Wikipedia — "Abhimāna"
- Author: unauthored (Wikipedia contributors)
- Publication: English Wikipedia
- Date: undated (live page; accessed 2026-09-06)
- URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abhimāna
- Type: tertiary; neutral-to-credulous stance (presents the Hindu-philosophical sense as settled, cites the "no direct English translation" category without qualification)
- Accessed: 2026-09-06
Extract
- Etymology given: from man ("to think") plus māna ("too much"); glossed as "pride, false prestige, desire, an impression, the conception."
- Philosophical sense (the article's main content): in Hindu philosophy, abhimāna is the false identification of the individual self with "I" and "mine" — a function of ahamkara (ego-consciousness) that produces a sense of agency. It is described as operating through three aspects (sanga, associations; mamkāra, attachments; moha, attractions) and as something to be transcended for liberation, per citations to Surendranath Dasgupta's A History of Indian Philosophy and other academic Hindu-philosophy references.
- Dual/contextual valence noted: for those pursuing worldly success, the article states abhimāna can function as a virtue; for the spiritually accomplished, it is mere pride/arrogance. In aesthetic theory (citing a source on Sanskrit poetics), the scholar Bhoja is reported to use the term positively, as an ego-quality essential to aesthetic experience.
- Untranslatability framing: the article itself carries the category "Words and phrases with no direct English translation," but its own body text does not argue this explicitly — the classification is asserted by the category tag alone, the same "genre tag without supporting content" pattern this project has already documented for Sankofa's sole popular-genre source.
- Primary citation for the base gloss: the article's own reference [1] is Sanskritdictionary.org's entry for the word — see sanskritdictionary-org-abhimana.md for this project's own direct check of that same source.
- Relation to the colloquial Bengali/Odia sense on this project's file: this page documents only the classical philosophical sense (pride, ego-identification), with no mention of the modern Bengali/Odia colloquial sense (hurt, sulking, an implicit demand for a loved one's apology) documented by Mukherjee & Das (2018) and Bag & Dash (2024) — consistent with, and independently corroborating, both papers' own claim that the word's "original meaning" (pride) and "current [Bengali/Odia] usage" (hurt/sulk) are two historically related but distinct senses.
Gaps
- The article cites primarily specialist Hindu-philosophy monographs (Dasgupta, Chattopadhyaya, Pande) that this project has not independently read — the philosophical content here is filed as Wikipedia's own tertiary synthesis of those sources, not independently verified against them.
- No discussion of the word's modern colloquial/regional (Bengali, Odia, Hindi) usage or its popular "untranslatable words" genre presence — for that, this project relies on separate sources (see word page).