AxisMundi
E Pluribus Unum!!!
Um, you're contradicting yourself.
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The Sanatan Dharma the World's Oldest Religion?
- Thread starter Rainbow Mage
- Start date
Um, you're contradicting yourself.
Wannabe Yogi
Well-Known Member
No I am not. I was giving you the argument of the Europeans who set the random date of 1500 bc.
My argument was not that others did not use a fire alter. Just no other fire alters were like the Vedic ones.
A. Seidenberg of University of California at Berkeley reviewed the geometry of the fire altars of India as summarized in early Vedic texts such as the Shatapatha Brahmana and compared it to the early geometry of Greece and Mesopotamia. In a series of papers, he was able to establish that this Vedic geometry should be dated prior to 1700 BC.
- It has now been discovered that altar constructions were used to represent astronomical knowledge. Furthermore, an astronomical code has been found in the organization of the Vedic books. This code establishes that the Vedic people had a tradition of observational astronomy which means that the many astronomical references in the Vedic texts that point to events as early as 3000 or 4000 BC can no longer be ignored.
The Aryans photo - Patrick André Perron photos at pbase.com
AxisMundi
E Pluribus Unum!!!
So you're attempting to claim that the NAzi propeganda machine speaks for the entirety of modern European historians and scientists? You're being very confusing.
As to the remainder of your psot, again, all I see is an attempt to duck tape Vedic ideals to odler believes and archeaoligcal evidence. There is simply no evidence that these alters, and other things you mentioned, where influenced in any way by the Vedeas or Hinduism in general.
Wannabe Yogi
Well-Known Member
The idea of Aryans coming into India pre dates the Nazi's. It was used as an excuse for colonialism in the 19th century. Many of the first European Indianologists Defended the Idea of the Aryans coming to India and starting Hinduism in 1500 bc. Max Muller is just one of these Indianologists.(Late in life he also rejected these views) Not all of the European Intelligencia excepted this view but some did.
AxisMundi
E Pluribus Unum!!!
There is no such thing as an Aryan race, nor is there any serious academian who thinks there was.
First of all, sorry for taking so long to get back to this thread. I've been quite busy quite exams. You may find this information interesting. I hope that it has not already been presented. I thought I would provide information from an educational text:
Almost a century ago, Winternitz ([1907] 1962) was refreshingly forthright about the lack of agreement regarding even the approximate date of the Veda: "It is a fact, and a fact which it is truly painful to admit, that the opinions of the best scholars differ, not to the extent of centuries, but to the extent of thousands of years, with regard to the age of the Rg Veda. Some lay down the year 1000 B.C. as the earliest limit for the Rg Vedic hymns, while others consider them to have originated between 3000 and 2500 B.C." (253). Despite such differences of opinion in this matter, eventually, communi consensu, the Indological community settled on 1200 B.C.E. as the probable date for the compilation of the Rgveda-a date that has remained standard to this day. As opponents never tire of pointing out, "it was Max Milller who put forth die hypothesis . . . that die Rgveda began to be composed in 1200 B.C." (Varma 1984, 2).
Muller based his calculations on information he gleaned partly from the Kathasaritsagara, a collection of stories written in the twelfth century c.E. by Somadeva. In one of these stories, we find a Katyayana Vararuchi, who was reported to have eventually become a minister in the court of King Nanda. Since, in the Puranas, Nanda is the predecessor of the Mauryas, Milller assigned him a date in the second half of the fourth century B.C.E., shortly before the accepted date for this dynasty. 3 In brief, Muller felt he now had a reasonably secure date for Katyayana Vararuci. His next step was to correlate this Katyayana with a Katyayana who was said to have authored a variety of sutras. 4 Since other sutras were both anterior and posterior to this latter Katyayana, to whom he had assigned a date in the fourth century B.C.E., Miiller ([1859] 1968) decided that "as an experiment, therefore, though as no more than an experiment, we propose to fix the years 600 and 200 B.C. as the limits of that age during which the Brahmanic literature was carried on in the strange style of Sutras" (218). Preceding the sutras are the Brahmana portions of the Vedic texts (since the latter are presupposed by the former). Regarding these, Muller ([1859] 1968) considered that "it would seem impossible to bring the whole within a shorter space than 200 years. Of course this is merely conjectural" (395). Conjectural or not, the Brahmanas, in Miiller's schema, are consequently assigned a date from 800 to 600 B.C.E., "although it is more likely that hereafter these limits will have to be extended" (406). Older still than the Brahmanas are the Mantras, which, in turn, are anterior to the Chandas so, since he seemed to be on a roll with these concise 200-year brackets, Muller felt that "if we assign but 200 years to the Mantra period, from 800 to 1000 B.C., and an equal number to the Chandas period, from 1000 to 1200 B.C., we can do so only under the supposition that during the early periods of history the growth of the human mind was more luxuriant than in later times" (525). As Winternitz ([1907] 1962) points out, "it is at the fixing on these purely arbitrary dates that the untenable part of Max Miiller's calculations begins" (255).
Reaction to Muller's perfectly synchronized, two-hundred-year periods for the development of these different genres of literature was not slow in coming. Goldstiicker ([I860] 1965) objected that "neither is there a single reason to account for his allotting 200 years to the first of his periods, nor for his doubling this amount of time in the case of the Sutra period" (80). He points out that, ultimately, "the whole foundation of Muller's date rests on the authority of Somadeva . . . [who] narrated his tales in the twelfth century after Christ [and] would not be a little surprised to learn that 'a European point of view" raises a 'ghost story' of his to the dignity of an historical document" (91). Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire (1861) remonstrated that "Mr. Max Muller would have done well not to have fixed things so precisely, and not to have circumscribed things so neatly" (54; my translation).
Winternitz (1907), too, felt that since "all the external evidence fails, we are compelled to rely on the evidence out of the history of Indian literature itself, for the age of the Veda. . . . We cannot, however, explain the development of the whole of this great literature, if we assume as late a date as round about 1200 or 1500 B.C. as its starting point. We shall probably have to date the beginning of this development about 2000 or 2500 B.C.".
Max Milller (1892), who hastily acknowledged that he had only considered his date for the Veda a terminus ad quern, completely submitted to his detractors: "I need hardly say that I agree with almost every word of my critics. I have repeatedly dwelt on the hypothetical character of the dates. . . . All I have claimed for them has been that they are minimum dates . . . Like most Sanskrit scholars, I feel diat 200 years . . . are scarcely sufficient to account for the growth of the poetry and religion ascribed to the Khandas period" (xiv-xv). A few years later, at the end of his long and productive life, he again acknowledged the complete arbitrariness of his previous calculations: "Whether the Vedic hymns were composed 1000, or 1500, or 2000, or 3000 years B.C., no power on earth will ever determine" (Muller 1891, 91). Elsewhere, Muller (1897, 87) was quite happy to consider a date of 3000 B.C.E. based on Sayce's discovery of two Babylonian ideographs— cloth + vegetable fiber (which Sayce believed was cotton)—that had to be pronounced 'sindhu . This suggested that the Babylonians knew of the river Sindhu and, by extension, since he considered this word to be Sanskrit, the Indo-Aryan-speaking people, in 3000 B.C.E. However, despite Muller's willing retraction of his hasty attempt at chronology: It became a habit already censured by W. D. Whitney, to say that Max Muller had proved 1200-1000 B.C. as the date of the Rg Veda. It was only timidly that a few scholars, like L. von Schroeder ventured to go as far back as 1 500 or even 2000 B.C. And when all at once, H. Jacobi attempted to date Vedic literature back to the third millenary B.C. on the grounds of astrological calculations, scholars raised a great outcry at such heretical procedure. . . . Strange to say it has been quite forgotten on what a precarious footing stood the "opinion prevailing hitherto," which was so zealously defended. (Winternitz [1907) 1962 256) Whitney ([1874] 1987) had made a point of mentioning that Miiller himself had made no pretensions that his dates had "in any essential manner contributed to the final settlement of the question." But his concern is that Muller "is in danger of being misunderstood as doing so; we have already more than once seen it stated that 'Muller has ascertained the date of the Vedas to be 1200-1000 B.C.'" (78). Winternitz (1907), too, hastened to note that "Max Muller himself did not really wish to say more than that such an interval at least must be assumed. . . . He always considered his date of 12001000 B.C. only as a terminus ad quern" (293).
Bryant, Edwin. Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate.
Cary, NC, USA: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2004. p 246.
ebrary: Server Message
Copyright © 2004. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.
Almost a century ago, Winternitz ([1907] 1962) was refreshingly forthright about the lack of agreement regarding even the approximate date of the Veda: "It is a fact, and a fact which it is truly painful to admit, that the opinions of the best scholars differ, not to the extent of centuries, but to the extent of thousands of years, with regard to the age of the Rg Veda. Some lay down the year 1000 B.C. as the earliest limit for the Rg Vedic hymns, while others consider them to have originated between 3000 and 2500 B.C." (253). Despite such differences of opinion in this matter, eventually, communi consensu, the Indological community settled on 1200 B.C.E. as the probable date for the compilation of the Rgveda-a date that has remained standard to this day. As opponents never tire of pointing out, "it was Max Milller who put forth die hypothesis . . . that die Rgveda began to be composed in 1200 B.C." (Varma 1984, 2).
Muller based his calculations on information he gleaned partly from the Kathasaritsagara, a collection of stories written in the twelfth century c.E. by Somadeva. In one of these stories, we find a Katyayana Vararuchi, who was reported to have eventually become a minister in the court of King Nanda. Since, in the Puranas, Nanda is the predecessor of the Mauryas, Milller assigned him a date in the second half of the fourth century B.C.E., shortly before the accepted date for this dynasty. 3 In brief, Muller felt he now had a reasonably secure date for Katyayana Vararuci. His next step was to correlate this Katyayana with a Katyayana who was said to have authored a variety of sutras. 4 Since other sutras were both anterior and posterior to this latter Katyayana, to whom he had assigned a date in the fourth century B.C.E., Miiller ([1859] 1968) decided that "as an experiment, therefore, though as no more than an experiment, we propose to fix the years 600 and 200 B.C. as the limits of that age during which the Brahmanic literature was carried on in the strange style of Sutras" (218). Preceding the sutras are the Brahmana portions of the Vedic texts (since the latter are presupposed by the former). Regarding these, Muller ([1859] 1968) considered that "it would seem impossible to bring the whole within a shorter space than 200 years. Of course this is merely conjectural" (395). Conjectural or not, the Brahmanas, in Miiller's schema, are consequently assigned a date from 800 to 600 B.C.E., "although it is more likely that hereafter these limits will have to be extended" (406). Older still than the Brahmanas are the Mantras, which, in turn, are anterior to the Chandas so, since he seemed to be on a roll with these concise 200-year brackets, Muller felt that "if we assign but 200 years to the Mantra period, from 800 to 1000 B.C., and an equal number to the Chandas period, from 1000 to 1200 B.C., we can do so only under the supposition that during the early periods of history the growth of the human mind was more luxuriant than in later times" (525). As Winternitz ([1907] 1962) points out, "it is at the fixing on these purely arbitrary dates that the untenable part of Max Miiller's calculations begins" (255).
Reaction to Muller's perfectly synchronized, two-hundred-year periods for the development of these different genres of literature was not slow in coming. Goldstiicker ([I860] 1965) objected that "neither is there a single reason to account for his allotting 200 years to the first of his periods, nor for his doubling this amount of time in the case of the Sutra period" (80). He points out that, ultimately, "the whole foundation of Muller's date rests on the authority of Somadeva . . . [who] narrated his tales in the twelfth century after Christ [and] would not be a little surprised to learn that 'a European point of view" raises a 'ghost story' of his to the dignity of an historical document" (91). Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire (1861) remonstrated that "Mr. Max Muller would have done well not to have fixed things so precisely, and not to have circumscribed things so neatly" (54; my translation).
Winternitz (1907), too, felt that since "all the external evidence fails, we are compelled to rely on the evidence out of the history of Indian literature itself, for the age of the Veda. . . . We cannot, however, explain the development of the whole of this great literature, if we assume as late a date as round about 1200 or 1500 B.C. as its starting point. We shall probably have to date the beginning of this development about 2000 or 2500 B.C.".
Max Milller (1892), who hastily acknowledged that he had only considered his date for the Veda a terminus ad quern, completely submitted to his detractors: "I need hardly say that I agree with almost every word of my critics. I have repeatedly dwelt on the hypothetical character of the dates. . . . All I have claimed for them has been that they are minimum dates . . . Like most Sanskrit scholars, I feel diat 200 years . . . are scarcely sufficient to account for the growth of the poetry and religion ascribed to the Khandas period" (xiv-xv). A few years later, at the end of his long and productive life, he again acknowledged the complete arbitrariness of his previous calculations: "Whether the Vedic hymns were composed 1000, or 1500, or 2000, or 3000 years B.C., no power on earth will ever determine" (Muller 1891, 91). Elsewhere, Muller (1897, 87) was quite happy to consider a date of 3000 B.C.E. based on Sayce's discovery of two Babylonian ideographs— cloth + vegetable fiber (which Sayce believed was cotton)—that had to be pronounced 'sindhu . This suggested that the Babylonians knew of the river Sindhu and, by extension, since he considered this word to be Sanskrit, the Indo-Aryan-speaking people, in 3000 B.C.E. However, despite Muller's willing retraction of his hasty attempt at chronology: It became a habit already censured by W. D. Whitney, to say that Max Muller had proved 1200-1000 B.C. as the date of the Rg Veda. It was only timidly that a few scholars, like L. von Schroeder ventured to go as far back as 1 500 or even 2000 B.C. And when all at once, H. Jacobi attempted to date Vedic literature back to the third millenary B.C. on the grounds of astrological calculations, scholars raised a great outcry at such heretical procedure. . . . Strange to say it has been quite forgotten on what a precarious footing stood the "opinion prevailing hitherto," which was so zealously defended. (Winternitz [1907) 1962 256) Whitney ([1874] 1987) had made a point of mentioning that Miiller himself had made no pretensions that his dates had "in any essential manner contributed to the final settlement of the question." But his concern is that Muller "is in danger of being misunderstood as doing so; we have already more than once seen it stated that 'Muller has ascertained the date of the Vedas to be 1200-1000 B.C.'" (78). Winternitz (1907), too, hastened to note that "Max Muller himself did not really wish to say more than that such an interval at least must be assumed. . . . He always considered his date of 12001000 B.C. only as a terminus ad quern" (293).
Bryant, Edwin. Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate.
Cary, NC, USA: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2004. p 246.
ebrary: Server Message
Copyright © 2004. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.
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There are FAR, FAR, more YEC Christians than Hindus who are under some notion that it's the "true" religion. That kind of thing is EXTREMELY rare.
That we're aware of...
And yet in your studies, you didn't come across the fact that the Vedas aren't books?
They're hymns meant to be chanted, not books to be read. Even if they weren't written down until ~1500 B.C.E., that doesn't mean that's when they were first composed.
Or presenting it, as far as I can see, in that post.
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I guess I have to point something out here that I don't think has been in the back of all our minds here:
Hinduism isn't even a single religion. It is fair to assume that the religion we call "Hinduism" didn't exist until relatively recently. The religion whose age we're debating, from what I've seen, only bears a slight resemblance to that one called "Hinduism." Instead of murthi worship, you have fire-sacrifices. You also have animal sacrifice, which is heavily frowned upon in "Hinduism."
Now, WY, when Axis says there's no evidence that those fire-alters have anything to do with Hinduism, what that means is that those alters may have predated the texts that wrote about them. IOW, it's possible that the composers of those Vedic texts saw those already existing fire-alters, and wrote about them.
Hinduism isn't even a single religion. It is fair to assume that the religion we call "Hinduism" didn't exist until relatively recently. The religion whose age we're debating, from what I've seen, only bears a slight resemblance to that one called "Hinduism." Instead of murthi worship, you have fire-sacrifices. You also have animal sacrifice, which is heavily frowned upon in "Hinduism."
Now, WY, when Axis says there's no evidence that those fire-alters have anything to do with Hinduism, what that means is that those alters may have predated the texts that wrote about them. IOW, it's possible that the composers of those Vedic texts saw those already existing fire-alters, and wrote about them.
AxisMundi
E Pluribus Unum!!!
And yet well represented on this thread appearently.
Point?
The etnire argument is when the Vedas were WRITTEN. Anything before then is pure conjecture."Aryan races" sweeping into areas are certainly indicative of racist ideals.
I haven't seen it.
We can't "know" anything about the ancient past. We can't "know" that there was no writing before ~6000 years ago, because of the simple fact that writings don't survive well in most climates.
Oh, so you're trying to argue when they were first written down, not necessarily when they were composed.
Why does whether or not it was written down matter?
That's not part of the Hindu argument. Most Hindus reject the Aryan Invasion Theory. I don't see why this is even still being debated right now, as it seems that there's consensus on both your side and the side of the other Hindus that it didn't happen.
How would we know? It just becomes speculation then. Is there any indication at all of who would otherwise have built them?
In which case I hope you read my post on the previous page.
AxisMundi
E Pluribus Unum!!!
Becasue it's your own camp doing it.
(again) The oldest examples of writtings we have are Carved On Stone. Becasue without the solid evidence of a dated piece of writting, anything befoe is pure conjecture. One can easily make the argument that the Vedas were a rough draft and the start, and not a culmination of oral history.
Tell the other Hindu then.
Maybe you see what you want to see. Most of us do not posit that Hinduism is the only true religion, we believe it is one of many true religions.
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AxisMundi
E Pluribus Unum!!!
You've been doing a pretty lousy job of forwarding that ideal until called out for it.
Wannabe Yogi
Well-Known Member
I would like you to show us where any of us has said that Hinduism is the only truth,
I want to see quotes.
AxisMundi
E Pluribus Unum!!!
Implied by claiming yours is the oldest religion.
Wannabe Yogi
Well-Known Member
-I for one never said that with out many qualifying statements even named a faith that I believed be traced farther back. I don't believe it is necessarily older.
-I do not see these two comments as being the same thing. Oldest don't equal truth. Islam says that Mohammed was the last prophet. Islam is the most complete truth. In this case oldest could mean the least true.
-We believe that there are many paths to the Truth. Old or New it matters not.