Sanskrit names

Sanskrit is a classical Indo-Aryan language of the Indian subcontinent. It is the primary liturgical language of Hinduism and a scriptural and philosophical language of Buddhism and Jainism. Its oldest recorded form, Vedic Sanskrit, appears in the Rigveda, and the grammarian Panini standardized the classical form in roughly the fifth century BCE. Sanskrit is still used in religious ceremony and in scholarship, and it is revered as a sacred language, though it is not an everyday spoken vernacular. It is also an ancestor of many modern languages of South Asia.

Names drawn from Sanskrit almost always carry a plain meaning, and many point to a deity, a feature of the natural world, or a virtue. Bodhi means awakening, the enlightenment the Buddha reached beneath the bodhi tree. Lila, also spelled Lilah, means play, and in Hindu thought it describes creation as the divine at play. Arjun is the name of the archer hero of the Mahabharata and carries the sense of bright or shining. Because the meaning is usually transparent, parents often choose these names for what they say.

Some names ask for a fuller note. Maya is often glossed as illusion in Vedic and later Hindu thought, where it names the power that makes the changing world appear real; Maya is also an independent name in other cultures, so families arrive at it by more than one path. Tara means star and is also the name of a goddess honored in both Hinduism and Buddhism. Arya, from the Sanskrit and Old Iranian arya, meant noble and was used by early Indo-Iranian peoples as a self-designation; nineteenth and twentieth century European race theory later misappropriated the word, though scholars now hold that the original sense was cultural rather than racial.

A few names belong to major deities and carry that weight. Kali is a Hindu goddess whose name is the feminine of a word meaning both black and time, and who is worshipped as a fierce and protective mother. Names like these reach the United States chiefly through the Indian diaspora, who carry them into English-speaking use. In the Embrisa library they appear alongside Arya, Maya, Tara, Mira, Lila or Lilah, Anaya, Arjun, Bodhi, and Avyaan.