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Edifying Puzzlement: Ṛgveda 10. 129 and the Uses of Enigma

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Abstract

This paper reconsiders ṚV 10. 129 in order to explore its meaning and the more general functions of riddle hymns and other enigmas in the Veda. Its starting point is the unresolved question that concludes the hymn. This question calls into doubt the possibility of any cosmogonic narrative, including the narrative that the hymn itself has just offered. The lack of resolution within the hymn causes the audience of ṚV 10. 129 to reflect. But in doing so, that audience is actually recovering the power of creation, for the hymn identifies thinking as the original creative activity. Thus, the solution to the hymn and to the question of the origin of things rests both in what the poem says and, even more, in the response it evokes from its audience.

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... "The nonexistent did not exist, nor did the existent exist at that time. There existed neither the airy space nor heaven beyond" 551 (see for a detailed discussion Jurewicz 2010, 44-62, andBrereton 1999; see for later variations ŚB 6. What then is the actual value of the Buddhist mockery? ...
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This dissertation investigates the relation of early Buddhism to the Brahmanism of its time. Both religions are usually researched by their own academic traditions, and due to the lack of bigpicture crossover research we still find the opposing views that Buddhism was anti-Brahmanical and, in contrast, that it developed as a reformed Brahmanism. In order to provide more clarity to the religions’ connection this study offers an analysis and discussion of several main topics as they are presented in the Buddhist suttas: the portrayal of different types of Brahmins, rituals, deities and supernatural beings, and the concepts of brahman and ātman. Throughout this study we also attempt to stratify the Buddhist content linguistically and contextually and to arrive at statements whether a specific content related to Brahmanism belongs to an early or a later Buddhist sutta period. In the end we conclude that early Buddhism had a very differentiated relationship to Brahmanism: The Buddha’s relationship to Brahmins is mostly portrayed as benevolent and respectful. Only later suttas display an attitude of polemic criticism. Early Buddhist concepts of deities and supernatural beings are strongly influenced by Vedic Brahmanism, and likewise the concept of spiritual studentship (brahmacariya). Further, the early suttas are not anti-ritualistic but deem Brahmin rituals to be ineffective. Instead of condemning all rituals, they replace the Vedic gods with the Buddha and declare that devotion and religious giving to the Buddha and his monastics are the most efficient ways for lay people to secure a good afterlife. The Buddhist anattā (not-self) turns out to be a general strategy and not specifically directed at Brahmin concepts of ātman (self). Additionally, statistical analyses of the suttas show that Brahmins were less likely to receive the teaching of anattā. We come to the conclusion that early Buddhism as a whole has developed independently from Brahmanism, with selective influences from Brahmanism and non-Vedic spiritual movements, altering and utilizing these influences for its own growth against its religious competition.
... When analyzing the structure of the R̥ V IV.42 in which Indra and Varuna are praised, he noted that the verse 4 mixes the normal functions of both gods, although the utterance belongs formally to Varuna: ahám apó apinvam ukṣámāṇā dhāráyaṃ dívaṃ sádana r̥ tásya / r̥ téna putró áditer r̥ tāvotá tridhātu prathayad ví bhū́ma // I swelled the splashing (and mounting) waters; I upheld heaven on the seat of truth. Through the truth the son of Aditi possesses the truth, and he spread wide the threefold earth [6] . ...
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... "It is like this, son. By 26 Scholarship seeking to explain the origins and implications of chapter six includes (Edgerton 1915(Edgerton , 1965Morgenroth 1970;Hanefeld 1976;Brereton 1986Brereton , 1999Acharya 2017;Visigalli 2018). 27 The Chāndogya Upanis . ...
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Implicit in Heidegger’s 1920–1921 Phenomenology of Religious Life is an account of religion as a radical transformation of the very structures of experience. This article seeks to apply that account to a classical Indian discourse on reality and the self, Chāndogya Upaniṣad chapter six. This classical source-text for two thousand years of Hindu theology advocates a new ‘religious life’ achieved through phenomenologically reorienting the very structures of cognition toward the broadest truths of reality, rather than the finite features of the world. The goal is to create a new form of primordial subjectivity with an altered relationship to phenomena, finitude, and the divine. The article proceeds in two parts: The first section brings out Heidegger’s theory of religion through a reading of Heidegger’s 1920 Phenomenology of Religious Life with the help of his lectures, On the Definition of Philosophy, from the previous year. The second section tries to demonstrate the value of integrating traditional textual/historical scholarship in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad with Heidegger’s method. The juxtaposition aims to both (1) foreground the phenomenologically transformative goals of this influential Indian text, and (2) challenge Heidegger’s scepticism about the religious value of metaphysical reflection.
... Theology and science have frequently wondered upon common questions, but no other topic overlaps as much as the inquiry on the origin of life. Detailed commentaries on Näsadiya Süktam are beyond the scope of this article and can be found elsewhere, [1][2][3] and a compilation of interpretations made by several authors can be found here. [4] Descriptions made until date have been focused mostly on the vedanta underlying the Näsadiya Süktam. ...
Article
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The aim of this article is to provide a unified account for all attestations of the particle aṅgá in the Rigveda. Based on its distribution in different clause types, I argue that previous analyses of this particle, which treat it as a focus particle or a marker of the speaker’s attitude or certainty are incorrect. Instead, I propose that the particle is used to indicate shared (lack of) knowledge between speaker and addressee. This proposal is based on the observation that when the particle occurs in questions these are not information-seeking. By adducing typological parallels, I argue that this function accounts for its presence in other clause types as well. Moreover, I will attempt to show that while aṅgá has an intersubjective function it is not to be regarded as an evidential or a marker of epistemic authority or epistemic modality.
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This essay attempts to de-link the study of the Rigveda from both colonial philology and ongoing Hindu nationalist projects. It brings the rhetoric of form, especially as theorized by Kenneth Burke, to open up space for critics and commentators with a broader range of relationships to Brahmanical liturgy. To further the goal of delinking, it first narrows the scope of analysis to dialogue hymns, which are reminiscent of debates found within Buddhist conversion narratives rendered in versified Sanskrit. It then centers formal linguistic figures that these two layers of Sanskrit poetry have in common. Finally, conceptualizing these formal devices, it uses analytic categories from a South Asian critical tradition (alaṃkāraśāstra). Framed and constrained in this manner and applied to the (ex-)lovers’ quarrel of Purūravas and Urvaśī (in R.V. 10.95), a Burkean analysis reveals an exchange that both satisfies the “appetites” and allays the concerns of conservative audiences, who otherwise might fear that their wives could follow Urvaśī’s example and happily part with their wedded partners-in-sacrifice.
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Western surveys of idealism historically overlook Indian sources as scholars were unfamiliar with Indian metaphysics and lacked appropriate exegetical translations of India’s ancient Sanskrit spiritual literature. But millennia before the (Neo)Platonists conceived their idealist arguments, Indian sages who meditated on causal consciousness produced esoteric teachings, metaphorical descriptions of abstract states, and influential philosophical ideas that shaped the ancient worldview of monistic idealism. Many Indologists argue that the Vedic religion introduced by the prehistorical or ancient Aryan migrants into Northern India catalyzed the growth of later Hindu traditions that regard Brahman (Metaseity) as the supreme ontological entity. However, P. R. Sarkar tilts the origins of Indian idealism away from this monolithic Vedic source with his polemical claim that indigenous Śiva Tantra initially existed independently from Aryan Vedic beliefs and propitiatory rites. This essay therefore interrogates the first ancient expression of metaphysics in India through a new translation and reinterpretation of the Ṛg Veda’s canonical “Creation Hymn,” mediated by Sarkar’s Tantric historiography and spiritual metaphysics. By engaging with Sarkar’s emic claim for Tantra’s spiritual and epistemic influences on Vedic thought, I reconstruct the Creation Hymn’s influential monistic ontology to explain its radical departure from the Ṛg Veda’s traditional sacerdotalism. It is proposed that monistic idealism likely originated in India and that the Creation Hymn is the first textual evidence of this philosophy infused with proto-Tantra. Keywords idealism, Tantra, Rig Veda, metaphysics, P. R. Sarkar, Creation Hymn, ontology, cosmology, meditation, Indology
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Nonagonistic Discourse in the Early History of Indian Philosophical Debates: From Brahmodyas to the Mahābhāṣya
Chapter
The Rigveda (also written R̥gveda) is one of the most influential religious texts in the history of the world, but is it world literature? This chapter examines what is really at stake when we translate the Rigveda, and how much we miss when we force the text to conform to our aesthetic world rather than its own. This chapter examines how the poets of the Rigveda conceive of literature, of the world, and of the relationship between the two, in an attempt to better understand what the creators of the Rigveda would consider a graceful translation.
Book
Cambridge Core - Non-Western Philosophy - The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India - by Richard Seaford
Article
This essay attempts to de-link the study of the Rigveda from both colonial philology and ongoing Hindu nationalist projects. It brings the rhetoric of form, especially as theorized by Kenneth Burke, to open up space for critics and commentators with a broader range of relationships to Brahmanical liturgy. To further the goal of delinking, it first narrows the scope of analysis to dialogue hymns, which are reminiscent of debates found within Buddhist conversion narratives rendered in versified Sanskrit. It then centers formal linguistic figures that these two layers of Sanskrit poetry have in common. Finally, conceptualizing these formal devices, it uses analytic categories from a South Asian critical tradition (alaṃkāraśāstra). Framed and constrained in this manner and applied to the (ex-)lovers’ quarrel of Purūravas and Urvaśī (in R.V. 10.95), a Burkean analysis reveals an exchange that both satisfies the “appetites” and allays the concerns of conservative audiences, who otherwise might fear that their wives could follow Urvaśī’s example and happily part with their wedded partners-in-sacrifice.
Chapter
Yoga is not that new to the Western world. In fact, studying about the Transcendentalist Movement in the eighteenth-century West, one can see the deep influence of the ancient Indian Yogic scriptures (Upanishad) on notable Western philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer, author of the famous book, The World as Will and Representation (Payne 1958). Schopenhauer’s deep considerations that a lifestyle of negating desires, similar to the ascetic teachings of Upanishads, was the way to attain liberation and he keeping a copy of the Upanishad by his side all the time attest to the above fact. Unfortunately, despite its immense popularity, Yoga is a profoundly misunderstood subject, more so in the West. The experiential essence of Yoga is to pass beyond the world of intellectual distinctions and into the world of the unthinkable, where reality appears as undivided and undifferentiated. For most, this seems too difficult to grasp. Yoga is often mistaken for unclearness or un-objectiveness, mainly due to its experiential nature. Ancient Indian philosophies elude even the greatest Western thinkers. For example, in his letters to Romaine Rolland, Sigmund Freud’s mystic friend, Freud himself comments on his own difficulty with the philosophy and practice of Yoga. He writes: “…let me admit once more that it is very difficult for me to work with these almost intangible quantities…” (Freud 1930, p. 72). Being exclusively experiential and subjective in nature, Yogic experiences, while documented over many centuries and millennia, cannot be verified using concrete measures. Unlike scientific methodology, Eastern mysticism regards intellect as merely a means for clearing the path to direct mystical experience. This is called direct because it is experiential and thus bypasses the interpretive and intellectual interference of the ordinary mind. Yogic experiential knowledge is intuitive and non-conceptual and not based on a concrete sensorial experience. In essence, one must transcend taxonomies and multiplicity in order to experience a reality void of arbitrary distinctions. Yoga’s disregard for concrete concepts, reductionism, and the mind/body dichotomy is partially responsible for the grave misunderstanding of Yoga. Here follows the fundamental difficulty with understanding Yoga. As Suzuki (1963, p. 11) writes: “… the scientific method in the study of reality is to view an object from the so-called objective point of view. For example, suppose a flower on the table is the object of a scientific study. The chief characteristic in this scientific (or objective) approach is to put this object (flower) to all kinds of analyses, to talk about it, to go around it, to catch anything that attracts our sense–intellect and abstract it away from the object (flower) itself, and, when all is supposedly finished, to synthesize these analytically formulated abstractions and take the outcome of the analysis for the object (flower) itself. But the question still remains: Has the complete object really been caught? The answer is no. These objective observations are mere descriptions of the object, in this case the flower, but in reality not the flower itself.
Chapter
This chapter addresses the question in what form or forms the intellectual adventure of ancient India took shape. It addresses the nature of the author's sources. That is the Rig Veda, a collection of over a thousand hymns to a variety of divinities, hymns to be used in ritual performance and making constant reference to ritual procedures and paraphernalia. The hymns are extraordinarily complex, deliberately allusive and ambiguous, poetry of the highest and most self-conscious artfulness, designed to appeal to the gods, who, it is regularly said, love the obscure. The chapter explains the question of social relations among humans. These relations have both horizontal and vertical axes. The chapter deals with the vertical: hierarchy and social class. The authors have encountered the formal expression of hierarchy in the Hymn of Man, namely the four varnas issued from the primeval sacrificed man.
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Als één van de oudste cultuurgebieden op aarde, wordt India sinds de oudheid gekenmerkt door een bijzonder rijke verhalenwereld. Sommige verhalen zijn (deels) gebaseerd op historische gebeurtenissen, andere geheel ontsproten aan de fantasie van getalenteerde vertellers. De regio Zuid-Azië kent een lange en woelige culturele geschiedenis, gekenmerkt door instromen van diverse migrerende en veroverende volkeren, die er allen hun sporen nalieten, uiteraard ook in het verhalencorpus. Bovendien vonden verscheidene wereldreligies, hindoeïsme, boeddhisme, jaïnisme en sikhisme er hun oorsprong, en konden religies als islam er op een heel aparte manier ontwikkelen tot een typisch Zuid-Aziatische vorm. Tegen deze achtergrond geeft dit volume een overzicht van verschillende aspecten van de verhalenliteratuur in India. De omvang van het onderwerp betekent natuurlijk dat er keuzes gemaakt zijn geworden, maar we hebben gepoogd enkele van de meest frappante onderwerpen naar voren te brengen. Dit boek is onderverdeeld in drie grote delen: ten eerste, de klassiekers, ten tweede, verhalen en religie, en ten derde, lokale verhalentradities.
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This paper engages with Johaness Bronkhorst’s recognition of a “correspondence principle” as an underlying assumption of Nāgārjuna’s thought. Bronkhorst believes that this assumption was shared by most Indian thinkers of Nāgārjuna’s day, and that it stimulated a broad and fascinating attempt to cope with Nāgārjuna’s arguments so that the principle of correspondence may be maintained in light of his forceful critique of reality. For Bronkhorst, the principle refers to the relation between the words of a sentence and the realities they are meant to convey. While I accept this basic intuition of correspondence, this paper argues that a finer understanding of the principle can be offered. In light of a set of verses from Nāgārjuna’s Śūnyatāsaptati (45–57), it is maintained that for Nāgārjuna, the deeper level of correspondence involves a structural identity he envisions between understanding and reality. Here Nāgārjuna claims that in order for things to exist, a conceptual definition of their nature must be available; in order for there to be a real world and reliable knowledge, a svabhāva of things must be perceived and accounted for. Svabhāva is thus reflected as a knowable essence. Thus, Nāgārjuna’s arguments attacks the accountability of both concepts and things, a position which leaves us with nothing more than mistaken forms of understanding as the reality of the empty. This markedly metaphysical approach is next analyzed in light of the debate Nāgārjuna conducts with a Nyāya interlocutor in his Vigrahavyāvartanī. The correspondence principle is here used to highlight the metaphysical aspect of the debate and to point out the ontological vision of Nāgārjuna’s theory of emptiness. In the analysis of the Vigrahavyāvartanī it becomes clear that the discussion revolves around a foundational metaphysical deliberation regarding the reality or unreality of svabhāva. In this dispute, Nāgārjuna fails to answer the most crucial point raised by his opponent—what is that he defines as empty?
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In Rgvedic Sanskrit present participles built to transitive roots regularly follow their corresponding finite forms in relation to argument structure. Of those participles whose argument structure differs from that of the corresponding finite forms (most often because they lack the ability to govern an accusative object), some may have originated as adjectives or may have become adjectivized. A particular group of present participles in the Rgveda which tend to remain intransitive even when formed to transitive roots are negated participles, i.e. participles compounded with the negative prefix á(n)-. This is explained by assuming that the combining of a participle with the negative prefix was originally a process of adjectival derivation. Support for this hypothesis comes from a consideration of the two forms of the negated present participle of the verb √as 'be', namely ásant- and āsant-.
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The problem tackled in this article is ambitious. Through examination of how certain fundamental teachings of the Buddha originated – the author argues that those teachings must indeed go back to the Buddha himself. Thus the author builds a chain of argument which creates hypothetical links rather than declaring ‘a priori’ that links and connection cannot be established. This article argues that the Alagaddūpama Sutta, an important early Buddhist text, portrays the Buddha in the process of formulating his thoughts. If so it contradicts the myth that the Buddha awakened to the entire Buddhist Dharma on one occasion, and should be dated to the fourth century bce . Such an antiquity, and peculiar didactic structure suggests that the text contains authentic teachings of the Buddha.
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