[Advaita-l] Fw: On vAnara, garuDa etc

[jaldhar at braincells.com]

Apologies for the long delay in responding.


On Wed, 13 Apr 2022, Shrinivas Gadkari via Advaita-l wrote:

> Practicing very long jumps, lifting and throwing big rocks was also part of
> vAnara vidyA training.
>
> If we accept that with sufficient yoga training one can develop superhuman
> capabilities, all that I have written here does seem plausible.
>

Well I shall await any further facts you can find about this.  Bear in 
mind that even in terms of "monkeys" we are talking about legendary 
supernatural creatures not your usual banana-eating tourist harrassers.

On Wed, 13 Apr 2022, Venkatesh Murthy via Advaita-l wrote:

> Namaste
>
> Kindly see the Ramayana translation of Makhan Lal Sen. He has commonly
> translated Vanara as Vanara only and not monkey.
>
> These are the statistics in his translation of Yuddha Kanda -
>
> Vanara word appears 592 times
>
> Monkey word appears only 6 times
>
> Full text of "Ramayana: Translated From The Original Of Valmiki Vol.3"
> (archive.org)
> 
<https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.528978/2015.528978.ramayana-tra$
>
> In Kishkindha and Sundara Kandas the statistics are
>
> Vanara is used 373 times
> Monkey is used 17 times
> Full text of "The Ramayana Vol.2, Ed.2nd" (archive.org)
> 
<https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.148293/2015.148293.The-Ramayana$
>
> It appears Vanaras were superior and different from monkeys. But monkeys
> were also living with Vanaras and working under them.
>


In light of this and what Srinivas has said, I have decided to follow 
course and leave vanara untranslated except where the text explicitly uses 
a synonym for monkey.  I will also add a note about the controversy.

-- 
Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar at braincells.com>