Translation of Purusha

Puruṣa: is sometimes translated as ‘cosmic person’, a translation that inspired this writing. Literally it just means ‘person’ which is phonetically very similar in Sanskrit and English: person-puruṣa. 

It can be used in the sense meaning ‘person’, often masculine, such as ‘that person over there’ or ‘that man over there’. Puruṣa-tvā means manhood or manliness, puruṣa-mukha means to have the face of a man, puruṣa-rūpa means the shape of a man, and a puruṣāda is a man-eater (cannibal). In this way, the Sanskrit language uses the term to mean a human.

Puruṣa shares a similar meaning to the Greek word anthropos- which means man/human being. To anthropomorphize means to give something human features, characteristics, or motivation. If I put a vase in a particular spot and say that it likes it there, I have given the vase a human feeling, which is anthropomorphizing it. In western science and Christianity anthropomorphization is associated with animism or paganism, and can take a negative connotation (even though the Christian concept of god is anthropomorphized- they put human characteristics onto even their highest conceptions of the 'father' in heaven). In Vedic practice (and other nature religions), it is beneficial to give animals, inanimate objects, and large philosophical concepts human characteristics to describe them. It is a system of metaphor that allows our consciousness to engage in a more holistic manner by relating the similarities of key archetypal functions in other things as they exist within us.   

The term puruṣa can be added to a word to indicate the anthropomorphic form of that word. For example, in the Veda-puruṣa: pronunciation is the nose, grammar is the mouth, rhythm is the feet, etymology is the ear, astrology is the eyes, and ritual is the hands. Rhythm is the feet because it has the ability to take your consciousness to a particular place based on its nature, like the feet take you where you go. Astrology is the eye because it allows you to see what is going on and why, so that we don't do things blindly or without reason. Etymology is the ear in that it allows us to understand what we hear others communicate. No one believes that there is some big human like god called Veda-puruṣa walking around that might step on you. The anthropomorphizing allows the human mind to understand and have a deeper relationship with how things work. 
  
The Kāla-puruṣa is the personification of the embodiment of Time which is seen as the zodiac. Aries is the head, Taurus is the neck, all the way to Pisces as the feet. This is an anthropomorphizing of the heavens. The Vastu-puruṣa is the anthropomorphizing of the place you live. It is way to visualize how the contours of a piece of land feels and how the energy of that space interacts with the humans that live on it. 

Puruṣa alone has a sense similar to the English use of the word ‘man’, where ‘man’ can refer to an individual or it can refer to the whole of mankind; ‘That’s one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind’. Its use will be determined from its context or prepositions.

When puruṣa is translated as cosmic person it is expanding past individual ‘man’, past the whole of mankind, to include the whole of existence. Mankind is the human species as one being. ‘Cosmic man’ is the whole universe (or reality of manifest existence) to be seen as a unitive being. In this way, the Puruṣa is the universe anthropomorphized into a holistic entity. 

Depending on your belief system of what the universe (or reality of perceived existence) is, then your concept of the cosmic person will be represented accordingly. To the Gauḍiya Vaiṣṇava, the Puruṣa is the seen as the ‘Supreme Personality of Godhead named Kṛṣṇa’. To the Sāmkhya view, the Puruṣa is the core Consciousness which is the unmanifest perceiver of the world. In this way, the term Puruṣa is translated as Spirit or Supreme Being or Soul of the Universe. I like the ‘Comsic Person’ translation, and shared this to show how the word in Sanskrit already includes the local, global and universal meaning within the word as it is.