Amarakosha

01Name and gender

Its proper title is Namalinganushasana, the teaching of nouns and their genders, and that is its whole method. Each shloka strings together the synonyms for one thing, so that in a single line a student learns that heaven is svar, svarga, naka, tridiva, tridashalaya and suraloka, and learns in the same breath that dyo and div are feminine and trivishtapa neuter. Nothing is defined. The meaning is carried by the company a word keeps. Indra is Maruttvan, Vajri and Purandara; fire is Agni, Vaishvanara and Vahni; and a reader who has the verse by heart will never be stopped by any of those names in a poem.

02Amarasimha

Of the author we know the name and little else. A well-known verse lists Amarasimha among the nine gems of Vikramaditya’s court, beside Kalidasa, Varahamihira and Dhanvantari, and tradition has kept him there. Many commentators, and the Tibetan and Sri Lankan traditions, held him to be a Buddhist, and the opening verse praises an unnamed one who is an unfathomable ocean of knowledge and compassion, which they read as the Buddha. Other commentators read the same verse of Vishnu or of Shiva. The book itself gives every deva of the Puranas his full list of names, and has been used by Hindu, Jain and Buddhist students alike for fifteen centuries.

03How the book is built

After the opening prayer Amarasimha states his plan in one verse: he has gathered the material of other works, compressed and revised it, and set it out complete in vargas, sections by subject. A few rules follow. Gender is usually shown by the form of the word itself, sometimes by the company it keeps, and where needed by an explicit marker; a word followed by trishu takes all three genders, one followed by dvayoh takes the two named. Words of differing gender are never run together in a compound, so the student is never left to guess. With these rules, about fifteen hundred shlokas carry many thousands of words.

04From heaven to the waters

The first kanda, Svargadi, begins at the top of creation. It names heaven, then the devas, and gives Bhagwan Vishnu dozens of names in a row: Vishnu, Narayana, Krishna, Vaikuntha, Damodara, Hrishikesha, Keshava, Madhava and on. Shiva, Devi, Brahma, Ganesha and Kartikeya follow with theirs. Then come the sky and the quarters, time from the blink of an eye to the kalpa, the mind and its faculties, sound and speech, and the natya varga of music, dance, the nine rasas and stage terms. It ends below the earth, with the nagas of patala, the narakas, and the waters with their fish, lotuses and boats.

05The earth and its people

The second kanda, Bhumyadi, is the longest. It names the earth and its soils, cities and their parts, mountains, then the forests and plants in a varga of more than three hundred lines that is still a source for the history of Indian botany and medicine. Animals follow, then people: the body and its ailments, kinship, clothes and ornaments. Four vargas named for the varnas hold the vocabulary of their callings: the ashramas, the Vedas and the yajna; the king, his ministers, army, weapons and statecraft; farming, trade, weights and measures; and crafts, music and service. Here too is the line every student learns, that dharma, artha and kama make the trivarga, and with moksha the chaturvarga.

06Words of many meanings

The third kanda, Samanya, the general, turns from things to words. It lists adjectives by the nouns they qualify, then a mixed varga of terms that would not fit elsewhere. Its great section is the nanartha varga, words with more than one meaning, arranged by their final consonant so that a reader can find them: hari, as a masculine noun, is Yama, the wind, Indra, the moon, the sun, Vishnu, the lion, a ray of light, the horse, the parrot, the snake, the monkey and the frog, and as an adjective it means tawny. The kanda closes with the indeclinables and a summary of the rules of gender. The edition on GRETIL counts 281 root verses in the first kanda, 735 in the second and 480 in the third, with a few dozen added verses besides.

07Learnt before grammar

In the old pathashalas a child learnt the Amarakosha before Panini, chanting a few shlokas each morning until the whole book was in memory, often with the Shabdarupavali beside it. In Kerala the custom of learning ‘Amaram’ by heart lasted well into the twentieth century, and elders still recite its first verses. With it a student could read any kavya without a dictionary, because he carried the dictionary in his head. It is still the first book of a traditional Sanskrit course in many gurukulas, and teachers still test pupils by giving one word and asking for the rest of the line.

08Forty commentaries

More commentaries were written on the Amarakosha than on almost any Sanskrit work outside the Shastras, some forty of them. Kshirasvamin wrote the Amarakoshodghatana in Kashmir in the eleventh century. Sarvananda’s Tikasarvasva, written in Bengal in 1159, explains hundreds of words by their Bengali equivalents and is one of the oldest records of that language. Rayamukuta’s Padachandrika of the fifteenth century gathers the earlier commentators’ views, Lingayasuri wrote for Andhra readers, and Bhanuji Dikshita’s Vyakhyasudha, also called the Ramashrami, written in the seventeenth century, is the one printed in most Indian editions.

09Across Asia

The Amarakosha travelled with Sanskrit learning. It was translated into Tibetan and placed in the Tengyur, studied in Nepal with commentaries in Newar, and used in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Southeast Asia. In India it was rendered into Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Marathi, and later dictionaries in those languages copied its order of subjects. When Henry Colebrooke printed an edition at Serampore in 1808 it was among the first Sanskrit books produced on a press, and every later Sanskrit dictionary, from Wilson to Monier-Williams and Apte, has drawn on it.

What it contains

1. 1
   Prathama Kanda (Svargadi): heaven and the gods स्वर्गादिकाण्डः

   The Svarga, Vyoma and Dik vargas: heaven and the devas with all their names, the sky, and the quarters with their guardians and elephants. The Kala varga follows, from the smallest unit of time to the yugas and kalpas.

2. 2
   Prathama Kanda: mind, speech and the stage

   The Dhi varga on the mind, knowledge and reasoning; the Shabda varga on sound, speech and kinds of literature; and the Natya varga on music, instruments, dance, the rasas and the theatre.

3. 3
   Prathama Kanda: below the earth and the waters

   The Patala-bhogi varga of the underworld and serpents, the Naraka varga, and the Vari varga of seas, rivers, aquatic creatures and water-plants.

4. 4
   Dvitiya Kanda (Bhumyadi): land, cities and hills भूम्यादिकाण्डः

   The Bhumi varga of soils and regions, the Pura varga of cities, houses and their parts, and the Shaila varga of mountains and their features.

5. 5
   Dvitiya Kanda: forests and animals

   The long Vanaushadhi varga of forests, trees, herbs and grasses, a treasury for ayurveda, and the Simhadi varga of wild and domestic animals and birds.

6. 6
   Dvitiya Kanda: people and their callings

   The Manushya varga of the body, kinship, illness, dress and ornament, and the Brahma, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra vargas, which gather the words of learning and ritual, rule and war, farming and trade, and the crafts.

7. 7
   Tritiya Kanda (Samanya): general words सामान्यकाण्डः

   The Visheshyanighna varga of adjectives, the Sankirna varga of miscellaneous terms, the Nanartha varga of words with many meanings arranged by final consonant, the Avyaya varga of indeclinables, and the Lingadisangraha, a summary of the rules of gender.

Famous verses

यस्य ज्ञानदयासिन्धोरगाधस्यानघा गुणाः । सेव्यतामक्षयो धीराः स श्रिये चामृताय च ॥

O wise ones, serve him, the unfathomable ocean of knowledge and compassion, whose virtues are spotless and who never wanes; may he be for your prosperity and your immortality.Amarakosha, mangala shloka (GRETIL 1.0.1–2)

समाहृत्यान्यतन्त्राणि संक्षिप्तैः प्रतिसंस्कृतैः । संपूर्णमुच्यते वर्गैर्नामलिङ्गानुशासनम् ॥

Having gathered other works, the teaching of nouns and genders is here set forth complete, in sections compressed and revised.Amarakosha, prastavana (GRETIL 1.0.3–4)

स्वरव्ययं स्वर्गनाकत्रिदिवत्रिदशालयाः । सुरलोको द्योदिवौ द्वे स्त्रियां क्लीबे त्रिविष्टपम् ॥

Svar, an indeclinable; svarga, naka, tridiva, tridashalaya and suraloka; dyo and div, the two in the feminine; and trivishtapa in the neuter: these are the names of heaven.Amarakosha 1, Svargavarga, first shloka (GRETIL 1.1.11–12)

विष्णुर्नारायणः कृष्णो वैकुण्ठो विष्टरश्रवाः । दामोदरो हृषीकेशः केशवो माधवः स्वभूः ॥

Vishnu, Narayana, Krishna, Vaikuntha, Vishtarashravas, Damodara, Hrishikesha, Keshava, Madhava, Svabhu: these are names of Bhagwan Vishnu.Amarakosha 1, Svargavarga, first shloka on Vishnu’s names (GRETIL 1.1.37–38)