Article Sidebar
Published:
Aug 29, 2021Keywords:
Article Details
The author(s) retain copyright on work published by AOSIS unless specified otherwise.
Licensing and publishing rights
Author(s) of work published by AOSIS are required to grant AOSIS the unlimited rights to publish the definitive work in any format, language and medium, for any lawful purpose. AOSIS requires journal authors to publish their work in open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
Read more here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
The authors retain the non-exclusive right to do anything they wish with the published article(s), provided attribution is given to the applicable journal with details of the original publication, as set out in the official citation of the article published in the journal. The retained right specifically includes the right to post the article on the authors’ or their institution’s websites or in institutional repositories.
Previously published work may have been published under a different licence. We advise the community that if they would like to reuse the work to consult the applicable licence at article level.
Main Article Content
An analysis of the Gayatri mantra as a mega-compression: A cognitive linguistic perspective in light of conceptual blending theory
Suren Naicker
Abstract
In this article, the Gayatri mantra, one of the most sacred chants to be found in Hindu lore, will be analysed as a blend, where an entire philosophy is compressed into these few syllables, which will be expounded upon here in more detail. Drawing upon insights from conceptual blending theory, this sacred mantra will be unpacked and explored, and it will be shown here that this ancient Rigvedic hymn is actually a nucleic compression which once tapped into leads the practitioner to new insights and higher levels of spiritual awareness as the inner meaning unfolds. Practising Hindus around the world revere and recite this mantra with the utmost reverence, and this is true of the Indian diaspora in South Africa as well. Aside from presenting this hymn through the lens of blending theory, the aim is to demonstrate and explain why exactly this mantra is chanted with such reverence and given precedence over the many other mantras found throughout the Vedic texts.
