Sanskrit in the West

At the end of the introduction to the "World as Will and Representation", Arthur Schopenhauer claimed that the rediscovery of the ancient Indian tradition would be one of the great events in the history of the West. Goethe borrowed from Kalidasa for the "Vorspiel auf dem Theater" in Faust.

Goethe and Schopenhauer were riding a crest of scholarly discovery, most notably the work done by Sir William Jones. (Goethe likely read Kalidasa's "The Recognition of Sakuntala" in Jones' translation). The Irish poet William Butler Yeats was also inspired by Sanskrit literature. However, the discovery of the world of Sanskrit literature moved beyond German and British scholars and intellectuals — Henry David Thoreau was a sympathetic reader of the Bhagavad Gita — and even beyond the humanities. Ralph Waldo Emerson was also influenced by Sanskrit literature. In the early days of the Periodic Table, scientists referred to as yet undiscovered elements with the use of Sanskrit prefixes (see Mendeleev's predicted elements).

The nineteenth century was a golden age of Western Sanskrit scholarship, and many of the giants of the field (Whitney, Macdonnell, Monier-Williams, Grassmann) knew each other personally. Perhaps the most commonly known example of Sanskrit in the West was also the last gasp of its vogue. T. S. Eliot, a student of Indian Philosophy and of Sanskrit under Lanman, ended "The Waste Land" with Sanskrit: "Shantih Shantih Shantih".

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*Vyakarana