Posts Tagged ‘Hinduism’
“Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion–several of them.”*…
Further, in a fashion, to last Saturday’s post, a look at how religions have changed from their inceptions until now– and how we know…
Five histories told in order, a chapter at a time: Hinduism from the farmers of Mehrgarh, Judaism from the hill villages of Iron Age Canaan, Buddhism from the Ganga plain, Christianity from Galilee and Islam from late antique Arabia. Every claim names the verse, inscription, excavation or study behind it, and says how settled the evidence is…
… How It Evolved tells the history of religions the way a good historian would explain it to a curious friend: chronologically, with the evidence on the table, and honest about where the evidence runs out.
Most writing about religion falls into one of two camps. Devotional accounts describe a tradition as it sees itself, often as timeless and unchanging. Polemical accounts go looking for ammunition. Neither is much use to someone who simply wants to know what changed, when, and how we know. That is the only question this site sets out to answer.
Every claim shows its receipt. Statements cite the specific verse, excavation, inscription, manuscript or peer-reviewed study they rest on, with numbered references on every page.
Every claim says how sure we can be. Confidence tags (Consensus, Majority, Contested, Speculative, Political) mark how far the evidence stretches.
Disagreements are stated, not resolved by fiat. Where scholars disagree, each chapter gives the strongest form of each position, including the ones we do not adopt.
Primary sources in the original. Key passages are quoted in their original script, transliterated and translated, followed by what the passage does and does not prove.
Each religion gets a series: a sequence of chapters from its earliest traceable roots to the present, with shorter pages that answer the questions people most often ask about it.
The five series published so far:
- How Hinduism Evolved, 7000 BCE – present, in 13 chapters. From Neolithic Mehrgarh and the Rigveda to bhakti, the Raj and the present.
- How Buddhism Evolved, c. 600 BCE – present, in 14 chapters. From the śramaṇa movements of Magadha to Theravāda, Mahāyāna, Zen and Tibet.
- How Christianity Evolved, c. 30 CE – present, in 14 chapters. From a Jewish apocalyptic movement to councils, schisms, reformations and a global church.
- How Islam Evolved, c. 300 CE – present, in 14 chapters. From late antique Arabia to the caliphates, law schools, Sufism and modern reform.
- How Judaism Evolved, c. 1250 BCE – present, in 14 chapters. From Yahweh among the gods to the Torah, the rabbis, the diaspora and the modern movements.
Series on Sikhism are in preparation. Each is published only when every chapter meets the same standard.
The series are written to be read together. Where traditions grew up side by side, as Buddhism did beside the Vedic religion of ancient India, the same evidence appears in more than one series, told from each side, and the chapters link to each other…
Plus there are maps shows the spread of each religion and a (very large) chart tracing the development of all five, side by side.
Absolutely fascinating: “How It Evolved“… puts one in mind of the telephone game.
(Image above: source)
* Mark Twain
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As we get religion, we might recall that today is (in the Christian tradition) All Souls Day, a day of prayer and remembrance for the departed. It is also (the final day of) All Souls Day’s predecessor (and variation on its pagan inspiration), The Day of the Dead…
The Day of the Dead (el Día de los Muertos), is a Mexican holiday where families welcome back the souls of their deceased relatives for a brief reunion that includes food, drink and celebration.
A blend of Mesoamerican ritual, European religion and Spanish culture, the holiday is celebrated each year from October 31-November 2. While October 31 is Halloween, November 1-2 is All Souls Day or the Day of the Dead. According to tradition, the gates of heaven are opened at midnight on October 31 and the spirits of children can rejoin their families for 24 hours. The spirits of adults can do the same on November 2.
The roots of the Day of the Dead—celebrated in contemporary Mexico and among those of Mexican heritage in the United States and around the world—go back some 3,000 years to the rituals honoring the dead in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.
The Aztecs and other Nahua peoples living in what is now Mexico held a cyclical view of the universe and saw death as an integral, ever-present part of life. Upon dying, a person was believed to travel to Chicunamictlán, the Land of the Dead. Only after getting through nine challenging levels, involving a journey of several years, could the person’s soul finally reach Mictlán, the final resting place.
In Nahua rituals honoring the dead, traditionally held in August, family members offered food, water and tools to aid the deceased on this difficult journey. This inspired the modern Day of the Dead practice of leaving food and other offerings on loved ones’ graves or setting them on makeshift home altars, called ofrendas.
In ancient Europe, pagan celebrations of the dead also took place in the fall and featured bonfires, dancing and feasting. Some of these customs survived after the rise of the Roman Catholic Church, which informally absorbed the pagan traditions into its observances of two holy days—All Saints Day and All Souls Day—celebrated on the first two days of November. – source
“As for us Indians, we have our own problem before us. It is the problem of the world in miniature. India is too vast in its area and too diverse in its races. It is many countries packed in one geographical receptacle.”*…
The current approach to this challenge seems to be (to oversimplify, if only slightly) to create a majoritarian Hindu state that homogenizes those differences. But it wasn’t always so. Scott Stroud tells the story of Bhimrao Ambedkar, an Indian student of John Dewey, who worked for a very different, more inclusive, kind of country…
When one thinks of American pragmatism, one often puts too much emphasis on the American part. It might even stunt our enquiry, irrevocably fixating on thinkers such as John Dewey, William James, and Jane Addams. But there is more to the story of pragmatism than what happened in the United States around the turn of the 20th century. Pragmatism itself was a flexible, loosely allied approach to thinking that held few maxims in common other than the idea that our theorising and arguing ought to come from lived experience and ought to return back to experience as the ultimate test of its value. Its advocates such as Dewey greatly affected nations such as China through his teaching and lecturing, leading us to see that pragmatism has a global narrative connected with it. Is there a similar tale to be told about pragmatism and its interactions with India?
Any narrative of pragmatism’s influence and evolution in India will centre on Bhimrao Ambedkar, a student of Dewey’s at Columbia University in New York. Some might recognise Ambedkar (1891-1956) as a chief architect of the Indian constitution in the 1940s. Others might recognise him as the indefatigable leader of India’s ‘untouchables’ (now denoted by the self-chosen label ‘Dalit’), given his constant advocacy for the rights of those oppressed by the complex and long-rooted caste system. Ambedkar himself was a so-called untouchable, which only fortified his commitment to seeking justice in the law and in social reforms for India’s most vulnerable populations. At the end of his life, he channelled his frustration at the prevailing caste consciousness within Hindu society into a conversion effort that tried to convince his fellow Dalits to convert away from Hinduism and into a more egalitarian Buddhism. On 14 October 1956, just weeks before he died, he led what was at the time one of the world’s largest voluntary mass conversions. This event held in Nagpur featured Ambedkar, his wife Savita, and an estimated 500,000 Dalits converting to Buddhism. For reasons such as these, Ambedkar was voted the ‘greatest Indian’ in post-independence India in a poll that included more than 20 million votes being cast.
Ambedkar was not merely a political figure or leader. He was also a philosopher. One can see the evidence for this in the reconstructed Buddhism that he advanced in his final years, coalescing in his rewritten ‘Buddhist Bible’, The Buddha and His Dhamma, which was completed just before his death on 6 December 1956. In this book, Ambedkar reconstructed the narrative of the Buddha, de-emphasising traditional formulas such as the four noble truths, and foregrounding poverty, injustice and the building up of social communities. In short, he reconstructed the Buddhist tradition and its myriad texts to show how it could function as a social gospel, or an engaged philosophy that could even meet the growing waves of those inspired by Karl Marx and Russian communism in the 1950s…
The politician and thinker whose philosophy of democracy challenged the caste system: “The Indian pragmatist,” from @scottrstroud in @aeonmag.
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As we contemplate community, we might recall that it was on this date in 1492 that all remaining Jews were expelled from Spain. On March 31 of that year, the joint Catholic Monarchs of Spain (Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, the patrons of Christopher Columbus) had issued an edict– the Alhambra Decree— ordering the expulsion of practicing Jews from the Crowns of Castile and Aragon and its territories and possessions by this date that year.
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