Monday, August 31, 2009

more dialog on facebook, this time on who invented dharma

aug 30th, 2009

enjoy!

amazing, isn't it, that a religion with the name 'sanatana dharma' still does not get credit for inventing dharma? oh, it was the sainted buddhists who invented it!

once again, this is nothing personal with brp, he is using the standard rhetoric of 90% of people in kerala (ie. the 30% mohammedans, 30% christists, and 30% communists).

Rajeev Srinivasan white guys converging on the idea of dharma? soon they will claim they invented it! http://bit.ly/r91Ne

August 24 at 8:32pm via Twitter · ·
Brp Bhaskar
Brp Bhaskar
Rajeev, who do you think actually invented it?
August 24 at 8:42pm · Delete
Rajeev Srinivasan
Rajeev Srinivasan
brp, hindus. in your terminology, so-called hindus. :-)
August 24 at 9:02pm · Delete
Brp Bhaskar
Brp Bhaskar
The white ones or the black ones? If you don't want to accept that there are shukla (white) paksha and krishna (black) paksha among hindus, I will put it differently. The ones that came out of the head/mouth or the ones who came out of the legs/feet?
August 25 at 11:49am · Delete
Rajeev Srinivasan
Rajeev Srinivasan
doesn't al-biruni have anything to say on this point? oh, maybe al-biruni was busy comparing the faithful (ie. semitic west asians) with the infidels (everybody else). to be followed by jihad and extermination of said infidels.

maybe the church guys had something to say about this, when they were not busy exhorting the sons of shem (ie. semitic west asians) to rule over the sons of ham (ie. blacks). to be followed by genocide or apartheid vs. blacks.

or maybe as the buddha said to the mother who insisted he revive her dead child, "get me some gingelly seeds from a house where there has been no death". ... Read More

in case it is not clear, do show me a society that did not have differentiation of groups. at least hindus did not go around exterminating people. until the british came along, there was not much casteism either. kindly read original british documents from the british museum as anthologized by dharampal.
August 25 at 12:09pm · Delete
Rajeev Srinivasan
Rajeev Srinivasan
i share your general distrust of priestly types who put on airs. have you noticed how jesus followers genuflect to their priests? perfectly sensible people will kneel and kiss their rings! even if said priests are the abhaya-murder type or child-molester type.

interestingly the 'priests' of the communist persuasion -- after all communism is ... Read Moreidentical to the catholic church -- are also prone to putting on airs. remember pol pot and company? i have been to the killing fields of cambodia and the tuol sleng prison where the communist high priests condemned thousands to death. they were serving their jealous, violent god.

despite vanity about being from the face of god or whatever, priests are not so powerful in hinduism. hindus engage someone as a paid expert to do priestly stuff, just like you employ a doctor or a mechanic or gardener. they are not treated as divine, unlike in the semitic cases as above.
August 25 at 7:12pm · Delete
Brp Bhaskar
Brp Bhaskar
Rajeev, let me pose the question differently. Was Dharma invented by the Vedic tradition (whose members call their religion Sanatana Dharma, avoiding the Persian/Muslim-European/Christian term Hindu) or by the Buddhist tradition (whose followers invoked Dhammam, which is the Prakrit form of the Sanskrit term Dharma, along with Buddham and Sangham ... Read Morein their daily prayers)?

If you go through the hymns of Rigveda, without being burdened by Sayana's interpretation, which came 15 or 20 centuries later, you can find the names of many hostile tribes who are now untraceable. Until we know what exactly happened to them, I will suspend judgment on the question of extermination.
Thu at 6:31pm · Delete
Rajeev Srinivasan
Rajeev Srinivasan
dear brp, i am disappointed to see that you have been infected by the nehruvian-stalinist obsession with labels. why don't you just accept that there is such a thing as hinduism, and that there are actual hindus, as much as it may bother the likes of ddkosabmi and romila thapar?

who invented dharma? isn't that inherent in your question? those who ... Read Morecall their religion sanatana dharma are pretty evidently the ones who invented it. i mean, try an analogy with the jesus people. they are obviously the ones who invented their church.

i did expect you to bring up the buddhism red herring. this is another nehruvian-stalinist invention, based on the white tendency to ascribe all good things in the world -- including a lot of hindu ideas -- to the greek/roman heritage, which of course they wiped out ruthlessly and deride as "pagan". since greek/roman civilization is dead, they can weep crocodile tears over it. similarly comrades -- amazing how true they are to the church's traditions (contd...)
15 hours ago · Delete
Rajeev Srinivasan
Rajeev Srinivasan
contd... -- like buddhism because it is dead in india, and ascribe all good things in india to buddhism, and generously leave everything bad to hinduism. this is like the other nehruvian stalinist tendency to claim that when if one mohdan/christist does one good thing somewhere, it is because their religions are so good; but if one hindu does one ... Read Morebad thing anywhere, it is because hinduism is bad. somehow doesn't seem like a level playing field.

and incidentally, before you latch on to that,no, it was not hindus who wiped out buddhism, it was the mohammedans who destroyed the viharas -- all the way from central asia to india -- who did. the coup de grace was the rape of nalanda by baktiar khilji circa 1182 ce.

you might want to go for a paradigm shift and consider that buddhism was merely a reformation in hinduism, and that the counter-reformation came a few hundred years later, in the form of sankara's intellectual and the bhakti saints' devotional responses. (contd...)
15 hours ago · Delete
Rajeev Srinivasan
Rajeev Srinivasan
why, by following the same pattern, the nehruvian stalinists do not claim that catholics and protestants are completely different, i do not know. after all, there has been historically great animosity between the two, many wars, and even today, some of the choicest epithets are used by protestants against the catholic church ("whore of rome" etc... Read More).

in fact, practising hindus and buddhists have no such animosity. hindu deities are found in buddhist temples -- i have seen these first hand in thailand, cambodia, and japan. there is also the account by xiuen tsang of common worship of the deity at sabarimala by hindus and buddhists. and everywhere in southeast asia, you find the lines between hindu and buddhist worship quite blurred.

the major innovation of the buddha was the removal of the deistic element, and also the introduction of the clergy. there is reason to believe both were fatal to buddhism later. one, the dry and nihilistic non-theism of buddhism (contd...)
15 hours ago · Delete
Rajeev Srinivasan
Rajeev Srinivasan
contd... -- by the way, that criticism comes direct from the vatican -- allowed the counter-reforming hindus, esp the bhakti saints -- to appeal to the common man. similarly, the centralization of buddhism in viharas allowed invading mohdans to decapitate it by beheading all the monks and burning down the libraries. but hinduism, being ... Read Moredecentralized, was more robust. this is a lesson from systems theory -- decentralization leads to resilience.

so, no, buddhists did not invent dharma. nor do they claim to. they followed the philosophy of dharma that hindus had already developed. incidentally, your claim that dharma was invented by buddhists is insulting to jainism, which was contemporaneous to buddhism, does follow dharma, and has no inherent conflict with hinduism. do you mean, miraculously, that jainism and buddhism simultaneously invented dharma? by occam's razor, that's unlikely, they both inherited it from hinduism.

please read history not written by nehruvian stalinists.
14 hours ago · Delete
Rajeev Srinivasan
Rajeev Srinivasan
please don't get into extermination issues: you will lose. hindus are very minor villains if at all, compared to the illustrious semites.

how many did the church kill? counting heretics like the gnostics, the crusades, the native americans, the incas, the azetcs, et al, roughly 250 million people? including the 30 million they killed in india in the great el nino famines of the 1880s.

how about the mohammedans? at least 100 million in india alone, untold millions in persia, egypt, and so on.... Read More

how about the comrades? 30 million in the 'great leap backward', 30 million in the gulags, 1/7th of the country's entire population in cambodia, and so on. easily 100 million in its short life of 100 years.

oh yes, the semitic types are the champions of mass murder.

and yes, it is always relative. compared to the other ideologies on offer, hinduism is far more benign.
14 hours ago · Delete
Rajeev Srinivasan
Rajeev Srinivasan
also consider the hindu habit of inclusiveness. octavio paz, somewhat rudely, spoke of the 'intellectual boa-constrictor' nature -- it absorbs with honor other traditions. excellent examples: the absorption of the tribal god jagannath with full honors as an incarnation of vishnu; the absorption of the tribal gods ayyappan and muthappan of ... Read Moreparassinikkadavu in kannur.

unlike the semites, who follow a scorched-earth policy of destroying other's sacred places and then stealing them -- thousands of hindu/jain/buddhist shrines have been turned into mosques, and at least hundreds into churches in india -- hindus invite others in with open arms.

the tribes in the rg veda and how they disappeared, and your imputation that this was genocide -- btw, did you read the rg veda in sanskrit or in some motivated translation by some white christist or some comrade? -- is, i am afraid, at variance with observed facts. much like the late lamented 'aryan' invasion fairy-tale.
14 hours ago · Delete
Brp Bhaskar
Brp Bhaskar
Rajeev, we have to abandon the thread again as labels have started taking the place of arguments. The problem is not that I am unwilling to admit that there is such a thing as Hinduism but that you are unwilling to admit that it is an artificial construct, for which the Hindus must be grateful to the Muslims and the Christians.
6 hours ago · Delete
Brp Bhaskar
Brp Bhaskar
The dominant strain of the artificial construct called Hinduism is the Vedic school, which believed in exclusion and practised segregation. If you don't go to foreigners to understand the Indian tradition you can easily find out taht the inclusive, integrationist approach belonged to other Indain schools.
6 hours ago · Delete
Rajeev Srinivasan
Rajeev Srinivasan
i'm afraid you're simply reiterating what you said above, that buddhism invented dharma. unfortunately, you are wrong. as i pointed out, at the very least jainism can also claim it invented dharma. so dharma has two parents?

secondly, you're once again reiterating your bias that there is no such thing as hinduism, or that it only exists because of... Read More some al-biruni or some max mueller. this is amusing,and it's downright libelous, not to mention wholly at variance with the facts. hinduism owes nothing whatsoever to the christists, who have on the contrary, stolen mightily from it: the trinity, the virgin birth, etc. and from buddhism the entire idea of an order of monks.

the christists are brilliant at "truth by repeated assertion". alas, you have been subjected to that by the nehruvian stalinists. just by repeating a falsehood many times, it doesn't become a fact, although this has been successfully done by goebbels, the indian church regarding the non-existent 'st' thomas, etc.
2 seconds ago · Delete

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