Classical Sanskrit for Everyone: A Guide for Absolute Beginners

About the book. Also, preorders!

Several years ago, I got an out-of-the blue email from Hackett Publishing Company, asking if I’d be interested in writing a book titled Classical Sanskrit for Everyone: A Guide for Absolute Beginners. The model was Bryan Van Norden’s book, Classical Chinese for Everyone, which was about 150 pages long, had thirteen short chapters, and by the end, readers were reading philosophy in Classical Chinese.

I said no. That is impossible for Sanskrit, I said. First of all, the writing system is different. Then there’s sandhi, or the way that combinations of sounds are represented in writing: in English, “it’s all fun and games” isn’t written the way most people say it, which is closer to “funnangames.” In Sanskrit, all these phonetic combinations are represented in writing.

After dashing off a quick email explaining the impossibility of this task, the publisher wrote back, saying that my accessible, entertaining email was precisely an example of what they wanted. (He was a good salesman!) Well, after some back and forth about what such a book could be and could not be, I acquiesced. Now, three— four?—years later, the book is in production and available to order.

I’ve tried to be clear what this book is and what it isn’t. It is not a teach-yourself-all-of-Sanskrit textbook. That would take many, many more pages. Rather, it is a guide to major concepts you’ll need if you want to learn the language. It is not an introductory textbook that someone would teach with, on its own. Many of those exist, and I reference them throughout. Rather, it is an introduction to Sanskrit grammar, vocabulary, one of its writing systems, as well as tips for how to read translations, commentaries, and poetry.

As I wrote the book, I thought about fellow philosophers who want to teach Indian philosophy but are sometimes stymied by the innumerable references to Sanskrit in both translations and secondary literature. I thought, too, about how they would want to understand something about Sanskrit grammar, since it’s often part of philosophical arguments.

I also thought about people who do yoga or meditation (Buddhist or otherwise) and find themselves wondering about the “deeper meanings” of Sanskrit terms, but are failed by online resources (I won’t link to them, but some are pretty bad).

I also thought about some of my classicist friends, who know Latin, Greek, or other languages, and I’ve heard talk about wanting to learn Sanskrit.

Each of these audiences informed the book in some way, and the book thus aims for the ‘curious,’ the ‘Yoga aficionado,’ and the ‘scholar.’

Now, while I think of myself as a philosopher who reads Sanskrit, not a “Sanskritist” or an “Indologist,” my hope is that this vantage point is helpful in the book, which I tried to make accessible. Not being a natural polyglot myself, learning Sanskrit involved long hours reciting paradigms, being frustrated with sandhi, and an incremental improvement in my ability to read the language as a language, not as a code to be cracked word-by-word with a dictionary.

This book is intended to be a help for those who might want to take a first step on this journey or those who just want some understanding of one of the world’s ancient languages in which some of humanity’s greatest works of literature and philosophy have been recorded.

You can preorder it online at Hackett Publishing, and it will publish February 2025.