Wikipedia Trails: From Vishnu to Vyakarana

My first link on Wikipedia starts at Vishnu. I have enjoyed watching the videos about Vishnu and decided this would be a good place to start my Wikipedia search. Here they explain that he is traditionally shown as having a dark or light blue skin color holding a lotus flower in his lower left hand, mace in his lower right hand, a conch in his upper left hand, and a discus in his upper right hand. From here I clicked on a link for Yaska, a mid-1st millennium  BCE Vedanga scholar.

Yaska was a Sanskrit grammarian and is usually known as the author of Nirukta, the discipline of etymology on Sanskrit. From here I clicked on the word Nirukta, because I wanted to learn more about this book!

Nirukta means "explained, interpreted" and refers to one of the six ancient Vendangas, or ancillary sciences connected to Hinduism. It discusses how to handle ancient, uncommon words in Sanskrit. This study is also called Nirvacana shastra. Nirukta is supposed to be close to another ancillary science called Vyakarana, which was my next and last link.

Vyakarana means "explanation, analysis", a slightly different interpretation from above. It is the study of grammar and linguistic analysis of the Sanskrit language. Panini and Yaska are both the scholars associated with the Vyakarana. Panini seems to be the main author of the majority of the book.

As a whole I really enjoyed this activity and feel as though I have a deeper understanding of the topics I got to research!

Links:
1. Vishnu
2. Yaska
3. Nirukta
4. Vyakarana

Ancient Sanskrit on Hemp paper