gurugeorge

Fantastic Jeffrey, thank you very much!

gurugeorge

Again, I'd disagree with this Prem. If you check out the traditional stuff, the way the Advaita Vedanta teaching is given orally now (even check the link to the Dayananda lecture above), every single word is pored over exhaustively for etymology and connotations - some of Swami Dayandanda's oral teaching can easily take 15 minutes or so over the meaning of just one word, with a teaching that takes a couple of hours covering only one verse in one of the Upanishads, for instance.

Of course we can't know for sure whether this is how these teachings were always given, or indeed meant, right back through history to the origins of these teachings, but it seems likely that there is an unbroken lineage at very least back to Shankara in which the teachings are given that way, and it's unlikely that a way of teaching used by Shankara arose in a vacuum.

This way of exhaustively analysing words seems to be common in extremely hardcore religious/mystical schools- the Zohar immediately springs to mind. Hermeticism was probably along the same lines too, and Pythagoreanism.

So I don't think it was just randomness or poetry - mystical texts in general - Sutras, Agamas, Tantras, etc., and indeed their Western equivalents (such as the "Holy Books" of Aleister Crowley, for example), are incredibly dense and absolutely nothing is thrown off at random or merely for the sake of mellifluousness. As with good cooking and multi-layered flavours, multi-layered meaning is part of the whole mystical game - it's as if the text is meant to hit you as a broadside with a whole bunch of stacked layers of meaning, but unlike with cooking and stacked flavours, you can't really get the broadside effect until you've analysed each layer.

premjan

http://vedabase.net/p/purnam
Maybe it is my Hindi bias - I learned Sanskrit only accessorily though I memorized a lot of Sanskrit verses as a child. In Hindi, poorna is not a very "big" word.