In the Atharva-Veda, for example, there are spells to obtain children, to avoid abortion, to prolong life, to ward off evil, to woo sleep, and to harm or destroy enemies. The Upanishads are a collection of texts of religious and philosophical nature, written in India probably between c. Some people during this time decided to engage in the pursuit of spiritual progress, living as ascetic hermits, rejecting ordinary material concerns, and giving up family life.
Some of their speculations and philosophy were compiled into the Upanishads. There is an attempt in these texts to shift the focus of religious life from external rites and sacrifices to internal spiritual quests in the search for answers. The books, then, contain the thoughts and insights of important spiritual Indian figures. Although we speak of them together as a body of texts, the Upanishads are not parts of a whole, like chapters in a book.
Each is complete in itself. Therefore, they represent not a consistent philosophy or worldview, but rather the experiences, opinions, and lessons of many different men and women. The Bhagavad Gita is an ancient Indian text that became an important work of Hindu tradition in terms of both literature and philosophy.
It is composed as a poem and it contains many key topics related to the Indian intellectual and spiritual tradition. There is a part in the middle of this long text, consisting of 18 brief chapters and about verses: this is the section known as the Bhagavad Gita.
It is also referred to as the Gita , for short. Around the time when the Gita was written, asceticism was seen in India as the ideal spiritual life. Ascetics from different sects along with Jains and Buddhists all agreed that leaving everything behind family, possessions, occupations, etc.
What can someone who does not want to give up family and social obligations do to live the right way? The Gita challenges the general consensus that only ascetics and monks can live a perfect spiritual life through renunciation and emphasizes the value of an active spiritual life. The plot of the Gita is based on two sets of cousins competing for the throne: The Pandavas and the Kauravas. When these Scythians arrived in India, they adopted the Indian system of funeral, which was cremating the dead.
And so instead of burying their kings and his servers they started cremating their dead with his surviving lovers. The Scythians were warrior tribes and they were given a status of warrior castes in Hindu religious hierarchy. The different castes who claimed warrior status or higher also adopted this custom. There are four castes in Hindu religion arranged in a hierarchy. The highest caste is Brahman, and they are the priest caste of Hinduism. After them are the Kshatria, who are the warrior castes.
After them are the Vaishya caste , who are business people. And after them are the Sudra, who are the common peasants and workers. Below these four castes there are casteless, the untouchables. The four castes were not allowed to have any physical contact with the untouchables. Each caste is divided into many sub-castes. The religious word for caste is Varna and for sub-caste Jat or Jati. But sometimes in English the term caste is used in both cases.
Religiously, people are born in a caste and it cannot be changed. Each caste has some compulsory duties, which its members must do. Each caste has professional limits which decides what profession each caste can follow. Each caste members can have social relations only with its caste members. Religiously this includes marraige and even eating only with caste members. Please note that socially the caste system is different from the religious form of caste system.
How did Hinduism originated is a difficult question. The accepted theory is that Hinduism was evolved after the historical meeting between the Aryans and Dravidians. Some claim that Hinduism is mainly an Aryan culture whereas the others claim that it is mainly a Dravidian culture. Religiously the Vedas were given by Brahma.
Before Hinduism there existed another religion in India called Brahmanism and its followers were called Brahmans. The Brahmans were the spiritual and moral guides of the Indian society.
The members of this religion were a close sect and others could not join it. The Brahmans slowly started accepting others into their religion and so was created Hinduism which included in it the customs which aren't the part of the Vedas. One of the reasons the Brahmans accepted others to their religion was the fear to loose their status as moral guides to priests of a new religion that started in India, namely Buddhism. The Brahmans even accepted Buddha as a Hindu God and part of his teachings and philosophy like non-violence into their religion.
Introduction Hinduism , religion that originated in India and is still practiced by most of its inhabitants, as well as by those whose families have migrated from India to other parts of the world chiefly East Africa, South Africa, Southeast Asia, the East Indies, and England.
The corresponding influence of these various religions on Hinduism it has an extraordinary tendency to absorb foreign elements has greatly contributed to the religion's syncretism—the wide variety of beliefs and practices that it encompasses. Moreover, the geographic, rather than ideological, basis of the religion the fact that it comprises whatever all the people of India have believed and done has given Hinduism the character of a social and doctrinal system that extends to every aspect of human life.
Fundamental Principles The canon of Hinduism is basically defined by what people do rather than what they think. Consequently, far more uniformity of behavior than of belief is found among Hindus, although very few practices or beliefs are shared by all. A few usages are observed by almost all Hindus: reverence for Brahmans and cows; abstention from meat especially beef ; and marriage within the caste jati , in the hope of producing male heirs. Most Hindus chant the gayatri hymn to the sun at dawn, but little agreement exists as to what other prayers should be chanted.
Most Hindus worship Shiva , Vishnu , or the Goddess Devi , but they also worship hundreds of additional minor deities peculiar to a particular village or even to a particular family. Although Hindus believe and do many apparently contradictory things—contradictory not merely from one Hindu to the next, but also within the daily religious life of a single Hindu—each individual perceives an orderly pattern that gives form and meaning to his or her own life.
No doctrinal or ecclesiastical hierarchy exists in Hinduism, but the intricate hierarchy of the social system which is inseparable from the religion gives each person a sense of place within the whole. Texts The ultimate canonical authority for all Hindus is the Vedas.
The oldest of the four Vedas is the Rig-Veda , which was composed in an ancient form of the Sanskrit language in northwest India. This text, probably composed between about and BC and consisting of hymns to a pantheon of gods, has been memorized syllable by syllable and preserved orally to the present day. A fourth book, the Atharva-Veda a collection of magic spells , was probably added about BC.
At this time, too, the Brahmanas—lengthy Sanskrit texts expounding priestly ritual and the myths behind it—were composed. Between the 8th century BC and the 5th century BC , the Upanishads were composed; these are mystical-philosophical meditations on the meaning of existence and the nature of the universe.
The actual content of this canon, however, is unknown to most Hindus. No prohibition is made against improvising variations on, rewording, or challenging the Smriti. The Smriti includes the two great Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana ; the many Sanskrit Puranas , including 18 great Puranas and several dozen more subordinate Puranas; and the many Dharmashastras and Dharmasutras textbooks on sacred law , of which the one attributed to the sage Manu is the most frequently cited.
The two epics are built around central narratives. The Mahabharata tells of the war between the Pandava brothers, led by their cousin Krishna , and their cousins the Kauravas. The Ramayana tells of the journey of Rama to recover his wife Sita after she is stolen by the demon Ravana.
But these stories are embedded in a rich corpus of other tales and discourses on philosophy, law, geography, political science, and astronomy, so that the Mahabharata about , lines long constitutes a kind of encyclopedia or even a literature, and the Ramayana more than 50, lines long is comparable. Although it is therefore impossible to fix their dates, the main bodies of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana were probably composed between BC and AD Both, however, continued to grow even after they were translated into the vernacular languages of India such as Tamil and Hindi in the succeeding centuries.
The Puranas were composed after the epics, and several of them develop themes found in the epics for instance, the Bhagavata-Purana describes the childhood of Krishna, a topic not elaborated in the Mahabharata. The Puranas also include subsidiary myths, hymns of praise, philosophies, iconography, and rituals. Most of the Puranas are predominantly sectarian in nature; the great Puranas and some subordinate Puranas are dedicated to the worship of Shiva or Vishnu or the Goddess, and several subordinate Puranas are devoted to Ganesha or Skanda or the sun.
Philosophy Incorporated in this rich literature is a complex cosmology. Hindus believe that the universe is a great, enclosed sphere, a cosmic egg, within which are numerous concentric heavens, hells, oceans, and continents, with India at the center.
They believe that time is both degenerative—going from the golden age, or Krita Yuga, through two intermediate periods of decreasing goodness, to the present age, or Kali Yuga—and cyclic: At the end of each Kali Yuga, the universe is destroyed by fire and flood, and a new golden age begins. Human life, too, is cyclic: After death, the soul leaves the body and is reborn in the body of another person, animal, vegetable, or mineral.
This condition of endless entanglement in activity and rebirth is called samsara see Transmigration. The precise quality of the new birth is determined by the accumulated merit and demerit that result from all the actions, or karma , that the soul has committed in its past life or lives. Hindus may thus be divided into two groups: those who seek the sacred and profane rewards of this world health, wealth, children, and a good rebirth , and those who seek release from the world.
The principles of the first way of life were drawn from the Vedas and are represented today in temple Hinduism and in the religion of Brahmans and the caste system. The second way, which is prescribed in the Upanishads, is represented not only in the cults of renunciation sannyasa but also in the ideological ideals of most Hindus. To the first three Vedas was added the Atharva-Veda. The first three classes Brahman, or priestly; Kshatriya, or warrior; and Vaisya, or general populace were derived from the tripartite division of ancient Indo-European society, traces of which can be detected in certain social and religious institutions of ancient Greece and Rome.
To the three classes were added the Shudras, or servants, after the Indo-Aryans settled into the Punjab and began to move down into the Ganges Valley. The three original ashramas were the chaste student brahmachari , the householder grihastha , and the forest-dweller vanaprastha. They were said to owe three debts: study of the Vedas owed to the sages ; a son to the ancestors ; and sacrifice to the gods.
The three goals were artha material success , dharma righteous social behavior , and kama sensual pleasures. Shortly after the composition of the first Upanishads, during the rise of Buddhism 6th century BC , a fourth ashrama and a corresponding fourth goal were added: the renouncer sannyasi , whose goal is release moksha from the other stages, goals, and debts.
Each of these two ways of being Hindu developed its own complementary metaphysical and social systems. Svadharma comprises the beliefs that each person is born to perform a specific job, marry a specific person, eat certain food, and beget children to do likewise and that it is better to fulfill one's own dharma than that of anyone else even if one's own is low or reprehensible, such as that of the Harijan caste, the Untouchables, whose mere presence was once considered polluting to other castes.
The primary goal of the worldly Hindu is to produce and raise a son who will make offerings to the ancestors the shraddha ceremony. The second, renunciatory way of Hinduism, on the other hand, is based on the Upanishadic philosophy of the unity of the individual soul, or atman , with Brahman, the universal world soul, or godhead. The full realization of this is believed to be sufficient to release the worshiper from rebirth; in this view, nothing could be more detrimental to salvation than the birth of a child.
Many of the goals and ideals of renunciatory Hinduism have been incorporated into worldly Hinduism, particularly the eternal dharma sanatana dharma , an absolute and general ethical code that purports to transcend and embrace all subsidiary, relative, specific dharmas.
The most important tenet of sanatana dharma for all Hindus is ahimsa, the absence of a desire to injure, which is used to justify vegetarianism although it does not preclude physical violence toward animals or humans, or blood sacrifices in temples.
In addition to sanatana dharma, numerous attempts have been made to reconcile the two Hinduisms. The Bhagavad-Gita describes three paths to religious realization. To the path of works, or karma here designating sacrificial and ritual acts , and the path of knowledge, or jnana the Upanishadic meditation on the godhead , was added a mediating third path, the passionate devotion to God, or bhakti , a religious ideal that came to combine and transcend the other two paths.
Bhakti in a general form can be traced in the epics and even in some of the Upanishads, but its fullest statement appears only after the Bhagavad-Gita. It gained momentum from the vernacular poems and songs to local deities, particularly those of the Alvars, Nayanars, and Virashaivas of southern India and the Bengali worshipers of Krishna see below. Therefore, most Hindus are devoted through bhakti to gods whom they worship in rituals through karma and whom they understand through jnana as aspects of ultimate reality, the material reflection of which is all an illusion maya wrought by God in a spirit of play lila.
Gods Although all Hindus acknowledge the existence and importance of a number of gods and demigods, most individual worshipers are primarily devoted to a single god or goddess, of whom Shiva, Vishnu, and the Goddess are the most popular. Shiva embodies the apparently contradictory aspects of a god of ascetics and a god of the phallus. Shiva is also the deity whose phallus linga is the central shrine of all Shaiva temples and the personal shrine of all Shaiva householders; his priapism is said to have resulted in his castration and the subsequent worship of his severed member.
In addition, Shiva is said to have appeared on earth in various human, animal, and vegetable forms, establishing his many local shrines. To his worshipers, Vishnu is all-pervasive and supreme; he is the god from whose navel a lotus sprang, giving birth to the creator Brahma.
Vishnu created the universe by separating heaven and earth, and he rescued it on a number of subsequent occasions. Several of these are animals that recur in iconography: the fish, the tortoise, and the boar. Others are the dwarf Vamana, who became a giant in order to trick the demon Bali out of the entire universe ; the man-lion Narasimha, who disemboweled the demon Hiranyakashipu ; the Buddha who became incarnate in order to teach a false doctrine to the pious demons ; Rama-with-an-Axe Parashurama, who beheaded his unchaste mother and destroyed the entire class of Kshatriyas to avenge his father ; and Kalki the rider on the white horse, who will come to destroy the universe at the end of the age of Kali.
Most popular by far are Rama hero of the Ramayana and Krishna hero of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavata-Purana , both of whom are said to be avatars of Vishnu, although they were originally human heroes. Along with these two great male gods, several goddesses are the object of primary devotion. They are sometimes said to be various aspects of the Goddess, Devi. In some myths Devi is the prime mover, who commands the male gods to do the work of creation and destruction.
As Durga, the Unapproachable, she kills the buffalo demon Mahisha in a great battle; as Kali, the Black, she dances in a mad frenzy on the corpses of those she has slain and eaten, adorned with the still-dripping skulls and severed hands of her victims. The Goddess is also worshiped by the Shaktas, devotees of Shakti, the female power.
Ziggurats were built to honor the holiness of the gods and to appease them in hopes of attaining their blessings. As the Indian philosophies evolved, Hindus developed the concept of reincarnation. The essence of that concept lied in the belief that no one is able to remain in the afterworld forever and eventually should return to the cycle of life, death and rebirth.
As transcendent as the concept of reincarnation was, it did not provide Hindus with an ultimate salvation from suffering. Thus every living thing must eventually suffer and die. Such views resulted in further development of Hindu religion, Hindu philosophers such as Manu questioned the concepts of Vedas and laid the foundation for a philosophy that transfo Philosophy could make space for the spiritual by acknowledging a difference between belief as propositional assent and religious faith as trust, a distinction lost with the mixing of Greek philosophy and Christian faith.
Artistic or religious truth disappeared as authentic forms of knowing. But Michael Polanyi reintroduced knowledge as more than can be thought. Also postmodern and feminist thought urge us to abandon autonomous reason as sole limit to knowledge. We have space again for philosophy to look at openness to the spiritual. Thus, the art and architecture of Ancient Egypt stemmed directly from their religion.
Egyptian theology, with its deified pharaohs and strange animal-headed gods, was complicated, but the most important belief was that survival after death depended upon the preservation of the body. This belief would influence the architectural design of the tomb, where the corpse was ultimately sealed Silverman, Immortality was only for privileged royal and priestly beings Stierlin, This implies that their tombs would be somewhat prestigious and not just and ordinary burial site. At the day of resurrection the Ka or soul would re-enter the dead body; this meant that it must be there, intact, ready for that moment.
The Roman Empire is credited with many things due partially to their ability to share, spread, and adapt culture. Rome was successful because it both conquered and shared the fruits of conquest with the conquered. Religion was one part of the culture that demonstrated the tolerance of Romans. Even though the official religion in the Roman Empire began as Pagan, it ended as Christianity when Emperor Theodosius declared it as the official religion in A.
The god of war, Huitzilopochtli, was the most important deity. They had many other important gods, such as Tlaloc, the god of rain, Quetzalcoatl, the god of wind and of learning, and Tenochtitlan, the sun god. The Aztecs believed in order to appease these and many other gods that they needed to perform human sacrifices. The main purpose of the great Aztec pyramids was, in fact, human sacrifices. The role of religion in ancient civilizations was one of primary importance. There was no idea of a separation of church and state.
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