Definition
The Sanskrit term लिङ्गं liṅgaṃ, transliterated as linga, has diverse meaning ranging from gender and sex to philosophic and religions to uses in common language, such as a mark, sign or characteristic. Vaman Shivram Apte's Sanskrit dictionary provides many definitions:
- A mark, sign, token, an emblem, a badge, symbol, distinguishing mark, characteristic;
- A false or unreal mark, a guise, disguise, a deceptive badge;
- A symptom, mark of disease
- A means of proof, a proof, evidence
- In logic, the hetu or middle term in a syllogism
- The sign of gender or sex
- In grammar, gender
- The genital organ of Shiva worshiped in the form of a Phallus
- The image of a god, an idol
- One of the relations or indications which serve to fix the meaning of a word in any particular passage
- In Vedānta philosophy, the subtle frame or body, the indestructible original of the gross or visible body
- A spot or stain
- The nominal base, the crude form of a noun
- In Sāk philosophy, Pradhāna or Prakriti
- The effect or product of evolution from a primary cause and also as the producer
- Inference, conclusion
Read more about this topic: Lingam
Famous quotes containing the word definition:
“The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.”
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“The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction.... The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyperreal.”
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“Scientific method is the way to truth, but it affords, even in
principle, no unique definition of truth. Any so-called pragmatic
definition of truth is doomed to failure equally.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)