[Music] so now we will see the next two vedangas namely nirukta and chandas we will start with nirukta before we understand nirukta it's important for us to know why we should be aware of nirukta so let me take an example and show it to you as to what is happening here is a mantra from tandiya brahmana what does it say I will quickly read the Mantra yeah this is one Mantra that you find in tandiya brahmana and one Dutch philosopher kaland actually translated it let us see how he has translated the world of Heaven is as far removed from this Earthly World they say as thousand cows standing one above the other the emphasis I have added because that's what I wanted to discuss therefore they say he who sacrifices with a sacrifice at which a thousand dakshinas are given reaches these worlds now the the important part part to note here is that he is saying thousand cows standing one above the other and that is how the world of Heaven is moved from our world I mean anybody will offered this translation and say what is all this how can you stack thousand cows one over the other and say that is the difference between the Earth and the heaven I mean this is the height of nonsense that one may think truly because you know nobody a good mind would have never uttered anything like this this is precisely why you need something called nirukta look at here what is the issue here in normal usage go means cow so that's what that translator has used a thousand cows but in nirukta if you look at there are 21 synonyms listed in a group in nirukta which are all sort of equivalence goho is part of it so smart aditihi Pusha these are all synonyms so what does it mean in this particular Mantra the meaning of go must relate to the Earth and not to the cow if you replace it with the Earth then it is a sensible thing you know the distance is something like thousand times or hundred times the diameter of the earth that is a sensible kind of a meaning so therefore unless we know the synonyms we will actually end up with the wrong translations wrong understanding that's why nirukta is required now what is this is basically the the the thesaurus or the set of synonyms for this is actually called Negan is nothing but organizing the niguntu into certain portions so we have here as you see here there are three chapters in the first chapter you have 17 groups of synonyms consisting of 415 words in the second chapter you have 22 groups of synonyms which has 516 words in the third chapter you have 30 groups of synonyms which have 410 words then you have the second one called naigama Kanda in which there are 278 words with multiple meanings organized into three groups and then there is a daivata Kanda in which there are 151 Words which has names of devatas in three groups so unless we know all these equivalences unless we know all these synonyms how are we going to actually make sense of The Vedic mantras so Negan 2 has a collection of rarely used words you can imagine something like that and it can be in a way equated to a thesaurus where synonyms of various generous or collect collater that's what we understand it to be as I told yaskar wrote nirukta in the fifth century BCE it is actually a commentary on niganto we will now move on to the next vedanga which is chandas now as I told you the samita portion of The Vedas are almost entirely in prasadi therefore the study of the meters to which they are set is very important only then we know whether we are pronouncing it correctly or there some varnas syllables missing you know if some something is in anushtube chandas then we know that there are certain number of syllables which make each quarter therefore we need to know it only then we will know have we missed something have we added something extra so these are checks and balances of The Vedic mantra so chandas is actually the meter of a poetic composition in The Vedic Corpus there are seven main meters used and majority of these meters majority of them have four quarters in them which means a meter will have four pathas and in each pada there are a certain number of syllables that's how a meter is made and some meters have only three pathas so any addition or removal of even a single syllable from from a mantra will suddenly become evident at once because the rhythm of the Mantra will be lost that's why we need to know the chandas chandas helps us in preserving intact not only The Vedic test but also any literature set in prosody so the same rule applies even even in your kalidas as shakuntal also will have the same rule if it is set to a particular meter suddenly the meter goes off hand that means either there is an addition or a deletion so this is a very generic idea actually and the hierarchical structure of a meter ah is something which we need to understand what you see here is the hierarchical structure essentially a meter is there and and it is made of padas a meter has a certain number of padas as I told you it can be three or four most of them are four some of them can be three and in each pada there will be a certain number of syllables we will take an example to actually understand this you see here there is this mantra so much this is a mantra from I think 8th or ninth mandala of rigveda so this is set to Gayatri meter now we have to understand what is this guy three meter guy 3 meter will have three pathas as indicated here so here the pada one is swadishtaya Madison that is the first father that is the second one that is the third one so now a meter has been broken into three padas now each pada will have eight syllables that is the definition of a guy three meter so you have three ah padas each pada Having Eight syllables therefore you have 24 syllables which make actually a guy three meter so that's how a guy three meter is understood actually so here are the syllables yeah if you count I've colored it differently just to indicate that there will be exactly eight similarly yeah there are eight of them this is again eight so this is how these meters are made and I one needs to really understand it otherwise we may not really know what is really happening now here is a table that you find Details pertaining to The Vedic meters ah as I as I was trying to explain there are actually seven of them as you see here I have numbered it now you see here Gayatri ushnik understood and in this column you find how many pathas make it as you see Gayatri and alone has three padas pankti has five padas all of those have four padas and this says guy 3 is 3 into 8 24 for example has a very weird combination three eight and one twelve so it becomes 36 if you take three step this is 11 syllables into four making it 44 anyway so this is how these different meters are made unless we know this structure unless we know what meter a mantra is set what number of padas and you know syllables in each other unless we know it we may not even know whether we have interpolated something removed something and so on that is the role this particular vedanga brings us to understand Vedas but little later we will also see that in the process of developing the Chandra sastra which pingala did in 200 BCE we also found some rudimentary but wonderful foundations of binary mathematics also there which we will see in some other video in another chapter that's related to this Chandra sastra since we are talking about vedanga I stop here but the mathematical part of it and the number part of it we will see later when we deal such issues in the another chapter [Music] foreign