A conversation with Mr David Stollar
By Veda Studies
In a box in West London, for many years, lay a manuscript that David Stollar handwrote half a century ago. The thousand names of Viṣṇu, set down one by one, each name given its dhātu, its Devanāgarī form and transliteration, Śaṅkara’s commentary, references to the Upaniṣads and the Bhagavad Gītā, and at the foot of every page verses from the King James Bible placed beside the name as a quiet companion. Viśvam, Everything, sits beside Colossians: “Christ is all, and in all.” Bhūtabhṛt, the Sustainer of All, sits beside the psalm: “O Lord, Thou preservest man and beast.”
David gave the work his own title: Song of the Thousand Names of God. The box sat unopened for decades. A few months ago, a former student asked to scan a copy to study with a friend, and the box was opened again. Through David’s generosity, the work has now found its way to our current cohort of students working on the Viṣṇusahasranāma at Veda Studies.
David is one of the founding figures of Sanskrit education at the St James Schools in London, where he served for many years as Head of the Sanskrit Department. With his colleagues he designed the Sanskrit IGCSE examination, now offered by the Cambridge International Examinations Board, and the textbooks that lead students to it. He continues to teach from his home in West London and online, with weekly groups studying the Bhagavad Gītā. We spoke with him over Zoom about his journey, his manuscript, and the unexpected gift his decades with Sanskrit gave him last year, when he needed it most.
Veda Studies: You are English, and you came to Sanskrit through what looks, in hindsight, like a series of unlikely doors. Will you take us back to the beginning?
David: Let me set a really large context. England, after the Second World War. The country had made an enormous effort to beat Hitler, and people wanted something different afterwards. My generation, born almost immediately after the war, only got our own identity once we were in our late teens, and people like me could see that our parents and that generation did not have a vision in the same way. They did not believe in the same things people had believed in before the war. I was given a religious education, but it did not touch me at all.
I was a very poor student. If anybody had told me I would become a teacher, I would not have understood that at all. But I had become interested in art, I was given some talent for it, and I managed to get into art school quite early, too young really. After a year of training, I had a year off, which was not good for me at sixteen. I had begun to read, but I had got onto depressive reading, like Jean-Paul Sartre. I fell into a depression, sometimes suicidal. My parents sent me to a psychiatrist, but it made no difference. A friend of mine said, you might be interested, David, in a philosophy course I have begun studying. He took me to the end-of-term lecture. What I heard there answered all the questions I did not even know I had. It was an exposition of the teaching of George Gurdjieff. I joined that school, and they introduced me to all sorts of things, including calligraphy.
Around that time, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi came to Europe. Our School of Philosophy helped him, and our leader went to India and discovered Maharishi’s fellow pupil of the teacher they called Gurudeva: the Śaṅkarācārya of the North, Sri Śāntānanda Sarasvatī. We began to take instruction from him. For the next forty years, that was where our teaching came from. He had a wonderful way of making the ancient Vedic teaching available to Westerners. In his discourses, he used a lot of Sanskrit words for which there was no English equivalent: buddhi, manas, and so on. Our leader asked him: would it be a good idea for us to learn Sanskrit? I know a lot of people would have preferred him not to have asked that question. But I, for some reason, fell in love with the language.
Veda Studies: The love began with the script.
David: Yes, it started when I saw the Devanāgarī script. As an artist, I could see that it was beautifully designed. The spaces between the letters were as beautiful as the letters themselves. They taught us to write it properly, with the thicks and the thins, with proper pens, and I really enjoyed that. I was put in various groups helping to design our own version of the alphabet. Eventually, we published books in the script we had designed. His Holiness told us that knowledge of Sanskrit can lead to self-realisation. He said the Sanskrit language reflects the arrangement of the whole of the universe. I later came to see what that could mean. So I worked at it. The classes went quite slowly, so I began looking at it on my own.
Veda Studies: And then someone showed you the Viṣṇusahasranāma.
David: I do not remember how this happened, but I am very grateful. I could see that even a novice like me could approach this, because all the words are in the same case. I did not need to know any grammar. And yet this document was showing me the nature of God, which had been my question for some years by then. What is God? What is divinity? Is it something you can speak to? I was, and still am, intensely interested.
I began to spend all my spare time looking at those names, learning more about divinity. This may sound strange, but I used to dress up in a white robe when I studied, because I saw it as a holy occupation. I did not let anybody else know I was doing strange things like that. The way we had been taught Sanskrit, through the instructions of Sri Śāntānanda, made the sounding of the words enormously important. We English tend to sound Sanskrit like English. Our leader made us do a lot of sounding to rectify our pronunciation. When I say ‘i’, my mouth is open. The average Englishman will say ‘i’ without his mouth open at all. We followed the ancient five mouth positions, and pronunciation became very important. So there was me, in my white robe, intoning Sanskrit.
The whole feeling of the project as it grew was this: I could come home from work and sit down in the presence of this hymn, and reflect. It gave me a focus of reflection on that which is divine. Each name has a wealth of meanings. I managed to get hold of Śaṅkara’s commentary, which is quite commonly known, and that opened other areas of understanding, because the names in the Viṣṇusahasranāma are full of mythology. The whole of the Vedic mythology is there in one form or another, especially about Brahman and Kṛṣṇa. It is full of philosophy. What does it mean to be omnipotent? What does it mean to be everywhere? That is how it starts. Viśvam. Everywhere, everything. You cannot get further than that. I was able to let my mind rest on these divine qualities. I was delighted and awed by it.
Veda Studies: Hundreds of names into the work, you discovered the dhātu.
David: The majority of Sanskrit words originate from a dhātu, which is sometimes called a root, though I prefer to call it a seed. Thousands of words come from each dhātu. What is interesting to me is how much the English language shares in those dhātus. English is very broadly a mixture of German and Latin, and both have a relationship with a language close to Sanskrit. From bhṛ, which means to bear, we get the English word bear, and we get the word burden. That was of great interest to me. You could spend a life looking into this. Sanskrit, I began to see, is not a foreign language at all. My English was a version of Sanskrit. That is what I began to find out by looking at the dhātus.
The dhātu business came in once I had already gone through several hundred names. I had been looking up words in the Monier-Williams dictionary, and at some point I thought, I ought to find out what the dhātu of each name might be. Sometimes there is more than one. And then another part of my mind said, you cannot do that, you cannot start again, you cannot waste all that time. It only took about an hour before I realised I had no option. This happened again and again with the manuscript. You think, you cannot write all this out in another script. An hour later, you realise you have to.
By the time I had finished, I had a good knowledge of the main dhātus in Sanskrit. Whenever I came across a Sanskrit word and recognised its dhātu, my mind immediately went back to Viṣṇu. Every Sanskrit word became related to the thousand names. And by studying each name, I had imbibed what is called the bhāvanā, the feeling, the emotional ground of Sanskrit literature. I no longer saw Sanskrit words as things in a dictionary. I saw them as examples of a vast culture and a way of understanding life. It was the best possible Sanskrit education I could have had, without knowing it.
Veda Studies: At the foot of every page, you placed verses from the King James Bible. Viśvam sits beside Colossians: “Christ is all, and in all.“ Bhūtabhṛt sits beside the psalm: “O Lord, Thou preservest man and beast.“ Why?
David: We were encouraged in our School of Philosophy to study the Bible, and I found it very beautiful. Again, it is the beauty of language. I began looking in the Bible to see whether the names of Viṣṇu were reflected in our own English Christian tradition. I was amazed at how much was reflected. So much so that I almost began to see the English Bible as a book of names of God. I understand scripture to be universal. There is a level of scripture which goes beyond all other words, a level where the Divine is speaking. In the Bhagavad Gītā, Kṛṣṇa is speaking directly. We do not know the original Aramaic of the words of Jesus, but those are the nearest we will get to God speaking in that tradition. I would include the Chinese Dao De Jing as another scripture on the same level. The words have a thousand meanings. Each time you pick up the book, you find it says something else, but it is the same text. There are very few texts like that.
I also translated one of the Buddha’s texts. I found Pāli was, as it were, like Sanskrit which has been run over by a bus. It was very easy to recognise the dhātus and to look up the words. I did not have to learn another language. There are many other languages in India which are also, you might say, like Sanskrit run over by buses, but they were different buses. One was a number twelve, and another was a number 158.
Veda Studies: How did you come to teach Sanskrit to small children at St James?
David: Before St James, I had been an interior designer. I used to design restaurants and pubs. The oil crisis in the Middle East closed down restaurants instead of opening them, and I lost my clientele. I decided that since I was qualified to be an art teacher, I would go into teaching. After an unfortunate experience with teenagers who did not want to be there, I took a job at a little prep school near where I lived. Eventually I let the headmaster of St James (a children’s school set up by the Philosophy School to pioneer a new type of education) know that I was available, and he gave me the job of form master to a class of four-and-a-half-year-olds, which was my idea of heaven. I had already been taking the children of my friends out to museums at the weekend, as I so enjoyed their company. I had a little knowledge of Sanskrit by then, at least how to sound it, and I began teaching the children how to write and pronounce it. Eventually I volunteered to write a course for all the children in the school, by then about five hundred. We designed books, and we designed exams. That was a very interesting period of my life.
Sanskrit has a special quality for children. You start with the vowels, then the consonants in their families of mouth positions. It is just great fun. A, ā, i, ī. Ka, kha, ga, gha, ṅa. The Dhātupāṭha, the document listing the dhātus, puts together similar sounds. The Viṣṇusahasranāma does this too, putting together sounds that match or contrast. Children love funny sounds. It is natural for them to learn them. I remember a little play we put on, where the magician had to cast a spell, and the boy doing it loved Pāṇini Sūtras and chose a very long one, about five lines. Nobody would have known where it came from. It was completely effective.
I taught them to write Devanāgarī by writing it on the board for them to copy. There was always the problem that some children would finish before others, so I would have to find something to stop them from mucking around while they waited. I would tell them to stand on their chairs once they had written it. You could not do this nowadays. Health and safety would not allow it. But they saw it as a great game, and as a way of beating their classmates. It got them used to writing quickly and watching what I was doing carefully. They were happy to stand and wait until everyone was standing, and then we would all sit down to write the next letter.
The Sanskrit IGCSE we developed is currently under threat, I am sad to say. The numbers are down considerably, and I do not know what is going to happen to the course we built. There is another examination, one developed by an Indian community overseas, which St James may teach in the future. It is not the ideal exam we designed, but it has a varied curriculum, and it is good for children. That at least continues.
Veda Studies: Our community is global. Our students’ first languages include Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Mandarin, Kannada, English, and many more. Yet everyone manages to recite the same mantras. What is it about Sanskrit, in your experience, that allows it to live in so many different mouths?
David: The Sanskrit language is scientifically organised: the vowels, the semivowels, the sibilants, set out according to the five mouth positions of throat, soft palate, hard palate, teeth, and lips. The sounds are systematised. They have power. No energy is wasted in anything but the pure production of the sound through a particular mouth position. Our teacher told us that the human body was constructed in order to sound Sanskrit. That is a far-fetched statement, I know, but you can see what he was getting at. Once you know what parts of the mouth and the vocal apparatus are working, it is very clear, and powerful. It does not surprise me that so many languages are less clear versions of Sanskrit. As I have said, I can usually take any English word back to its root in Sanskrit, or in a very similar language.
Veda Studies: We have many in our community who have spent years immersed in chanting and now wish to study Sanskrit itself, to know the language behind the sounds. For someone in that position, where do you suggest beginning?
David: I would advise beginning by learning the grammar. This can be done through the ISER Sanskrit Examinations site. After that, I recommend close study of the Bhagavad Gītā. I have two groups going through it at present. One is reading roughly ten verses a week, a two-year course looking at the Sanskrit. The Gītā is the most extraordinary book. It is incredibly short, considering the matter it contains, and it is relatively easy Sanskrit. There are many books to help. The second group I take every week on the Gītā takes themes. We have looked, for instance, at where the word ‘buddhi’ occurs through the chapters and how it is used in different ways, and we deepened our grasp of the word. We have just finished looking at the word ‘yoga’, probably the most common word in the Gītā, but understood in very different ways. Last night we came across a verse where yoga was used in one sense as a divine power belonging only to Lord Kṛṣṇa, and in another as a path of merging with the Divine.
In those classes we talk about putting the Gītā into practice. Something that comes up many times is karma-phala-āsakti, attachment to the fruits of action. It is difficult to home in on what that means, but when you look at it, you realise it is talking about the way you go down the stairs. If you are going down the stairs thinking, I must make myself a cup of tea before I go shopping, the cup of tea is the fruit you are attached to. What you should be attending to is the moment of action, your whole body, and possibly the intent of the action, which is not done to get yourself a cup of tea but done in honour of Sri Kṛṣṇa. All of this is in the Gītā. It takes some understanding, and putting it into practice requires real study and hard work.
Veda Studies: Looking back over your years with Sanskrit, what has it given you that you did not expect?
David: It has given me all sorts of things. But a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer, and I went through chemotherapy. It was the most awful experience I have ever had. It gave me a heavy depression. Nothing in life held any interest any more. My physical condition was so poor that I could hardly stand up, my digestion was not working, and I had headaches. I hardly slept for months. You cannot imagine anything that was not wrong in that situation. All I could set against the horrors that were besetting me was the memory that Kṛṣṇa is everything (‘vāsudevaḥ sarvam’ Gīta 7/19). I just repeated that again and again, and sometimes other texts from the Vedas or the Bhagavad Gītā. How could someone who did not have that to turn to survive such an experience? I do not know. You will be pleased to hear that the chemotherapy worked. It got rid of the cancer.
David is now cancer-free, and our community joins him in that celebration. He continues to teach from his home in West London, the language and the texts to which he has given his life. The manuscript that sat in a box for decades has begun to travel. The students in our current Viṣṇusahasranāma course have been delighting in these handwritten pages.
David Stollar is one of the founding figures of Sanskrit education at the St James Schools in London. He was assisted by his wife, Mrs Miriam Stollar, in teaching Sanskrit to children from 5 years to senior school over a period of 30 years. To get in touch with Mr Stollar, email him at [email protected]