Concept
Pingala
Overview
Acharya Pingala (Sanskrit: पिङ्गल, romanized: Piṅgala; c. 3rd–2nd century BCE) was an ancient Indian poet and mathematician, and the author of the Chandaḥśāstra (Sanskrit: छन्दःशास्त्र, lit. 'A Treatise on Prosody'), also called the Pingala Sutras (Sanskrit: पिङ्गलसूत्राः, romanized: Piṅgalasūtrāḥ, lit. 'Pingala's Formulae (Sutra literally a thread also means a formula, used as a metaphor)', the earliest known treatise on Sanskrit prosody.
The Chandaḥśāstra is a work of eight chapters in the late Sūtra style, not fully comprehensible without a commentary. It has been dated to the last few centuries BCE. In the 10th century CE, Halayudha wrote a commentary elaborating on the Chandaḥśāstra. According to some historians Maharshi Pingala was the brother of Pāṇini, the famous Sanskrit grammarian, considered the first descriptive linguist. Others identify him as Patanjali, the 2nd century BCE scholar who authored Mahabhashya.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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For this reason, too, it is a legend universally believed, that Pythagoras, for instance, received his Philosophy from India and Egypt; the fame of the wisdom of these people, which wisdom is understood also to contain Philosophy, is an old one. The Oriental ideas and religious worship which prevailed throughout the West up to the time of the Roman Empire, likewise bear the name of Oriental Philosophy. The Christian…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
States what Pingala is.
These languages consist of monosyllabic words which follow one another in direct succession without any intermediate inflectional elements to modify their meaning. Philologists usually call such languages 'root-languages,' because a sound complex that carries the essential meaning of a word, apart from all modifying elements, is called by their science a verbal root.
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
States what Pingala is.
They held that locomotion consisted in the translation of each atom of a body from one point to the next one; accordingly the velocity of one body in motion cannot be greater than that of another body. When, nevertheless, two bodies are observed to move during the same time through different spaces, the cause of this difference is not attributed by them to the fact that the body which has moved through a larger…
Moses Maimonides, The guide for the perplexed
States what Pingala is.
Related ideas
- Indian mathematics
- Śūnyatā
- Acharya
- Patanjali
- Academic Press
- Sanskrit
- 0
- Vyākaraṇa
- Sanskrit grammar
- Combinatorics
- Taylor & Francis
- Pāṇini
- Common Era
Place in the tradition
Part of History of philosophy in Pakistan.