and in the eleventh-century Persian poem Shahnameh the trees visited by Alexander are said to twine together into a single tree, one trunk being male and the other female.

…The Alexander Romance makes explicit not only that the trees are male and female but that they are trees of the Sun and Moon respectively. The pipal is sometimes said to be ‘the abode of the Sun on earth’ and is associated with the sacred fire: in kindling the sacrificial fire ‘the friction drill was made from pipal wood and was considered male, whereas the friction pan was made from sami wood and considered female’. The pipal tree is also often said to be the home of the god Shani, son of the Sun and brother of Death, though sometimes he only takes up his abode there on Saturdays, as otherwise the tree is Vasudev’s....

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