No. 62.— 1909.] 



JNANA VASISHTAM. 



303 



JNANA VASISHTAM ; OR THE DIALOGUES OF 

 VASISHTA ON WISDOM. 



By the Hon. Mr. P.- Arunachalam, M.A., Camb., C.C.S., 

 Vice-President, R. A. S. (G. B ). * 



I. — Introduction. 



The J nana Vdsishtam is a Tamil poem of authority in 

 that collection of the spiritual traditions of Ancient India 

 known as the Veddnta, and consists of a series of discourses 

 said to have been delivered by the sage Vasishta to Rama, 

 the hero of the Rdmdyana, the Iliad of India. Seized in early 

 youth with an aversion to worldly life, he longed to abandon 

 his royal state and to retire as a hermit into the forest. By 

 these discourses the sage persuaded him that, even amidst the 

 pomp and temptations of royalty, it was possible to attain to 

 the highest spiritual state. He showed the way to the goal, 

 which the prince in due time reached. From the name of the 

 sage (Vasishta) and from the fact that Jndnam, 1 or the spiri- 

 tual science known of old as Wisdom, is the subject of the 

 discourses, the work has been called Jndna Vdsishtam. 



The original discourses were in Sanskrit, and are said to 

 have been reported by Valnriki, the author of the Rdmdyana, 

 for the benefit of his pupil Bharadvaja in 100,000 stanzas, 

 of which 36,000 are extant under the name of the Yoga 

 Vasishta Mahd Rdmdyana. They were reduced to 6,000 by 

 Abhinandana, generally known as the Kashmir Pandit, whose 

 abridgment passes under the name of Laghu (i.e., little) Yoga 

 Vasishta. 



1 Another form of yvw-aig and knoic-ledge, the root being jna, gno, 

 to know. 



