FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

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Chapter 2: Vedas, Excerpt from "Hindu Dharma: Introduction to Scriptures and Theology"
by Ashim Kumar Bhattacharyya
Copyright © 2006 by Ashim Kumar Bhattacharyya

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Chapter 2: Vedas.

Hindu Dharma is based on the teachings of the Vedas. The Vedas are the highest authority in all matters about Hindu religion and philosophy. Swami Vivekananda, the foremost disciple of Shri Ramakrishna, in his speech in 1893 at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago said: "The Hindus have received their religion through revelation, the Vedas. They hold the Vedas are without beginning and without end. It may sound ludicrous, that a book can be without beginning or end. But by the Vedas, no books are meant. They mean the collected treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different people at different times. Just as the Law of Gravitation acted before its discovery by humanity and would continue to act if all humanity forgot it, so it is with the laws that govern the spiritual world. The discoverers of these laws are called 'Rishis', and we honor them as perfected beings".

Nobody knows when the Vedas were revealed and how long it took to be revealed to the Rishis; it may be 8,000 years ago, it may be more. Not one of these religious revelations is of modern date, but they are as fresh today as they were when they were revealed to the Rishis.

Vedas are written in an archaic form of Vedic or ancient Sanskrit -- a difficult language belonging to Indo-European family of languages. The Sanskrit word 'Veda' means knowledge, especially sacred knowledge. The ancient Indian Rishis considered the knowledge or truths revealed to them by God in their spiritual practices so sacred that they did not put them in writing. They preserved them in their memory and taught them to deserving students through verbal instructions. A Rishi, named Krishna Dvaipayana Vyasa collected them and recorded them in four books: 1) Rik Veda 2) Sama Veda 3) Yajur Veda and 4) Atharva Veda. Rik Veda is considered to be the oldest of the four Vedas. According to best estimates by many scholars, Vedas were written at least four thousand years ago.

Rik Veda is the compilation of Riks, which are hymns, that is mantras in verses. These mantras are recited by the 'Hota' priest to invite the deities to the Yajna that is sacrifice. Sama Veda is the collection of Samans, meant to be sung by the 'Udgatri' priest', the singer priest. Yajur Veda is the collection of the Yajus, the mantras, which are not in verses and used by the 'Adhvaryu' priest, the chief executor of the sacrificial rites. Atharva Veda consists of a special class of Vedic texts known as 'Chandas'.

Vedas are collected treasury of spiritual truths as discovered by Rishis at different times. Since the discoveries of the truths were made through spiritual practices, the Rishis believed that these truths were divine in origin, meaning the truths were revealed to them by God. Vedas are thus considered 'Apaurasheya' that is divine. Since the truths were revealed, the truths were thus 'Shruti' that is which was heard; that is why the Vedas are also known as 'Shruti'. The 'Shruti' is considered eternal and universal in truth and represents the 'Sanatana Dharma'. The Vedas contain the fundamental truths about Hindu Dharma. They are infallible source of the highest reason, antecedent to human experience and therefore free from human defects whatsoever. They are the authority; they provide the knowledge of God. Shri Ramakrishna said the Vedas and all other sacred books do not contain God; they give only hint that is only information about God.

Book 1
HYMN I. Agni.
1 I Laud Agni, the chosen Priest, God, minister of sacrifice,
The hotar, lavishest of wealth.
2 Worthy is Agni to be praised by living as by ancient seers.
He shall bring hitherward the Gods.
3 Through Agni man obtaineth wealth, yea, plenty waxing day by day,
Most rich in heroes, glorious.
4 Agni, the perfect sacrifice which thou encompassest about
Verily goeth to the Gods.
5 May Agni, sapient-minded Priest, truthful, most gloriously great,
The God, come hither with the Gods.

-- The Rig Veda. translated by Ralph T. H. Griffith

In each of the four Vedas, the bulk portion, called 'Karma Kanda', deals with details about Yajna (rituals), which were the ancient form of worship. The 'Karma Kanda' is subdivided into three parts: 1) Samhita 2) Brahmana and 3) Aranyaka. The rest, called 'Jnana Kanda', deals with the philosophy or knowledge. This part is also called the 'Upanishads' meaning devoted to knowledge. This part containing the knowledge portion of the Vedas occurs usually at the end of the Veda, so this knowledge portion is also commonly known as 'Vedanta' -- "anta" meaning last or end; thus, 'Vedanta' means the last part or end portion of the Veda.

Each Veda has its own customary Brahmana, Aranyaka and Upanishad.

Rik Veda --

Brahmanas: Aitereya and Kaushitaki or Sankhayana
Aranyakas: Aitereya and Kaushitaki or Sankhayana
Upanishads: Aitereya (part of Aitereya Samhita) and Kaushitaki (part of Kaushitaki or Sankhayana Aranyaka)

Sama Veda --

Brahmanas: Chandogya, Tandya and Jaiminiya or Talavakara
Aranyaka: Jaiminiya or Talavakara and Chandogya
Upanishads: Chandogya (part of Chandogya Brahmana) and Kena (part of Jaiminiya or Talavakara Brahmana)

Yajur Veda has two school: a) Shukla Yajur Veda and b) Krishna Yajur Veda (see later)

Shukla Yajur Veda --

Brahmana: Satapatha
Aranyaka: Brihadaranyaka
Upanishads: Isha (part of Vajasaneya Samhita) and Brihadaranyaka (part of Satapatha Brahmana)

Krishna Yajur Veda --

Brahmana and Aranyaka are considered together in Taittiriya Samhita and contains Maitrayani Brahmana
Upanishad: Katha and Svetasvatara

Atharva Veda --

Brahmana: Gopatha
Upanishad: Prasna, Mundaka and Mandukya
No Aranyaka of this Veda is known.

The Samhita is the collection of hymns, that is mantras in adoration of Brahman, the Supreme Spirit. It contains sacred prayers, invocation of different deities, sacred verses for chanting at the sacrifices, the sacrificial formulas, blessings and curses. Hymns praising personal gods (Ishvara) are also in this part. The Sama Veda Samhita and Yajur Veda Samhita mostly describe the Yajnas, the sacrificial rites.

The Brahmana deals with various aspects of the theory and practice of sacrificial rites. All mantras are intended to serve essentially for ritualistic purpose and the Brahmanas prescribe the manner in which they are to be used to serve that purpose. So, each of the Brahmanas is connected with one or other of the Samhitas.

The Brahmanas describe in details the topics of 'Karmavidhana', 'Arthavada', 'Ninda', 'Prasamsa', 'Purakalpa', and 'Parakriti'. Karmavidhana or simply Vidhi is the principle part of the Brahmana and sets forth the various details about a particular Yajna or sacrifice such as the proper time and place, the rite of initiation, the priests, the sacred fires, the divinities, the mantras, the oblations, the utensils and other materials, the Dakshina (sacrificial fee or gifts) and the expiation rites. In short, it contains the rules of performing particular rites. Arthavada provides the many explanatory remarks on the meaning of particular rite and mantra, the reason why a certain rite must be performed in a certain way. Ninda or censure refers to the controversial remarks contained in the Brahmanas. The sacrificer, that is the person performing the Yajna that is the sacrificial rite, is cautioned about making mistakes in performing the sacrificial rite. Prasamsa means praise and comprises principally those phrases that tell us what will be the desired effect of performing a particular rite with the proper knowledge. Purakalpa means performance of sacrificial rites in former times. Under this topic come many stories of the fights between Devas and Asuras, to which the origin of many rites is attributed, as also all legends on the sacrifices performed by the gods. Parakriti means the achievement or feat of another. This section comprises the stories of certain performances of renowned Shrotriyas, or sacrificial priests, of gifts presented by kings to the priests, and the successes they achieved.

The most important among the Brahmanas are the Aitareya and Kaushitaki belonging to Rik Veda, Taittiriya belonging to Krishna Yajur Veda, Satapatha belonging to Shukla Yajur Veda, Jaiminiya and Tandya belonging to Sama Veda and Gopatha belonging to Atharva Veda.

Aitareya Brahmana (Rik Veda) concerns mainly the duties of the Yajna priest, the Hotr. It also provides the procedure for Pashujaga (animal sacrifice) and Rajasuya Yajna.

Kaushitaki Brahmana (Rik Veda) covers more or less the entire Yajna (sacrificial) procedure.

Satapatha Brahmana (Shukla Yajur Veda) covers the basic sacrificial ritual, speaks of the mystical significance of the various aspects of the sacred fires, expiation rites, and the Sautramani Yajna. It also deals with the Asvamedha Yajna and briefly, the Purusamedha and Sarvamedha Yajnas. This Brahmana also considers the Pavargya ceremony (introductory to the Soma Yajna).

Jaiminiya Brahmana (Sama Veda) is the best source of information about the technique of the Samagas (the priests who chant or recite the Sama Veda).

Tandya Brahmana (Sama Veda) is chiefly concerned with the Soma sacrifice in all its varieties. It describes in detail the Sattras (sacrificial sessions) and the Vratya-stomas (hymns of praise).

Gopatha Brahmana (Atharva Veda) contains myths, legends and parables that explain the various ceremonies in the Vedic ritual. It stresses that sacrificial rites performed without the help of a priest is bound to fail.

The Aranyakas mark the transition from the ritualism of the Brahmanas to the spiritualism of the Upanishads. Aitereya Aranyaka, belonging to the Rik Veda, consists of five books. The 2nd and the 3rd books are specifically theosophical in nature. The first three sections of the second book teach the Prana-Upasana (worship of 'Prana' or vital power). The last three sections of the 2nd book make up the Aitereya Upanishad. The 3rd book deals with the Samhita-Upasana (unified form of worship). In other parts, it describes the sacrificial ceremonies of the Mahavrata.

Kaushitaki or Sankhayana Aranyaka, belonging to the Rik Veda, consists of three books; the first two are ritualistic and the 3rd forms the Kaushitaki Upanishad.

Taittiriya Aranyaka, belonging to the Krishna Yajur Veda, in its first six books describe the Vedic sacrificial rituals such as the Sarvamedha, the Pitrmedha, and the Pravargya Yajnas. The next three books make up the Taittiriya Upanishad. The 10th or the last book is known as the Mahanarayana Upanishad.

The first three Adhyayas (chapters) of the 14th Kanda (section) of the Satapatha Brahmana, belonging to the Shukla Yajur Veda, are called Aranyaka and they deal with the Pravargya Yajna or sacrifice. The last six Adhyayas of this Kanda is the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.

The division of the Vedas in two parts, the Karma Kanda, dealing with Karma, or ritualistic worship, and the Jnana Kanda, dealing with knowledge of Brahman, serves two types of minds. Thus, Karma Kanda serves those seeking happiness by fulfilling desires on earth and in heaven after death, whereas the Jnana Kanda serves those seeking the highest knowledge, the knowledge of Brahman, and or Atman thus attain liberation that is Moksha. Thus, the Karma Kanda of the Vedas guides the pleasure-seeking person, by stages, from physical enjoyments to the supreme experience of Moksha. The Vedic Rishis realized that sudden and blunt imparting of knowledge about the transcendental Brahman, unknown to and unknowable by the senses and the mind would confuse people attached to the world. They therefore did not renounce or discard the ritualistic actions, though these were considered inferior to the realization of Brahman. In the Jnana Kanda, that is the Upanishads, they have shown how the aspirant can finally attain the knowledge of Brahman through the rituals and what help can be rendered by the ritual for attaining Knowledge or Jnana.

The Vedas are the foundation of the Hindu Dharma. They contain eternal or revealed truths about the nature of supreme reality, the soul and its destiny and the creation; these cannot be understood through our sensory system and reasoning based on them. The Vedas also tell us about the cosmic divinities, the various heavens, the different courses followed by the soul after death and other similar phenomena beyond the reach of our senses. Vedas are concerned with the ultimate questions of human life; they are

Who are we?
Why are we born?
What in us, if anything, transcends death?
By knowing that can we transcend all pain?

The Vedas are the collected treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different Rishis or sages in different times. These are the laws that govern the spiritual world. The moral, ethical and spiritual relations between individual soul and the Supreme Soul that is Brahman are explored in the Vedas.

The Vedas teach the supreme reality that is the 'Supreme Spirit' or the 'Supreme Being' (Brahman), is all-pervading, uncreated, self-luminous, eternal spirit, the final cause of the universe, the power behind all tangible forces, the consciousness, which animates all conscious beings.

HYMN XXXVII. Maruts.
1 SING forth, O Kaṇvas, to your band of Maruts unassailable,
Sporting, resplendent on their car
2 They who, self-luminous, were born together, with the spotted deer,
Spears, swords, and glittering ornaments.
3 One hears, as though ’twere close at hand, the cracking of the whips they hold
They gather glory on their way.
4 Now sing ye forth the God-given hymn to your exultant Marut host,
The fiercely-vigorous, the strong.
5 Praise ye the Bull among the cows; for ’tis the Maruts’ sportive band:
It strengthened as it drank the rain.

-- The Rig Veda. translated by Ralph T. H. Griffith

The Vedas point out that this impersonal supreme reality that is Brahman is the supreme truth. Vedas give us the knowledge of Brahman, the 'Supreme Spirit' or the 'Supreme Being'.

May Agni, sapient-minded Priest, truthful, most gloriously great, The God, come hither with the Gods. Whatever blessing, Agni, thou wilt grant unto thy worshipper, That, Aṅgiras, is indeed thy truth....

Watch ye, through this your truthfulness, there in the place of spacious view
Indra and Agni, send us bliss....

Thou hast filled all the region with thy greatness: yea, of a truth there is none other like thee....

He who like Savitar the God, true-minded protecteth with his power. All acts of vigour, Truthful, like splendour, glorified by many, like breath joy-giving,—all must strive to win him....

So now, O truthfullest Invoker Agni, worship this day with joy-bestowing ladle....

Truthful art thou, and blameless, searcher out of sin: so thou, Strong Host, wilt be protector of this prayer....

Be this thy truth, Vaiśvānara, to us-ward: let wealth in rich abundance gather round us....

Ye Gods who yonder have your home in the three lucid realms of heaven, What count ye truth and what untruth?...

The flowing of the floods is Law, Truth is the Sun's extended light....

Now of a truth these be the very sunbeams wherewith our fathers were of old united....

He is a wild thing of the flood and forest: he hath been laid upon the highest surface. He hath declared the lore of works to mortals, Agni the Wise, for he knows Law, the Truthful....

These Sons of yours well skilled in work, of wondrous power, brought forth to life the two great Mothers first of all. To keep the truth of all that stands and all that moves, ye guard the station of your Son who knows no guile....

I in truth am fierce and strong and mighty. I bent away from every foeman's weapons....

Enrich the man more liberal than the godless. May we, ye Gods, be strong with food rejoicing. Endowed with understanding, I have uttered this truth, for all to hear, to Earth and Heaven....

Thou who in every way supreme in earthly power, rejoicing, by thy mighty strength hast waxen great,— He is the God spread forth in breadth against the Gods: he, brahmaṇaspati, encompasseth this All. From you, twain Maghavans, all truth proceedeth: even the waters break not your commandment....

I crave the grace of heaven's two chief Invokers: the seven swift steeds joy in their wonted manner. These speak of truth, praising the truth eternal, thinking on Order as the guards of Order....

The Spring that fails not with a hundred streamlets, Father inspired of prayers that men should utter, The Sparkler, joyous in his Parents' bosom, him, the Truth-speaker, sate ye, Earth and Heaven....

Yea, Much-invoked! in safety through thy glories alone thou speakest truth as Vṛtra's slayer.

-- The Rig Veda. translated by Ralph T. H. Griffith

The Vedas are intended to serve for spiritual enlightenment and self-culture. The study of the Vedas is, therefore, not merely to tell our intelligence but to purify and enrich the soul. For the study of the Vedas, one must have a teacher or Guru. A good teacher not only explains the scripture but also most importantly touches the life of the student. A good teacher or Guru helps to awaken the spiritual consciousness within the student. There are many instances that the first spiritual awakening came to an aspirant through a perfected soul or Guru. One should do well to be on the lookout for a perfected soul and when one finds such a person accepts that person as one's Guru and place oneself unreservedly under his guidance and teachings. Shri Ramakrishna said "God alone is the guide and Guru of the universe. He who can himself approach God with sincerity, earnest prayer and deep longing, needs no Guru. But such deep yearning of the soul is very rare, and hence the need of a Guru." Swami Vivekananda in his address on Bhakti Yoga considered the qualifications of a proper Guru as 'sinless, unselfish, and knowing the spirit of the scripture'.

Mahavakyas

There are four Mahavakyas or great statements in the Vedas:

Tat tvam asi (Chandyogya Upanishad V1.8.7 in Sama Veda) -- Thou art That.
Aham Brahmasi (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.10 in Shukla Yajur Veda) -- I am Brahman.
Ayam Atma Brahma (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 115.19 in Shukla Yajur Veda) -- This Self is Brahman.
Prajnanam Brahma (Aitereya Brahmana III.1.3 in Rik Veda) -- Knowledge is Brahman.

The first three Mahavakyas speak of the divinity of the indwelling Self in man, that is, the Atman or the soul of the man. These concepts imply not only the divinity of humans but also the identity of Brahman with Atman. The fourth Mahavakya states that supreme knowledge is Brahman and provides a definition of Brahman. Meditating on these Mahavakyas, one realizes oneness with Brahman.

Rik Veda

The Rik Veda is the oldest of the four Vedas. As stated earlier, Rik Veda was written about five thousand years ago. It is considered as the central 'canon' of the Vedic religion and of the Hindu Dharma that emerged from it.

The Rik Veda Samhita is arranged in ten books or mandalas. Six of the mandalas are devoted each to the hymns of a single Rishi or family of Rishis. For example, 2nd mandala is devoted chiefly to the suktas of the Rishi Gritsamada, the 3rd and the 7th to Vishvamitra and Vashistha, the 4th to Vamadeva, the 6th to Bharadvaja. The 5th mandala is devoted to the hymns of the house of Atri. The 9th mandala is devoted to Soma. In the 10th mandala we find hymns by several Rishis. In this mandala, one finds the great hymn of the creation (Purusha Sukta). Many scholars think that in this mandala the first origin of the Vedic philosophy 'Brahmavada' is found.

In each of the mandalas, the suktas are addressed first to Agni, the Fire God followed by to Indra and other Gods such as Brishaspati, Surya, Ribhu, Usha and others.

The topics dealt with in the Rik Veda Samhita fall into three groups. The first group deals with the deities like Agni, Indra, Varuna and others. The second group is concerned with philosophical speculations like the origin of the universe and the real nature of human beings. The third group deals with several secular subjects like marriage, wars, praise for generosity and so on.

The Vedic deities are usually listed as thirty-three -- eight Vasus, eleven Rudras, twelve Adityas, Indra and Prajapati. These deities are assigned to the three regions of the universe -- the earth (Prithivi), heavens (dvyau) and the intermediary space (Antariksha). Though they appear like personification of forces of nature, they are facets of Brahman, the Supreme Truth. This Veda ((1.164.46) makes the categorical statement 'Ekam sat viprah vahudha vadanti' (Truth is one, sages call it by various names). Thus, the Veda teaches 'Eka-devata-vada' or monotheism.[???!!!] However, the advocacy of 'Saguna Upasana that is God with form or attribute is also predominant in the Veda.

As regards the philosophical speculations of this Veda, we find that it is the origin and repository of almost all the later ideas of Vedanta including knowledge (Jnana) and devotion (Bhakti), though some of them are in the seed form.

The philosophical speculations about the origin of the universe, two streams of thought are found in the Rik Veda. They are 'creation' and 'evolution' -- both of which are also found in the Vedantic thoughts later. Statements like 'God created this world out of Himself, "rules over it' etc are found in the Veda.

The Rik Veda declared the existence of the soul as an eternal entity. It teaches to pray for 'immortality' (Amritatva). However, the Veda did not relegate the life on earth to the background. In the Veda, life here and life hereafter have been harmonized.

Ruler of sacrifices, guard of Law eternal, radiant One, Increasing in thine own abode....

O mighty Indra, Gotama's son Nodhas hath fashioned this new prayer to thee Eternal, Sure leader, yoker of the Tawny Coursers....

With flame insatiate, like eternal might; caring for each one like a dame at home; Bright when he shines forth, whitish mid the folk, like a car, gold-decked, thundering to the fight....

All men are joyful in thy power, O God, that living from the dry wood thou art born. All truly share thy Godhead while they keep, in their accustomed ways, eternal Law....

Thine are King Varuṇa's eternal statutes, lofty and deep, O Soma, is thy glory....

To whom thou, Lord of goodly riches, grantest freedom from every sin with perfect wholeness, Whom with good strength thou quickenest, with children and wealth—may we be they, Eternal Being....

May Indra, girt by Maruts, be our succour. Whose home eternal through his strength surrounds him on every side, his laud, the earth and heaven...

From days eternal hath Dawn shone, the Goddess, and shows this light to-day, endowed with riches....

In the sky's lap the Sun this form assumeth that Varuṇa and Mitra may behold it. His Bay Steeds well maintain his power eternal, at one time bright and darksome at another....

Obedient to the rein of Law Eternal give us each thought that more and more shall bless us....

Thou, Indra, without effort hast let loose the floods to run their free course down, like chariots, to the sea, like chariots showing forth their strength. They, reaching hence away, have joined their strength for one eternal end, Even as the cows who poured forth every thing for man, Yea, poured forth all things for mankind....

All falsehood, Mitra-Varuṇa! ye conquer, and closely cleave unto the Law Eternal....

Two Birds with fair wings, knit with bonds of friendship, in the same sheltering tree have found a refuge. One of the twain eats the sweet Fig-tree's fruitage; the other eating not regardeth only. Where those fine Birds hymn ceaselessly their portion of life eternal, and the sacred synods, There is the Universe's mighty Keeper, who, wise, hath entered into me the simple....

Ye men do worship to Indra seated on the grass, eternal....

Upholding that which moves and that which moves not, Ādityas, Gods, protectors of all being, Provident, guarding well the world of spirits, true to eternal Law, the debt-exactors....

SOMA and Pūṣan, parents of all riches, parents of earth and parents of high heaven, you twain, brought forth as the whole world's protectors, the Gods have made centre of life eternal....

Agni most bright and fair with song we honour, yea, the adorable, O Jātavedas. Thee, envoy, messenger, oblation-bearer, the Gods have made centre of life eternal....

Agni, burn up the unfriendly who are near us, burn thou the foeman's curse who pays no worship. Burn, Vasu, thou who markest well, the foolish: let thine eternal nimble beams surround thee....

Agni. RUBBED into life, well stablished in the dwelling, leader of sacrifice, the sage, the youthful, here in the wasting fuel Jātavedas, eternal, hath assumed immortal being....

In the floods' home art thou enkindled, Agni, O Jātavedas, Son of Strength, eternal, exalting with thine help the gathering-places....

Peer of each noble thing, yea, all excelling, all creatures doth he know, he slayeth Śuṣṇa. Our leader, fain for war, singing from heaven, as Friend he saved his lovers from dishonour. They sate them down with spirit fain for booty, making with hymns a way to life eternal.

-- The Rig Veda, translated by Ralph T. H. Griffith

Agni the God the first among the Immortals...

For glory, Agni, day by day, thou liftest up the mortal man to highest immortality.

-- The Rig Veda, translated by Ralph T. H. Griffith

From the group of Suktas that is hymns dealing with the secular side of life, we get some idea about the nature of the society of those times. Social life was permeated by spiritual consciousness. People strongly believed in 'Samanvaya' that is harmonizing life in this world with the one in the next. Truth (Satya) and Dharma (righteousness) are praised and immortality (Amritatva) as the goal of life accepted. Varna System in the society has already taken roots. Monogamy, polygamy, 'Svyamvara' system (bride choosing her husband), all existed in the society. Agriculture and animal management were the chief means of livelihood. Equitable distribution of wealth was recommended. Civilization was developed and fine arts encouraged. Priests and kings were powerful. System of sacrifices had evolved to a high degree of perfection.

Sama Veda

Sama Veda is also known as the book of Sama Gana (holy songs). The hymns are chanted or sung by Udgatri priests during the performance of important Yajnas, that is, sacrifices connected to prepare the 'Soma' juice. Thus, this Veda serves mainly ritualistic purpose. The hymns are mainly collected from the Rik Veda but are arranged in a different order with minor variations.

It is impossible to state with any accuracy the period when Sama Veda was composed out of Rik Veda. It was Sama Gana (holy songs) that served as the source of priesthood; its recitation pleased everyone because of the melodious quality of the Sama Gana. In fact, the Sanskrit term 'Saman' means 'soothing and pleasing'.

There are 1875 verses in the Sama Veda. It is a Veda chiefly of Upasana, that is worship and contemplation, essential for the realization of Brahman.

The Veda is divided into three parts: 1) Purva Archika, 2) Uttara Archika and 3) Maha Namni Archika. The Purva Archika is divided into four Kandas: 1) Agneya Kanda, 2) Aindra Kanda, 3) Pavmana Kanda 4) Aranyaka Kanda.

In Purva Archika, there are two song manuals: the Gana or congregational songs and Aranya Gana, which the recluse and seekers of salvation sing in the forest solitude. In the Uttara Archika, there are also two song manuals: the Uhagana and the Uhyagana.

Yajur Veda

The Yajur Veda is a collection of Yajus, which are mantras in prose; these mantras are useful to the 'Adhvarya' priest in performing the Yajnas (sacrifices). This Veda is essentially ritualistic and treats the entire sacrificial system. It deals with the duties of the Advaryu (the fire-priest) who is responsible for performing the various sacrificial rites.

The Yajur Veda has in all 1975 verses spread over forty chapters or Adhyasas. Nearly three to four hundred mantras of Yajur Samhita are common with Rik Samhita.

There are two schools of Yajur Veda: 1) Krishna Yajur Veda and 2) Shukla Yajur Veda. Rishi Vyasa taught Krishna Yajur Veda to Vaisampayana; while the Shukla Yajur Veda is associated with Vajasaneya Yajnavalkya. Thus, Shukla Yajur Veda is also known as Vajasaneyi Samhita. The Shukla Yajur Veda's entire Samhita and its Brahamana called the Satapatha Brahmana come in two distinct versions: 1) the Madhyandina and 2) Kanva. The Shukla Yajur Veda is traditionally the oldest recession of the Yajur Veda. The main Brahmana of Shukla Yajur Veda is Satapatha Brahmana. The Madhyandiniya Satapatha Brahmana has one hundred chapters, fourteen Kandas, four hundred thirty-eight Brahmanas, and seven thousand six hundred twenty-four Kandikas. The teacher of the Brahmana is Yajnavalkya. However, in four Kandas (chapters 6-9), the name of Rishi Sandilya is found. The Kanva Samhita also contains forty chapters (Adhyayas) and follows the same subject matter. The Yajur Veda is associated with two Upanishads, the 'Isha' and the 'Brihadaranyaka'. The 'Isha' Upanishad mainly reproduces the fourteenth chapter of the Yajur Veda with slight variation at the close. The 'Brihadaranyaka' Upanishad is the last part of the Satapatha Brahmana.

The main content of the Yajur Veda is the mantras that are short prose passages addressed to various objects that are used in the rituals. The Yajur Samhita deals mainly with Yajnas like Agnistoma, Vlajapeya and Rajasuya. In the Shukla Yajur Veda, the entire text is of this nature. In the Krishna Yajur Veda, the original mantras are mixed with explanatory passages.

Atharva Veda

Of the Vedas, the Atharva Veda is listed as the last in order. It contains 5977 verses. According to the tradition, Atharva Veda is mainly the contributions of two sages, Atharvan and Angira.

The Atharva Veda has remarkable references to various aspect of spiritual and temporal importance like Brahmavidyli, Prithivi or earth, kingship, marriage, treatment of ailments, building construction, trade and commerce. However, most of the hymns of the Atharva Veda is to appease (the demons), to bless (friends) and to curse. Because of this, the Veda did not find much favor with the priesthood. In this Veda one finds prayers for health and long life (Ayusya Mantra), for happiness and prosperity (Paustikani). The Veda also discusses various relationships with women (Strikarmani). Another section deals with Rajakarmani (involving the king). Also, there are sections, which are intended for securing harmony in domestic, social and political spheres. This Veda is also connected with later development of the Tantric System and mentions the importance of Japa or chanting of mantra to achieve material and spiritual benefits, which forms an integral part of Indian religious mysticism till today.

The Atharva Veda gives us an interesting picture of the society of its times. The land in which the people lived extended from 'Gandhara' (present Afghanistan) to 'Magadha' (Bihar) and 'Anga' (Bengal). The Varna system had been well established in the society. The first three Varnas were called 'Aryas' and last as 'Sudra'. But people lived in harmony. Kings were powerful. Trade and commerce were prosperous though agriculture was the mainstay of the people. Sometimes the 'Kshatriya' kings harassed the 'Brahmanas'. The cow was venerated and 'Godana' (gift of a cow) was considered meritorious. The institution of marriage was similar to that in the Rik Vedic times.  

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Part 1 of 2

The "Avaca" Inscription and the Origin of the Vikrama Era
by Richard Salomon
Journal of the American Oriental Society , Jan. - Mar., 1982, Vol. 102, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1982), pp. 59-68
March, 1982

THE "AVACA"' INSCRIPTION AND THE ORIGIN OF THE VIKRAMA ERA*
BY RICHARD SALOMON
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

A Kharosthi inscription on a Buddhist relic casket of uncertain provenance, first published by Bailey in 1978, is here re-edited. The re-interpretation of this inscription enables us to more fully reconstruct the previously obscure dynasty of kings who ruled Apraca or Avaca (modern Bajaur in north-western Pakistan) in the 1st centuries B.C. and A.D. Moreover, the date of the inscription samvatsarae tresathimae 20 20 20 3 maharayasa ayasa atidasa ('in the year 63 of the late King Azes ') provides the long-awaited explicit evidence that the Indo-Scythian king Azes I was the founder of the "Vikrama" era of 58-7 B.C.

H. W. BAILEY RECENTLY PUBLISHED two significant new inscriptions under the title "Two Kharosthi Casket Inscriptions from Avaca" in JRAS, 1978, 3-13. The first of these inscriptions is particularly important; for, in addition to its considerable philological and dialectal interest, it provides new historical data on (1) the reigns and genealogy of the hitherto little-known "Apracarajas" of Bajaur, and (2) the long-standing problem of the origin of the Vikrama era of 58-7 B.C. Since the historical significance of the inscription was not fully discussed by B, and since its reading and translation are subject to differences of opinion (as is so often the case with Kharosthi inscriptions), I have undertaken to present a new interpretation of the record in this article.

The inscription is a typical Buddhist dedication of a relic casket containing bodily relics (sarira) of the Buddha (bhagavato sakyamunisa) in Kharosthi script of the Scythian period (c. 1st century B.C.-1st century A.D.) and in the northwestern Prakrit dialect peculiar to Kharosthi documents. The dialect also shows a not-unusual admixture of non-Indic (i.e., Greek and Iranian) vocabulary.

Before proceeding to a discussion of the historical value of the inscription, I will first offer my reading and translation of it. These differ considerably from B's, and such points of divergence in the text and translation will be indicated by italics. My readings are taken directly from the plates illustrating the casket in B's article; I have not seen the original. I have added punctuation marks to the text to facilitate its reading and interpretation.

I. The "Avaca"' Inscription.

READING:

Line 1 [on the body of the casket] samvatsarae tresathimae 20 20 20 3 maharayasa ayasa atidasa kartiasa masasa divasae sodasae imena cetrike ksana idravarme kumare apracaraja-putre

2 ime bhagavato sakyamunisa sarira pradithaveti thiae gabhirae a pradithavitaprave (pa)tese. bramhapuna prasavati, sadha maduna ru-khanaka aji-putrae apracaraja-bharyae

3 sadha maulena ramakena, sadha maulanie dasakae, sadha spasadarehi -- vasavadatae, maha(e)dae, nikae ca, gahinie ya utarae.

4 pitu a puyae visnuvarmasa. avacarayasa

5 bhrada vaga stratego puyaite viyayamitro ya. avacaraya-maduka sabhaedata puyita.

6 [on the lid[2]] ime ca sarira muryaka-linate thubute ki (?) da-padiharia. avi ya ahethima-jimami pratithavanami pratitha(vita).

7 vasia pamcaviso.

TRANSLATION:

1 In the year sixty-three (63) of the late Maharaja Aya (Azes), on the sixteenth day of the month Karttika; at this auspicious (?) time Prince Indravarman, son of the Apracaraja,

2 establishes these body-relics of the Lord Sakyamuni in a long-lasting and revered place which is furnished with drinking wells. He (thereby) creates divine merit (for himself, and) together with (his) mother Ru-khanaka, daughter of Aji (and) wife of the Apracaraja,

3 with (his) maternal uncle Ramaka, with (his) maternal uncle's wife Dasaka, (and) with his sisters and wife -- (his sisters) Vasavadata (Vasavadatta), Mahaeda (?), and Nika, and (his) wife Utara (Uttara).

4 And (this is also done) for the honor of his father Visnuvarman. The Avacaraya's

5 brother, the Lord Commander Viyayamitra, is honored too. The mother of the Avacaraya, Sabhaedata, is (also) honored.

6 And these body-relics were prepared and presented from the stupa from (i.e., in) the Muryaka cave. And they were established in the Ahethimajima relic-shrine.

7 (In) the twenty-fifth (regnal) year.

NOTES:

Line 1:

samvatsarae tresathimae: The year 63 of the "Vikrama" era of 58-7 B.C., as will be shown in Part III of this paper. The inscription was therefore written in 5-6 A.D.

maharayasa ayasa atidasa -- The significance of this phrase will be discussed below in Part III.

imena cetrike ksana: The expression is somewhat irregular, the usual phrase in Kharosthi inscriptions being ise ksunammi or the like. For the instrumental imena cf. the Wardak vase inscription, line 1, imena gadrigrena (= Sansrit ghatikaya?) (K 170). cetrike (B reads -ka) is also unusual, but cf. the Saddo inscription (N. G. Majumdar, "List of Kharosthi Inscriptions" in Journal and Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 20, 1924, 19, no. 57) . . . masaisa cetra di (vaase) ... I translate as it as B, 'auspicious,' with reservations. ksana without case ending is perhaps, as B suggests (10) a scribal error for ksane or ksanena.

Line 2:

pradithavidaprave: = Sanskrit *pratisthapita-prape (pra-pa, 'drinking well') (as B).

a: Three forms of the word for 'and' appear in this inscription: ca (lines 3, 6), ya (lines 3, 5, 6), and a (lines 2, 4). ya in the combination avi va = api ca (as here in 1.6) is elsewhere attested in Kharosthi in the Wardak vase inscription, 1.3 (K 168; see also his remarks on xcix); ya = ca also occurs twice in line 4 of the Kalawan inscription (SI 132). a is not known elsewhere in Kharosthi, but its sense is clear from the context in both occurrences in this inscription. It is probably no more than a graphic variant of the form ya, without representation of the glide y.

bramhapuna: B reads bramu-; but the second aksara is not the same as the mu of muryaka, 1.6. It appears to resemble the letter read as m[h]a in 1.3 of the Peshawar Museum inscription, K 157 and pl. xxx. The metathesis of h and m is typical of Prakrit in general.

The phrase brahmapuna prasavati is reminiscent of pumnam pasavati in Asokan rock edict IX.

Line 3:

maidlanie dasakae: B reads ma'ulani adasaka'e; but the right-hand stroke indicating the vowel e on the fifth character is clear in the photograph, and this provides the appropriate oblique feminine case ending of the first word. maulani = Sanskrit matulani, which means 'maternal uncle's wife,' not 'maternal aunt,' as B translates. The name is thus Dasaka (= Daksaka?), not Adasaka. sadha spasadarehi - vasavadatae, maha(e)dae, nikae ca, gahinie ya: B reads sadha s'pasa-darehi vasavadata'e mahaphida anika'e cagahine aya-utara'e, 'with sister (and) wife Vasavadata, in honor of grandfather Kinsman Cagahine and of (his) noble (and) eminent . . .' According to him (11), "Only one name follows" the phrase sadha spasadarehi; but a re-reading of the inscription shows that this is not so. The text after the following word vasavadata reads maha, then a letter which is not completely clear but looks like e. These are followed by two disconnected parallel slanting lines, which do not seem to represent any letters; nor is a mark of punctuation to be expected here. B apparently takes the first line as an i-vowel marker to be applied to the preceding aksara, which he reads as ph. But the line does not actually touch that letter, and is much longer than a normal i diacritic; and in any case the second parallel line is still left unexplained. The word is read by B as mahaphida, taken as a (very irregular) correspondent to Sanskrit pitamaha 'grandfather,' with an unattested reversal of the order of words in the compound and unexplained aspiration of the p.

I am inclined to dismiss both unattached lines as extraneous marks, and read the word as mahaedae, a feminine name, i.e., that of the second sister of Indravarman. (Note that a similar pair of superfluous parallel lines appears in the Wardak vase inscription between lines 2 and 3; K pl. xxxiii, upper left.) The last letter is again, as in maulanie, clearly e and not a, for the feminine oblique ending. For the form of the name, cf. sabhaedata below, 1.5.

The next four aksaras are read as in B, but divided as nikae ca, giving the name of Indravarman's third and last sister. Following this I read and divide gahinie ya utarae; and once again the vowels -ie are clear. gahini is obviously Sanskrit grhini 'wife'; ya is = ca (see note on a, line 2); and utara = Uttara is Indravarman's wife's name. Thus B's anikae = Greek [x] 'kinsman,' questionable at best,[3] is unnecessary, as is utara = udara, with unexplained devoicing.

The word gahini is intended to identify Utara as the wife, as distinct from the three sisters whose names precede it; for without this additional specification, it would not be clear from the preceding dvandva compound spasadarehi which of the names were sisters and which the wife.

Line 4:

avacarayasa: This variant spelling (also in 1.5) for apracaraja is slightly surprising. While -y- for -j- intervocalically is normal, -v- for -pr- is not. The combination pr is common and stable in the north-western Prakrit of the Kharosthi inscriptions (K cvii). Intervocalic -p- often becomes -v-, as in other Prakrits; but -pr- → -v- is otherwise unattested, as far as I have been able to determine. While a subscript or "otiose" (K 166) r is often added to such consonants as k, g, s, s, etc., apparently to indicate spirantization (K c, cxxv), this does not normally occur with p. Thus the r in pra seems to be the full semi-vowel, not an "otiose" diacritic. The unusual alternation of pr/v suggests a non-Sanskritic origin for the word apraca, and such proposed derivations as apratyak and apracya no longer seem likely. The word is probably a non- Sanskritic place name for the region now known as Bajaur. Since Kharosthi does not indicate long vowels, the quantities are indeterminate; the word is actually a{pr/v}aca. For convenience's sake, the full term will be written as "Apracaraja."

Line 5:

vaga: Iranian baga, to be taken here as a royal title (B 12) with stratego (Greek [x]), rather than as the personal name of the Apracaraja's brother (as B). Compare the similar use of [x] = baga in the Surkh Kotal Bactrian inscription, line 1: [x], and Henning's remarks thereon in BSOAS 23, 1960, 51 and 52, note 5.

viyayamitro ya: This (and not vaga) is the personal name of the Commander, the king's brother. It is a variant spelling of the name Vijayamitra/ Viyakamitra of the Bajaur casket inscriptions (below, part II); intervocalic -j- frequently becomes -y- in the Kharosthi dialect. The nominative termination here, and in stratego, is surprising. Most of the nominative singular masculine nouns in this inscription end in -e, and Kharosthi texts usually have nominatives in either -e or -o, but not both. But the readings are clear (though B has stratega). B reads viyayamiroya, with "the suffix -oya-" of "a derivative feminine noun" (B 12), as the name of the following "aunt" of the king; but this would violate the pattern, consistent throughout the inscription, of giving the term of relation first, then the personal name. The name is Viyayamitra, masculine, applying to the foregoing "brother." maduka: Sanskrit matrka, 'mother,' not 'maternal aunt' (B 12).

sabhaedata: A proper name, of the king's mother according to the pattern noted above of names follow- ing relation terms. Cf. the other female names in the family, Vasavadata and (?) Mahaeda. (B'2 has "'re- vered' from older sabhdjaya- 'to honor', with secondary -d- for-y-.")

Line 6:

kida-padiharia: The construction here seems to require a past participle ( = pratihrta 'presented'), though the form is unusual; elision of intervocalic -t- is abnormal in Kharosthi (but cf. thiae?* sthitake in line 2; B 10). The form looks more like a gerund, but this would not fit the syntax. For the compound form, B (4) compares the type drsta-nasta. The h seems clear, though B reads b (padibaria < -bharita).

avi ya: = api ca; cf. note on a, line 2.

ahethimajimami: I prefer to take this as the proper name (probably after the name of its founder) of the relic shrine (pratithavana = pratisthapana), rather than as B's 'highest-central,' < ahethi 'not lowest' + majima < majjhima < madhyama, with unexplained deaspiration (4, 10), Ahethi- is more probably related to Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit ahethaka 'non-injurious (person)' (Franklin Edgerton, Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Dictionary, 86b).

pratitha(vita): The last two aksaras look like -thisa, but the context rules this out.

Line 7:

vasia: This must be = varsa, or rather varsika, though the usual Kharosthi form is vasa; rather than B's <di>-vasi'a 'day' (3, 10). varsa is used in the sense of regnal year' as distinct from samvatsara 'year of an era', as in the Takht-i-bahi inscription (K 62): maha-rayasa Guduvharasa vas[*e] 20 4 1 1 1 sa[m]ba [tsarae ti]satimae 1 100 1 1 1 .... The regnal year here is presumably that of the Apracaraja.

II. The Apracarajas of Bajaur

The dynasty of rulers of the 1st century B.C. and 1st century A.D. bearing the titles apracaraja and stratega is known from the Bajaur (Shinkot) casket inscriptions (see note 1), and from the coins of three members of the family, Aspavarman, Indravarman, and Sasa. These kings were the hereditary rulers of the region now known as Bajaur, situated along the western border of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province, to the west of Swat. The new Kharosthi inscription vastly increases our knowledge of this dynasty. The co-dedication of the relics by the prince together with various family members enables us to reconstruct a family line, not only of the kings themselves, but of their brothers, wives, and other relatives; a body of information much like that derived for the early Mathura Ksatrapas from the co-dedications of the Lion-capital inscriptions (see the diagram in K 47). The family tree of the Apracarajas is derived from the new inscription as follows:4


[i]Sabhaedata Aji Stratega Viyayamitra Apracaraja Visnuvarman Rukhanaka Ramaka Dasaka Utara Kumara Indravarman Vasavadata Mahaeda(?) Nika

This tree may be further developed with the genealogical information obtained from the other epigraphic and numismatic material mentioned above:


? = Sabhaedata Aji Apracaraja/ Stratega Viyayamitra Apracaraja Visnuvarman = Rukhanaka Ramaka Dasaka Utara = Kumara Indravarman Vasavadata Mahaeda(?) Nika Stratega Aspavarman ? Maharaja Sasa

The additional title apracaraja for Viyayamitra, who is stratega in the new inscription, is derived from the Bajaur inscription. As this is the other major source for the history of the Bajaur kings, and as it both clarifies and is clarified by the new inscription, it will be helpful here to summarize its contents and the controversies about it.

The casket bears five separate short passages (A through E) in Kharosthi script, of which two are fragmentary. These are divided into two groups, the second group having been added to the previously inscribed casket at a considerably later date.5 The earlier group consists of the three fragmentary lines of A written on the lid of the casket, which apparently contained a date (the number is broken off) in the reign of minedrasa maharajasa, i.e., the famous indo-Greek king Menander, the Milinda of Buddhist texts, who ruled in the second century B.C. The later group comprises inscriptions C-E, which record the re-dedication of the casket, which had been damaged and neglected, by vijayamitrena apracarajena (D-3). The same name occurs also in C-1, vijaya[mitre]na.... (Inscription C is on the lid of the casket, which is broken. The remaining inscriptions are on the body of the casket and are complete.)

The remaining inscription, B, is the subject of a controversy which is crucial to the understanding of the history of the Bajaur kings -- and which, I believe, can now be solved with the aid of the new inscription. B is written on the inside of the casket, between lines 1 and 2 of inscription D, and reads viyakamitrasa apracarajasa. This inscription was attributed by the first editor, N. G. Majumdar, to the earlier group, and interpreted as meaning that the casket was originally dedicated as "(The gift) of Viyakamitra, who has no king as his adversary" (EI 24, 7). Konow, however, has convincingly argued that it belongs to the later group of inscriptions, and was added on as a postscript or afterthought to the regnal year given in D-2, vasaye pamcamaye 4 1.

Konow's position finds its strongest support in the paleographic argument. The form of the two s-s in inscription B are of the open-sided variety which is seen in the later inscriptions C-E, and which is characteristic of later stages of the Kharosthi script; while s in inscription A has the earlier closed form. It is true, as Majumdar points out (2) that the end of line D-2 seems to have been curved downward toward the center of the bowl to avoid inscription B, which must therefore (according to Majumdar) have been written before D. But one could just as well argue that line D-2 was inscribed (with the characteristic and notorious casual style of Kharosthi scribes) out of the proper line; and that the scribe who added B later took advantage of the resulting extra space between lines D-1 and 2. Konow's paleographic analysis, utilizing the highly reliable test of the forms of Kharosthi s, is certainly stronger than Majumdar's argument based on inconclusive assumptions about the arrangement of the lines.

The argument over the attribution of inscription B to the earlier or later groups, trivial as it may seem, has important historical consequences. If one goes with Majumdar (and D. C. Sircar), putting B in the earlier group, it appears that there was an early Apracaraja named Viyakamitra, who ruled as a subordinate to the Greek emperor Menander (since he dated his inscription by the latter's rule) in the second century B.C. This Viyakamitra is then presumed to be the father or grandfather (Sircar, SI 103, note 1) of the later Apracaraja Vijayamitra of inscriptions C and D.

If, on the other hand, one accepts Konow's view and places B with the later group, then there is no longer any question of an Apracaraja in Menander's time. Rather, there are the names Viyakamitra (B) and Vijayamitra (C-1, D-3), both bearing the title Apracaraja, at the time of the later inscriptions (estimated by Konow as dating from about the middle of the first century B.C.). But, as Konow (NIA 2, 1939-40, 642) observes, "it would be absurd to assume the existence of two contemporaneous kings, Viyakamitra and Vijayamitra, both using the epithet apracaraja." He therefore concludes that the two names are actually merely orthographic variants, and refer to the same person. The different spellings of one name in the same document can be explained on the grounds that, as previously mentioned, the inscription B which contains the deviant form Viyakamitra is an addition -- a marginal gloss, so to speak -- in a different hand, intended to clarify that the regnal date in D-2 is that of Vijaya-/ Viyakamitra.

This ingenious suggestion is justified by Konow on the basis of similar orthographic and/or phonetic variations in Kharosthi. j/y is well-known; for instance, Aja and Aya for the name of King Azes (as he is called in Greek). k for y (if Vijaya- is in fact the original or proper form of the name, which is not absolutely certain) is more difficult, but Konow does cite such examples as udaka for udaya in Kharosthi manuscripts.

The crux of the question of the placement of inscription B of the Bajaur casket, and of the historical consequences thereof, thus rests of the validity of Konow's identification of Vijayamitra = Viyakamitra.

It is here that the new inscription comes to our aid, for the name Viyayamitra therein (line 5) presents a third variant, an intermediate form, of what can only be the same name. Both of the intervocalic consonants -j- and -y- were subject to phonetic change in northwestern Prakrit; -j- to -y- (as above; also K xcix-c), and -y- to a palatal fricative for which Kharosthi has no sign proper, but which may be written as -y-, -k-, or -g(r)- (K cv-cvi). We have, in other words, in the three forms Vijaya-/Viyaka-/Viyayamitra of the two inscriptions different representations of the same name; the first form preserving the Sanskrit orthography, the others being different attempts to represent the actual colloquial pronunciation ( Viyaya), which cannot be adequately rendered in an Indic script which characteristically lacks symbols for spirants.

If it may be considered settled that there was only one Apracaraja in the Bajaur inscriptions, those inscriptions can now be dated by their relation to the new inscription through the identification of Vijaya-/ Viyakamitra of the former with Viyayamitra of the latter. It may be assumed that the Bajaur casket is the older of the two inscriptions, both on the grounds of its connection with inscriptions as old as the time of Menander, and of chronological data to be examined later (see note 8). Vijayamitra must have been elevated, between the time of the two inscriptions, from Apracaraja, or local king, to Stratega, or commander, under the emperor Azes 11. (This too will be explained in detail below.) At the time of the new inscription, Vijayamitra's successor as Apracaraja, Visnuvarman, was in his 25th regnal year, which corresponds to 5 A.D. Thus he became Apracaraja in 20 B.C.; so the later Bajaur inscription, in which Vijayamitra is still Apracaraja, must be sometime, but probably not too many years, before 20 B.C. It may be dated to c. 30-20 B.C.6

This date is not far off from Konow's original estimate on paleographic grounds of "the middle of the first century B.C." (NIA 2, 1939-40, 641) for the later inscriptions on the Bajaur casket. Moreover, his citation of their "rather close agreement with the palaeography of the Mathura Lion Capital" (ibid.), which is dated at c. 10 A.D. by Sircar (AIU 133), would tend to move the date up somewhat toward the range now established by the synchronization with the new inscription. Finally, the new data also endorse Konow's estimate that the younger Bajaur group "must be about a century later" (NIA 2, 644) than the earlier inscriptions of the time of Menander.

The later members of the Bajaur line as given in the second family tree are clearly attested by coins. Aspacarman is well-known from coins issued jointly with the kings Azes [11] and Gondophernes with the Kharosthi legend indravarmaputrasa aspavarmasa strategasa javatasa, "(Coin) of Aspavarman, victorious commander, son of Indravarman" (R. B. Whitehead, NC, 6th series, 4, 1944, 99-101). Sasa is known from coins (cf. note 6) with the legend maharajasa aspabhratapu-trasa tratarasa sasasa," (Coin) of Maharaja Sasa, savior, nephew of Aspa" (ibid. 101). Aspa here is almost certainly Aspavarman; the name of his brother, Sasa's father, is unknown.

The history of the Bajaur dynasty of Apracarajas can now be reconstructed in some detail from the data of the two inscriptions and the coins. They first appear in history at the time of the fifth regnal year of Vijayamitra as Apracaraja, c. 30-20 B.C., in the later inscriptions on the Shinkot casket. There is no indication in this document that they were subordinated to the greater Scytho-Parthian dynasty centered in Taxila, under the emperor Azes II or Azilises; but there may well have been some such association even at this early period. The old theory that Viyakamitra was the father or grandfather of Vijayamitra and a feudatory of Menander must now be discarded. The Bajaur kings had no connections with the Greeks, other than their re-dedication of the Shinkot casket of Menander's time.

Then, at least 25 years later, in the new "Avaca" inscription of 5 A.D., we find Vijayamitra serving as stratega to an unspecified emperor, either Azilises or more likely Azes II,[7] while his younger brother,[8] the previously unknown Visnuvarman, is now apracaraja, and the latter's son Indravarman is kumara or heir-apparent.[9] The fact that Vijayamitra has been elevated from apracaraja to stratega indicates that the latter office was the senior position, while the post of apracaraja, or local ruler, was the junior position occupied by the younger brother or son of the stratega.

From coins of presumably a slightly later date we next find Indravarman ruling as apracaraja. He must have succeeded his father Visnuvarman in that position, apparently (see note 9) while Vijayamitra was still stratega to the Indo-Scythian emperor.

It is not known whether Indravarman ever ruled as stratega; nor can it be said who succeeded him as apracaraja. His son Aspavarman was stratega to Azes II not long after the time of the new inscription (5 A.D.), since Azes II ceased to rule in c. 20 A.D. This indicates that Indravarman's rule must have been fairly short.

Aspavarman continued to serve as stratega under Gondophernes, who succeeded Azes II. Finally, Aspavarman's nephew Sasa ruled as maharaja in conjunction (NC 1944, 101) with the same emperor. At this point probably in the second quarter of the first century A.D. the line of the Bajaur kings fades from history.

III. The Origin of the Vikrama Era

By way of background for the discussion of the importance of the new "Avaca" inscription for the problem of the origin of the "Vikrama Samvat" of 58 B.C., a brief summary of the epigraphic data and the views of various scholars on the subject is given below.[10]

1. Epigraphic data: The range of inscriptional dates which belong to, or are believed to belong to[11] the era of 58 B.C., are listed below, grouped according to the several different names or titles applied at different historical periods to the era.[12]

a. Inscriptions dated in the years of Aya or Aja: 134 (Kalawan) and 136 (Taxila silver scroll). To these must now be added, of course, the new inscription of the year 63.

b. Inscriptions dated in Krta years: 282 (Nandsa) through 481 (Nagari).

c. Inscriptions dated in Malava years: 461 (Mandasor) through 936 (Gyaraspur). (In the last inscription in b and the first in c, the date is designated with both terms Krta and Malava. The combination of the two names in this period suggests a transitional stage.

d. Inscriptions dated in Vikrama or Vikramaditya years: 898 (Dholpur),[13] and many inscriptions thereafter.

In addition, from the fifth century A.D. on, many dates in this era are denoted by neutral terms for "year," especially samvat, and also sasvatsara, varsa, etc. 2.

Opinions on the origin of the Vikrama era: The following are only the most authoritative or widely held views on the problem. The list is not meant to be comprehensive.

a. The traditionalist view is that the era was founded by an Indian king Vikramaditya, identified with either the geographical region of Malwa (Malava), or the tribal republic (gana) Malava. According to this view, which finds its main support in the Jaina historical text Kalakacaryakathanaka and in popular traditions, Vikramaditya drove the Sakas (Scythians) from Uj-jayini (Ujjain) and founded the era which bears his name in celebration of this triumph.

This view has been espoused by, among others, R. B. Pandey (Proceedings of the All-India Oriental Conference, Benares, 1943-4, 503-9); Harihar Nivas Dvivedi (VV 131-2); and R. C. Majumdar (VV 302). It also appears to find some support from Konow (JRAS 1932, 953, 955).

The objections to this tradionalist view are serious. First, there is no epigraphic or numismatic evidence for any king called Vikramaditya in the first century B.C. Second, and more cogently, the theory fails to explain why, if Vikramaditya founded the era in 58 B.C., his name is never applied to it until at least eight and a half centuries later (see note 13).

b. F. W. Thomas (JRA S 1914, 414) and K. P. Jayaswal (JBORS 16, 1936, 251) believe that the era was founded by the Malava gana to celebrate their "tribal independence" (Thomas) or their overthrow of the Sakas (Jayaswal). According to Jayaswal, the Vikramaditya for whom the era was (later) named was the Satavahana king Gautamiputra Satakarni, who he says also took part in the expulsion of the Sakas.

The objections to this theory are essentially the same as to the preceding one. The events described are not corroborated by any firm archaeological evidence, and the name Malava, invoked to explain the origin of the era, was not actually applied to it until over 500 years later.

c. A. S. Altekar (VV 16-9) attributes the foundation of the Vikrama era to a "king, general, or president" of the Malava tribe named Krta.

Here again, the name Krta for the era in question does not occur until over three centuries after its foundation; and the existence of such a historical figure is, as Altekar himself cautiously admits (19), purely speculative.

d. D. R. Bhandarkar (VV 57-69) suggests that the era may have been established by the Sunga king Pusyamitra who, in overthrowing the Buddhists and re-establishing orthodox Brahmanism set up, as it were, a new krtayuga, or golden age.

 This theory has little to support it and has not won any significant support.

e. J. F. Fleet (JRAS 1905, 232-3) was of the opinion that the Vikrama era "was certainly founded . . . by Kaniska." Subsequent epigraphic and archaeological discoveries have conclusively disproven this view.

f. The theory that the Scytho-Parthian king Azes I was the originator of the Vikrama era of 58 B.C. was first proposed by Sir John Marshall (JRAS 1914, 977) in reference to the Taxila silver scroll, which is dated in the year 136 "ayasa." Marshall interpreted that word as meaning 'of Azes,' Aya being the Prakrit form of the name, as it also appears in the Kharosthi legends of his coins. This interpretation was at first disputed by Konow (K 71-3), but was confirmed by the subsequent discovery of the Kalawan inscription dated in the year 134 "ajasa," obviously a mere graphic variant of ayasa, 'of Azes.'

On the west side of the tank the Stupa K1 is also worthy of notice. Observe in particular the seated image of the Buddha in the niche on the northern side, and also the cornice and other details of a distinctively Hellenistic character.

On to the north side of this stupa were subsequently built several small chambers, probably chapels, facing north. They stand on a common base adorned with a row of stunted pilasters alternating with niches of the same design as those above the terrace of the Main Stupa, namely, trefoil arches and doorways with sloping jambs in which figures of the Buddha were placed.

From this point it is well worth while to ascend the higher ground to the north and take a bird's-eye view of the whole site and of the surrounding country (PI. IX). Five years ago the ground level of the whole excavated area was little lower than this elevated plateau, and standing on the edge of the latter we get a good idea of the amount of debris that had to be shifted before this array of buildings could be exposed to view. The point to which this debris rose around the Great Stupa itself is still clearly visible on the sides of the structure.

As to the character of the remains that still lie buried beneath the plateau on which we are standing, a clear indication is afforded by other Buddhist sites in the neighbourhood. If the visitor will look at the other eminences in the valley, he will see that many of them are crowned by groups of ancient ruins, and he will observe that in each group there is a circular mound standing side by side with a square one. In each of these eases the circular mound covers the remains of a Buddhist stupa, and the square one adjoining it the remains of a monastery. Similarly, at the Dharmarajika Stupa, which was the chief monument of its kind at Taxila, it may be taken for granted that quarters were provided for the monks in close proximity to the sacred edifice, and it is obvious from the configuration of the ground that these quarters must have occupied the northern part of the site. To this monastery no doubt belong the high and massive walls which have been laid bare on the eastern side of the plateau, but judging by the results obtained from other trial trenches it is doubtful if this area would repay excavation.

Descending again to the lower level we pass, on our right hand, the shrine H1 which was probably intended for an image of the Dying Buddha. This building exhibits three types of masonry, representing three different periods of construction. In the original shrine the stonework is of the small diaper pattern, but subsequently this shrine was strengthened and enlarged by the addition of a contiguous wall in the larger diaper style, as well as of a second wall enclosing a pradakshina passage and portico in front. Later on, when the level had risen several feet, additions in semi-ashlar masonry were made, and other repairs were carried out at a still later date. The only minor antiquities of interest in this building were 28 debased silver coins of the Greek king Zoilus (PI. III, 14). They were brought to light beneath the foundation of the earliest chapel, where they appear to have been deposited before the site was occupied by the Buddhists.

The two small pits M4 are of interest only as affording some evidence as to the age when the Gandhara School of Art was flourishing. They were used for the mixing of lime stucco and their floors were composed of Gandhara reliefs laid face downwards. As the reliefs in question were already in a sadly worn and damaged condition before they were let into the floor, it may safely be inferred that a considerable period—say a century or more—had elapsed between the time when they were carved and the construction of the pits. But from the character of their walls the latter appear to have been constructed in the 3rd or 4th century A.D. and it follows, therefore, that the reliefs cannot be assigned to a later date than the 2nd or 3rd century A.D. Evidence of a precisely similar character was also obtained from the chamber B17 on the eastern side of the Great Stupa.

The complex of chambers G1 to G8 comprises chapels erected at different periods and in different styles of masonry. From an architectural point of view they are in no way remarkable, but the chapel G5 merits notice, because it was here that one of the most interesting relics yet discovered in India was unearthed. The find was made near the back wall of the chapel opposite the Main Stupa and about a foot below the original floor. It consisted of a steatite vessel with a silver vase inside, and in the vase an inscribed scroll and a small gold casket containing some minute bone relics. A heavy stone placed over the deposit had, unfortunately, been crushed down by the fall of the roof, and had broken both the steatite vessel and the silver vase, but had left the gold casket uninjured, and had chipped only a few fragments from the edge of the scroll, nearly all of which were fortunately recovered (Pl. VII). The inscription, which is in the Kharoshthi character and dated in the year 136 (circa 78 A.D.), records that the relics were those of the Lord Buddha himself. It reads as follows:

L. 1. Sa 100. 20. 10. 4. 1. 1. Ayasa Ashadasa masasa divase 10. 4. 1., isa divase pradistavita Bhagavato dhatu[o] Ura[sa]—

L. 2. kena Lotaphria-putrana Bahaliena Noachae nagare vastavena tena imc pradistavita Bhagavato dhatuo Dhamara—

L. 3. ie Tachhasie Tanuvae Bodhisatvagahami maha-rajasa rajatirajasa devaputrasa Khushanasa aroga-dachhinae

L. 4. sarva-buddhana puyae prachaja-hudhana puyae araha[ta*]na puyae sarvasa [tva*] na puyae mata-pitu puyae mitra-macha-nati-sa—

L. 5. lohi[ta*]na puyae atmano arogadachhinae nianae hotu [a], de samaparichago.


PLATE VII. DHARMARAJIKA STUPA: SILVER SCROLL INSCRIPTION AND TRANSCRIPT.

"In the year 136 of Azes, on the 15th day of the month of Ashadha, on this day relics of the Holy One (Buddha) were enshrined by Urasakes(?), son of Lotaphria, a man of Balkh, resident at the town of Noacha. By him these relics of the Holy One were enshrined in the Bodhisattva chapel at the Dharmarajika stupa in the district of Tanuva at Takshasila, for the bestowal of perfect health upon the great king, king of kings, the divine Kushana; for the veneration of all Buddhas; for the veneration of the private Buddhas; for the veneration of arhats; for the veneration of all sentient beings; for the veneration of (his) parents; for the veneration of (his) friends, advisers, kinsmen, and blood-relations, for the bestowal of perfect health upon himself. May this gift be ...........".[1]  

-- A Guide to Taxila, by Sir John Marshal, KT., C.I.E., M.A., Ltt.D., F.S.A., Hon.A.R.I.B.A., ETC., Director General of Archaeology in India, 1918

This view has earned qualified support from such historians as Vincent Smith (Early History of India, 4th ed., Oxford, 1967, 244) and E. J. Rapson (Cambridge History of India 1, Cambridge 1922, 571, 581-2 515, 524-5 of the New Delhi reprint edition, 1968). It has been more recently (and more enthusiastically) upheld by A. D. N. Bivar (BSOAS 39, 1976, 335-6). On the whole, the theory that Azes I founded the era which later came to be known as the Vikrama Samvat is the one most widely held by modern scholars. They are not without reservations, as mentioned above, and below in g; but these reservations can now be eliminated by the new "Avaca" inscription.

g. Finally, there are some modern scholars -- notably H. C. Raychaudhuri (Political History of Ancient India, 7th ed., Calcutta 1972, 390 note 1) and D. C. Sircar (AIU 124-5, 127, and Indian Epigraphy, Delhi 1965, 256-7) -- who identify Aya/Aja of the Taxila and Kalawan inscriptions as Azes II, mentioned as the reigning king, and not as the founder of the era. (Konow, cited above as a "traditionalist," seems to agree with this view in JRAS 1932, 953: "The addition ayasa, ajasa need not ... be taken to characterize the era as founded by Azes.") Sircar suggests that the Indo-Parthian king Vonones may have founded the era of 58 B.C.

The view that Azes was the reigning, rather than the founding king of the era of the Kharosthi inscriptions is now ruled out by the evidence of the new inscription.

To review the situation as it now stands: the most probable candidate for founder of the Vikrama era is the Indo-Scythian king Azes I, whose name appears in connection with the earliest inscriptional dates which are attributable to that era. All available chronological data from numismatic and epigraphic material support a date for the beginning of the reign of Azes I around the middle of the first century B.C. Vincent Smith first proposed a succession of Scytho-Parthian kings on the basis of their coin types as Azes I - Azilises - Azes II, followed by Gondophernes. This succession was confirmed by Marshall's excavations at Taxila, and is now widely accepted. Now, the only fixed chronological point in this whole period of history comes (as is so often the case in ancient Indian history) from a correlation with a historical event outside of South Asia. I refer, of course, to the well-known description in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas of that apostle's journey to India in the time of King Gunaphar, who can be none other than the Parthian king Gondophernes. That king must therefore have been ruling toward the middle of the first century A.D. It is thus apriori not unlikely that Azes, who preceded Gondophernes by three reigns, might have begun ruling about a century earlier.

Fortunately, we have more specific chronological data for Gondophernes, which supports the hypothesis presented above. The Takht-i-bahi inscription (K 57-62) is dated in the (unspecified) year (sambatsara) 103 and the regnal year 26 of Gondophernes. The unstated era is generally agreed to be the era of 58-7 B.C. (regardless of the question of its founder), so that the date of the inscription works out to 46 A.D. This year being the 26th of Gondophernes' rule, he began to rule in 20 A.D. If Azes I began his reign in 58 B.C., this leaves a period of 78 years for the three reigns of Azes I and his two successors, Azilises and Azes II, or an average reign of 26 years each; not an improbable figure, in view of the fact that Gondophernes himself ruled for, at the very least, 26 years, and of the general longevity of the Indo-Scythian rulers.[14]

On these epigraphic and historical grounds, then, Azes I is the most likely founder of the Vikrama era. He must have ruled in the first century B.C., and his name is associated with the earliest dates of what is generally agreed to be the "Vikrama" era of 58 B.C. The main reservation until now has been about the nature of that association; does it or does it not designate Azes as the founder of the era? The new inscription which is the subject of this paper answers this question, beyond the slightest doubt, in the affirmative. Not only does it give the earliest date by far, 63, with a specification of the era, but it explicitly attributes it to "the late Maharaja Azes" (maharayasa ayasa atidasa = maharajasya Ayasya atitasva[15]). This phrase can only mean that a dating system originating with the regnal years of Azes I was continued after his death, and thus (after the usual pattern of ancient Indian chronological systems) became, in effect, an era. At first, dates were specified as derived from the "late maharaja"; later on, as in the Kalawan and Taxila dates, the name itself of the king became in effect identical with the era, and the qualifying titles were dropped. (This explains the problem of why Azes' name was mentioned without any title in the latter two inscriptions, this being the main reason that Konow was originally reluctant to take ayasa as the name of a king.) Thus it can no longer be held that Azes of the Kalawan and Taxila inscriptions was the current ruler (i.e., Azes II).

It is now beyond question, from the data of the new inscription, that Azes I "founded" an era, in the sense that his regnal dates were continued after his death as the basis of a chronological system. That this era is identical with that of the Kalawan and Taxila inscriptions of the years 134 and 136 is equally certain. The only remaining problem is whether these dates are in fact in the same era of 58 B.C. which, much later in history, came to be known as the Vikrama era. This has long been held probable, though it must be ad-mitted that there is still no absolute proof of it. Thus, for instance, Marshall himself, who first proposed the now proven theory that Azes was the founder of this earlier Scytho-Parthian era, stipulated that "the identity of the era of Azes and the Vikrama era can hardly be regarded as fully established. . . . It is quite possible that the era of Azes will be found to have commenced a few years earlier or later than 58 B.C." (JRAS 1914, 977).

As it happens, no such evidence to differentiate Azes' era from the Vikrama era has turned up; so that, although absolute proof has not been found either, the weight of probability remains heavily in favor of the identity of the two eras. We have, on the one hand, an era founded by Azes I, with dates up to 136, which must have begun around the middle of the first century B.C. On the other hand, we have an era beginning in 58 B.C., which is known from inscriptions with dates from 288 up to modern times under various names Krta, Malava, and Vikrama. Two interpretations are possible: either (1) that there were two eras of almost the same date, one of which died out in its second century, and the other of which is not attested until the 288th year of its use; or (2) that the two are the same era, and that the change of name from ava(sa) or "Azes' ", to Krta was merely the first of several such changes which the era was to undergo. I feel there can be no question that the second alternative is far more likely,[16] and that therefore the longstanding problem of the origin of the Vikrama era can now be considered solved: Azes I was the founder of the Vikrama era.

One problem concerning the historical development of the Vikrama era remains. This is the question of the origin and meaning of the term krta applied in the 3rd to 5th centuries to the Vikrama era. Various suggestions have been offered for the explanation of krta (among them Altekar's theory cited above in section III. 2 c), but, as Sircar concludes, "the real significance of this name is yet unknown."[17] The origin and development of the later names of the era, Malava and, of course, Vikram(aditya), have been fully explained by Sircar.[18]

POSTSCRIPT:

While this article was in the press, the same inscription was edited and discussed by Dr. B. N. Mukherjee in "An Interesting Kharosthi Inscription" (Journal of Ancient Indian History 11, 1978, 93-114). It was therefore not possible to refer to Dr. Mukherjee's version in this paper. While we have agreed as to the overall historical significance of the inscription, the reader will notice several differences in specific points of textual and historical interpretation.

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Part 2 of 2

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Notes:

* The following abbreviations are used in this article:

AIU: The Age of Imperial Unity, ed. R. C. Majumdar (Vol. II of The History and Culture of the Indian People, 4th ed. Bombay, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1968).

B: H. W. Bailey, "Two Kharosthi Casket Inscriptions from Avaca," JRAS, 1978, 3-13.

BSOAS: Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies.

EI: Epigraphia Indica.

JBORS: Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society.

JRAS: Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.

K: Sten Konow, Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, Vol. II Part 1: Kharoshthi Inscriptions (Calcutta, Government of India, 1929).

NC: Numismatic Chronicle

NIA: New Indian Antiquary

SI: Select Inscriptions Bearing on Indian History and Civilization, Vol. 1, Dines Chandra Sircar. 2nd ed. (Calcutta, University of Calcutta, 1965).

VV: Vikrama Volume, ed. Radha Kumud Mookerji (Ujjain, Scindia Oriental Institute, 1948).

1 Avaca refers to the name of the kingdom of the rulers (the Apraca- or Avaca-rajas) in the inscription, not to its findspot. The latter is not mentioned and is presumably unknown; the inscribed casket is located only "in the collection of Professor Samuel Eilenherg" (B 3). The casket may be assumed, however, to have come from the same region as the related Bajaur (Shinkot) relic casket; see N. G. Majumdar, EI 24, 1937, 1-8; D. C. Sircar, EI 26, 1939, 318-21 and SI 102-6; Sten Konow, NIA 2, 1939-40, 639-48 and EI 27, 1947, 52-8.

2 As B notes (4), the two lines on the lid of the casket are a "supplement" to the main part of the inscription on the body of the casket. They were evidently placed on the lid because the engraver ran out of space at the bottom of the bowl. I have therefore numbered the lines in order of their actual intended reading, rather than their placement on the casket; thus my lines 1-5 = B's 3-7, and my 6-7 = B's 1-2.

3 The Bajaur casket inscription, part E, is cited as support for the reading; but there too anamkayena = [x] (suggested by Konow in NIA 2, 1939-40, 646) is very doubtful; others, e.g., Sircar (SI 105, especially note 3; 106) read anamkatena = ajnakrta.

4 The family tree derived from my interpretation of the inscription is quite different from that which would follow B's reading:


? Cagahine = ? Viyayamiroya Aji Stratega Vaga Apracaraja Visnuvarma = Rukhanaka Ramaka Adasaka (?) Kumara Indravarma = Vasavadata

5 This is now agreed to by all scholars who have written on the subject. Sircar, who previously doubted that there was a long time between the writing of the two groups, has since expressed his agreement with this view (AIU 115 note 1).

6 There is, however, another problem concerning Vijaya-mitra. According to the new inscription, Visnuvarman is his brother and Indravarman is Visnuvarman's son and Vijayamitra's nephew. But according to R. B. Whitehead's reading (NC, 6th series, Vol. 4, 1944, 102) of the legends of the coins of Indravarman (previously known as "coins of Vijayamitra's son"; see Alexander Cunningham, NC 3rd series, Vol. 10, 1890, 127, 170, pl. xii.7-8, and Whitehead's Catalogue of Coins in the Punjab Museum, Vol. 1, Lahore 1914, 168, Supplementary no. iii and pl. xvii.iii), Indravarman would be the son, not the nephew, of Vijayamitra: Vijayamitraputrasa Itravarmasa apracarajasa. According to Whitehead, the reading is "fairly clear"; but it must be noticed that the portion of the legend which is read as putra is not legible in any of the published specimens. May I suggest that the correct reading might be Vijayamitrabhra-taputrasa, i.e., "nephew of Vijayamitra," thereby eliminating the apparent contradiction between the epigraphic and numismatic sources? The designation of the uncle rather than the father is attested in the coins of Indravarman's son's nephew Sasa (cited below) and in other Indo-Scythian coins (e.g., Whitehead, Lahore Catalogue, coins of Abdegases, 152-3, nos. 61-5); the usage being due to the peculiar Indo-Scythian system of brother-to-brother rather than father-to-son succession.

(This problem, incidentally, arises with B's interpretation of the new inscription as well. Even though B does not have a Vijayamitra as uncle of Indravarman, he does read Visnuvarman as the name of Indravarman's father, as seems unavoidable, thus also contradicting Whitehead's reading of the coin legend.)

7 B (10, 11) suggests that the name Aji (line 2) of the father of Rukhanaka, wife of Apracaraja Visnuvarman, is equal to Aja, by which he presumably means Azes 11. If this is correct, it would indicate that the overlord Azes cemented his alliance with the Bajaur kings by a marital bond making the Apracaraja his son-in-law. The identification Aji = Azes is, however, not at all certain. While Aja for Aya = Azes is attested (in the Kaladn inscription, SI 131), the change of the final vowel is not; nor is B's explanation (10) by reference to the doubtful term ahethi convincing. The suggestion is attractive, but requires confirmation.

8 Visnuvarman must be the younger brother. If Vijayamitra were younger, he would have succeeded Visnuvarman as Apracaraja, and the Bajaur inscription in which he holds this title would have to be later than the new "Avaca" inscription. Then he would have ruled until at least 10 A.D. (5 A.D., date of the new inscription, + 5 regnal years of Vijayamitra in the Bajaur inscription), and probably much longer. But Aspavarman, his grand-nephew, was still ruling as Stratega in the time of Azes[11], whose reign ended by 20 A.D. (the date of Gondophernes' accession) at the latest. This scheme would thus necessitate squeezing one full reign (Indravarman's) and parts of two more (Vijayamitra's and Aspavarman's) into a period of, at most, ten years. It may therefore be taken for granted that Vijayamitra was the elder brother, and that the Bajaur casket is the older of the two inscriptions of this dynasty.

9 If the hypothesis offered in note 6 for the reading of Indravarman's coin legends is correct, it would probably indicate that Visnuvarman died before his elder brother Vijayamitra. The position of Apracaraja would then have passed on to Indravarman, who continued to be heir to senior position of Stratega held by his uncle. This would be the reason that he designated himself as nephew of Vijayamitra, rather than as son of the late Apracaraja, whose title he had already inherited.

10 For full discussions of this and related problems, see the VV, especially the articles of Altekar, Bhandarkar, Dvivedi, Majumdar, and Sircar.

11 I.e., the inscriptions of Aya or Aja; this question will be discussed in detail below.

12 For full data on inscriptions in the era of 58 B.C., see VV pp. 133-6.

13The Dhiniki inscription of 794 is dated in a "Vikrama" year, but the inscription is considered spurious by many scholars (EI 26, 1941-2, 189). Sircar, however, accepts it as legitimate in VV 581.

THE DHINIKI GRANT OF KING JAIKADEVA, TOGETHER WITH SOME REMARKS ON THE VIKRAMA, VALABHI AND GUPTA ERAS.
BY DR. G. BUHLER, C.I.E.

I.—The Grant of Jaikadeva.

The subjoined grant of Jaikadeva, lord of Saurashtra, was dug up during the famine relief operations of 1879-80 in the Undke talao, a tank situated a mile to the north-east of the present village of Dhiniki,[1] but close to the ruins of old Dhiniki in the Okha-mandal district of the Kathiavad peninsula. It was subsequently, in 1881, brought to the notice of my friend Colonel Watson, President of the Rajasthanik Court, by Ajam Vajeshankar G. Ozha of Bhaunagar, who furnished to the former a paper impression of the plates. About the same time another rubbing was sent to me by the Deputy Educational Inspector of Kathiavad, Rao Bahadur Gopalji S. Desai. On my communicating with Colonel Watson regarding the document, I received from him successively another rubbing, a photograph, and finally the original plates themselves, as well as numerous important notes on the historical and geographical questions connected with the grant. Colonel Watson also generously relinquished his intention of editing the grant and made over to me, when he learnt I was anxious to publish the grant, a valuable manuscript article which he had already written.

The grant is written on the inner sides of two plates, measuring 9-3/4 inches by 5, the thinnest and smallest I have ever seen used for a sasana by a ruler of Western India. A small hole through the bottom of the first and the top of the second, shows that they were originally held together by a ring. It is doubtful if the ring bore a seal, because the cognizance of the king, a fish, is engraved at the bottom of Plate II. The preservation of the plates is very good, in spite of the muddy bed in which they must have lain for a long time. Only very few letters in line 2 of Plate I and in the first five lines of Plate II, have been partly destroyed by verdigris. Nevertheless the grant is difficult to read, and some of the names contained in it remain either very doubtful or absolutely undecipherable. One cause of this fact is the extreme slovenliness of the execution. A great many letters have been formed inaccurately and carelessly, and some have not even been finished. In a few cases the punch has also completely gone through the thin sheet of copper. It is perfectly clear that the kansar who transferred the grant to the plates, must have been unskilled and unaccustomed to delicate work. Another circumstance which contributes to the difficulty of the document is that the clerk or Karkun who wrote the MS. copy must have been careless or in a hurry. This is shown by the displacement of the matras, or e strokes, which, as often happens in modern official documents, repeatedly stand over the wrong syllables, e.g. in vade for veda (I. 6), likhyenta for likhyante (I. 10), and by the omission of many superscribed reephas and anusvuras.[2] The alphabet used is the literary alphabet of Western and, probably also, of Central India, which first occurs in the royal sign manual of the Gurjara grants of the 5th century A.D. A few years ago most epigraphists would have unhesitatingly condemned the Dhiniki sasana, on account of the modern appearance of its characters, as a forgery of the 11th or 12th century. Now that Professor Max Muller’s great discovery of the old palm leaves from Japan, the Valabhi plates of Siladitya II, dated Sam. 352,[3] and the excellent facsimile of Dantidurga-Khadgavaloka’s Samangadh plates, dated 675[4] are before the public, it is no longer possible to fall into such an error. On the contrary, it must be conceded that an alphabet closely resembling the modern Devanagari was in general use certainly during the 7th and 8th centuries, and probably at a much earlier date. Though it would seem that this alphabet was regularly used for literary purposes only, it cannot be denied that it sometimes was employed for sasanas also. In order to test a new grant which shows not the archaic “cave characters,” but a more modern looking alphabet, it is only necessary carefully to compare it with the undoubtedly genuine sasanas of the same period, which show the literary alphabet. If we apply these principles to the Dhiniki grant, which is dated Vikrama samvat 794 or A.D. 738, the undoubtedly genuine grant in the literary alphabet which comes nearest to it in point of age is Dantidurga’s sasana of Saka sathyat 675 or A.D. 753 (the Samangadh plates). If due allowance is made for the difference in the size of the letters and the careless execution of the Dhiniki plates, the characters of the two documents are almost identical. The only real differences which I can find occur in the shape of the letters ta and tha. In the Dhiniki grant the ta in aghata (I. 9) has the older round form with a horizontal top-stroke to the right of the letter, but twice in ghata (II. 1) and mahakshapataliku (II. 6), the modern Devanagari form [x]. As regards the tha, it has once, in karanatha (I. 9), the older form [x], and once in paripamthaniyah a very peculiar shape [x] which possibly may be intended for the modern [x] though it is not impossible that it is merely owing to a blunder of the unskilled Kansar. However that may be, these peculiarities cannot be used as arguments against the genuineness of the grant. They are merely instances of the rule to which I have repeatedly called attention, that in Indian epigraphy those forms which are constant in the later documents, occur sporadically in the earlier ones. The truth of this assertion for the case of the form [x] ta is proved by the fact that my unpublished Rathor grant of Dhruvaraja, Akalavarsha of Bharoch, dated Saka samvat 789 or A.D. 867 shows no other form of ta but [x].

The language of the Dhiniki sasana is not quite grammatical Sanskrit, interspersed with a few Prakrit forms and words, apechhya (I. 6) for apekshya and the Gujarati dharu (I. 11-12), instead of pada, “a hill-spur.’’ Its wording differs considerably from that usually adopted by the rulers of Gujarat. For it begins with the date, gives no particulars of the donor’s and the donee’s families, and its chief portion (I. 1-9,) consists of a single sentence. As regards the first and second points, the published grants of Bhimadeva X. and Visaladeva,[5] and some other unpublished Gujarat inscriptions furnish analogies. With respect to the third point, I am not able to adduce instances from Western India. But a good many grants from other parts of India, e. g., the ancient Kadamba sasanas[6] published by Mr. Fleet, especially Nos. I, III, VI, and VII, likewise omit the usual phrases ajnapayati, sambodhayati or anudarsayati, astu vah samviditam yatha maya &c., and contain in their stead the simple dattavan. Some other minor peculiarities, such as the constant use of the word naman after proper names (I. 7; II. 1, 6), the omission of the syllable sa in the compound muntalla-(mudgala)-gotraya, the use of the verse mayi rajni vyaitikrante, &c., of a mangala at the end of the inscription instead of the repetition of the donor’s name are likewise not usual in Gujarat grants, but common enough on the sasanas issued by kings of various other districts.[7] It appears, therefore, that the official who composed the text of the Dhiniki grant did not use one of the old forms current in Gujarat, but, for some reason or other, invented a new one, which, however, does not depart from the general traditions regulating the formalities to be observed in royal edicts.

The donor of the Dhiniki grant is the illustrious Jaikadeva, the lord of the province of Saurashtra, who assumes the proud titles paramabhaittaraka, maharajadhiraja, and paramesvara, and thus claims to be an independent ruler, not owing allegiance to anybody. His capital was Bhumilika, and his cognizance a fish. The name and the fish emblem connect him, it would seem, with Jaika[8] the donor of the Morbi grant, and the fact that he held court in Bhumilika indicates that he belonged to the Jethvas, one of the ancient Rajput clans, whose present representatives are the Ranas of Porbandar. For the word Bhumilika exactly corresponds to the modern Bhumli or Bhumbhli. Though the map of Kathiavad shows several towns and villages of that name, Bhumilika in Saurashtra can only be the deserted capital founded by the Jethvas in the Barda hills, which is still called Bhumli, Bhumbhli, or Ghumli,[9] and at the time of the Jethva ascendancy must have been the capital of Saurashtra, i.e. the whole of south-western Kathiavad. The conjecture, on the other hand, that the donor of the Morbi plate is in some way connected with the grantor of the Dhiniki sasana considerably gains in probability by a tradition, prevalent among the Jethvas and in Kathiavad generally, according to which Morbi was the oldest or one of the oldest seats of the Jethva Rajputs, long before they founded Bhumli. This story, which Colonel J. Watson, the first authority on the mediaeval history of Kathiavad, considers to be perfectly trustworthy, explains how it happens that the Bhumilika fish emblem and the identical name Jaika have been found at Morbi. This is, however, the only point in which the Jethva traditions can be made serviceable to the interpretation of our grant. In other respects the information derived from records of the Porbandar bards and from the present state of things, are rather puzzling than helpful. For though the bardic list enumerates 177 predecessors of the present Rana Vikmatji (Vikramaditya), who are stated to have ruled at Morbi, Bhumli and other places, there is no Jaika among them.[11] As this list is evidently ‘‘made up,” and as it is well known that Indian princes often bear many names, the absence of the name Jaika from the Porbandar list is not a very serious obstacle to the conjecture that Jaika of Bhumilika belongs to the Jethva family. But it precludes the possibility of our learning more regarding him.

Another matter is of somewhat greater importance. The modern tradition derives the origin of the Jethvas from the monkey- god, Hanuman, and it is asserted in Gujarat that, until recent times, the Ranas of Porbandar were pumchherids, i.e., carried in token of their descent a caudal appendage which was lost of late only, owing to the influence of the degenerate Kali age. Owing to his intimate connection with the Jethvas Hanuman is at present the emblem on the Porbandar flag, which does not show a fish. The solution of the difficulty which is thus raised may be attempted in several ways. We may either assume that the Jethvas have changed their cognizance, or that their coat of arms contained of old several emblems, both the fish and Hanuman, and that the latter has alone been retained in modern times. It seems to me that the second explanation is the more probable one. For both the fish and Hanuman belong to the cycle of the Vaishnava legends, the former referring to the Matsyavatara and the second to the Ramavatara of Vishnu. If the Jethvas, as is presumable, were and are Vaishnavas, it is not improbable that they originally used both the fish and Hanuman. Colonel Watson, who agrees with me in this view, points out that the first mythical descendant of Hanuman is called in the bardic list Makaradhaj, i.e. “he who bears a makara in his banner.” If makara denotes in this case a shark or other large fish, it is not impossible that the name refers to the Vishnuitic legends and to the fish emblem on the banner. It deserves also to be noted that on the brackets of the columns of the Naulakha temple at Bhumli,[12] the fish emblem occurs several times, side by side with representations of monkeys. These remarks will suffice to show that the modern tradition is not irreconcilable with the inference drawn from the statements of the two sets of plates, that their donors were Jethvas.

According to Dr. Burgess (loc. cit. p, 181, seqq.), the ruins of Bhumli furnish also some evidence that certain buildings of the town possess a high antiquity. He assigns the temple of Hanuman or Ganapati and some of the Vaishnava temples at the neighbouring Son Kansari, on archaeological grounds, to the eighth or ninth century A.D. This collateral evidence as to the age of the towns of Bhumli, and consequently of the Jethva rule in Kathiavad, is so much the more valuable, as the oldest inscription on funeral monuments at Bhumli dates from Sam. 1118 or 1061-2 A.D. and the name of the Jethvas is mentioned in inscriptions and books of the 13th and 14th centuries only. The oldest mention of the name of the clan, known to me, occurs in the Vastupalacharitas of Rajasekhara and Harshagani where it is asserted[13] that Simha, the maternal uncle of Visaladeva Vaghela (Vikrama samvat 1300-1318) was a Jethva. The evidence of the style of the Bhumli temples, taken together with that of the two grants is, however, strong enough to show that the advent of the Jethvas in Kathiavad must fall at the latest in the sixth or seventh century. The question whether the Morbi and Dhiniki grant belong to the same person or have been issued by two homogenous kings will be discussed in the second part of this paper. It may suffice to state here that the data contained in the two grants alone do not admit of a definitive settlement of the question.

The date of the Dhiniki sasana is given as Vikrama samvat 794, new-moon-day of Karttika, Sunday, under the Nakshatra Jyeshtha. The figure for the year probably refers, as is usual in Indian dates, to completed years, and the grant was therefore issued at the end of Karttika (in Gujarat the first month) of Vikrama samvat 795. On this supposition the day of the week and the Nakshatra have been given correctly. For Karttika vadi 15, 795 Vikrama, corresponds to Sunday, Nov. 16, 738 A.D,, when the Nakshatra was Jyeshtha. The grant further states that an eclipse of the sun occurred on that date. But this is a mistake. An eclipse of the sun, which, however, was not visible in Kathiavad, happened on the new moon of the preceding month Asvina, i.e., on Saturday, October 18, 738 A.D.[14] The well-known fact that the grants were rarely written on the day when the donation was made,[15] permits us to explain the error with respect to the eclipse. It may be safely assumed that the village was given on the last day of Asvina 794, when the calculated eclipse occurred,[16] and that the document was drawn up a month later, on the last day of the following month, Karttika vadi 15, 795. The Karkun forgot to give the two dates separately, and thus made the same muddle as the writer of the Morbi plate, who asserts that the grant was made on the fifth day of the bright half of Phalguna, on the occasion of an eclipse of the sun.

The object of our grant is to convey the village of Dhenika to a Brahmana, called Isvara, who belonged to the Muntalla, (read Mudgala), gotra and to a race the name of which is not decipherable. The correctness of the reading Mudgala is attested by the fact that the Mudgalas really have three pravaras as asserted in the grant.[17] Dhenika is, of course, the name of the ruined village, now called "old Dhiniki,” where the plate has been found. According to the information collected by Colonel Watson and Rao Bahadur G. S. Desai, it was a place of great antiquity. The Rao Bahadur informs me that the ruins contain a palio, or funeral monument, which shows the date Samvat 779 Asad Sudi 2, or 722-23 A.D. If this statement be correct, it certainly furnishes collateral evidence that the village existed in the beginning of the 8th century. The uncertainty in the readings of the names of the boundaries given in the grant makes it difficult to identify them. If it is really true that the ocean is mentioned as the northern boundary, this statement may refer, according to the authorities quoted, either to a large creek, into which some streams, rising northeast and north of old Dhiniki, fall, or to the Ran between Okhamandal and Kathiavad, which, formerly seems to have been more extensive than at present. There are also a good many dhars ‘‘hillspurs or ridges” near Dhiniki, though none of them now bears the name Rohara which the plate mentions. As regards the remaining localities mentioned, I abstain from all attempts at identifications, because the basis afforded by the plate is too unsafe.


PLATE 1 DHINIKI COPPERPLATE GRANT.


PLATE 2 DHINIKI COPPERPLATE GRANT.  

Transcript. Plate I.



Translation. Om! Hail! (When) seven hundred years of Vikrama, exceeded by ninety-four, (in figures) 794 (had passed), in the second half of the month Karttika, at the new moon, on a Sunday, under the constellation Jyeshtha, on the occasion of an eclipse of the sun—on that lunar day, which is preceded by the year, month, half-month and solar day (above mentioned )— the lord of the province of Saurashtra, the supreme sovereign, king of great kings, and supreme lord, the illustrious Jaikadeva, gave—confirming the gift with a libation of water—to-day here in Bhumilika with the approval of his chief minister Bhatta Narayana, his associate in the fulfilment of his duties, knowing the instability of worldly affairs and having regard to (the fact that) the occurrence of an eclipse of the sun is a time for charity, for the increase of his own merit and fame, to the Brahmana, called Isvara (Isvara) who knows the four Vedas, belongs to the Mudgala gotra and to the line of . . . ., and invokes Agni by the names of three ancestors, the village, called Dhenika (situated) in the province of Bhumilika, together with (its) grass, wood and water, and together with its trees and fields (or rows of trees); excepting (former) gifts to the gods. Now the boundaries of this village in the four directions of the compass will be described in order to ensure possession in future times (viz.): to the north, the ocean (?) in Samapakhetra (?); to the east, the Savanagaruja water- course (?) together with (the hillspur called) the Roharadhara; to the Sayalasatakantagaricha (?) as far as the river (?); to the west, the hillspur which runs towards the sea. If the Brahmana, called Isvara enjoys the land of that village of Dhanika, which is defined by these four boundaries, or causes it to be enjoyed (by others), he must not be disturbed by anybody, (for the Smriti says):—‘‘The earth has been enjoyed by many kings, Sagara and others, &c. (and also): "I beseech as a supplicant that other ruler who will be king when my kingdom has passed away, that he may not act against (this my) edict.” This grant has been written by me, the chief keeper of the records, called Narahari. May it be auspicious! Prosperity! (To be continued).

_______________

Notes:

1 The village is called Dhingi in the old maps, Dhaniki on the Trig. Surv. map, and bears also the names Dhinki and Dhanika. It lies south-east of Dvarka and close to the sea.

2 Compare in these respects the Lunavada plates of Siladitya V, Ind. Ant vol. VI, p. 17, seqq. and my Rathor grant, No. IV, to be published shortly in this Journal.

3 Ind. Ant. vol. XI, p. 305 f.

4 Ind. Ant. vol. XI, pp. 110-112.  

5 Ind. Ant. vol. VI, pp. 193-210.

6 Jour. Bom. Br. R. As. Soc. vol. IX, pp. 235-249.

7 See e.g. Dr. F. E. Hall's Chedi grant. Jour. Beng. As. Soc. vol. XXXI, p. 120, 1. 11; p. 122, vs. 41; the Kadamga grants, and the Samangadh plates referred to above.

8 Ind. Ant. Vol. II, p. 257, Professor Bhandarkar reads Jaimka. But I think the third point in the i must be taken for the sign of the long vowel, which in olden times consisted of four points [x] and hence must become later [x].

9 See Archaeol. Reports W. India, vol. II, pp. 181 ff.

10 Watson, Statistical Account of Porehandar, p. 14, seqq.  

11 Watson, loc. cit. pp. 17-20.

12 Burgess, Reports, vol. II, pl. xliii.

13 Ind. Ant, vol. VI, pp. 190-191; vol. XI, p. 99.

14 The astronomical data in this grant have been kindly calculated for me by Professor Jacobi of Munster, Dr. Burgess, and Mr. Hutcheon, of Stonehaven, and Dr. Schram, of the Vienna Observatory. All four gentlemen have independently obtained the same results. A separate calculation has also been made in order to ascertain if "Vikrama'’ could stand for Saka, and a decidedly negative result has been obtained.

15 See e.g. Nasik No. 11 B; Burgess, Reports, vol. IV, p. 106.

16 It may be noted that according to the modern treatises on dana, bathing and gifts are unnecessary on the occasion of calculated eclipses which are invisible in India. But it is, of course, very possible that a king who wished to make a present, chose, in case no visible eclipse was available, the day of a calculated one, in order to secure greater spiritual merit.

17 Max Muller, Hist, Anc. Sansk. Lit., p. 382.

-- The Dhiniki Grant of King Jaikadeva, Together With Some Remarks on the Vikrama, Valabhi and Gupta Eras, by Dr. G. Buhler, C.I.E., Indian Antiquary XII, pp. 151-156).

14 Besides Gondophernes, the Western Ksatrapa Castana ruled for at least 41 years; Nahapana, another Western Ksatrapa, reigned for at least 44 years, if (as I believe) his dates are regnal years. The early Kusana Wima Kadphises had a long, though unspecified rule. The later Kusana Huviska had a minimum reign of 32 years.

15 atita 'late, deceased' is well attested in literature and inscriptions. Cf. adhvadidana = adhvatitanam 'who have passed their course (of life),' i.e., 'late' in the inscription of the "Buddha of the year 5", Bulletin de l'Ecole Francaise d'Extreme Orient 61, 1974, 54-5.

16 Arguing this point on somewhat more general terms, Sircar reaches the same conclusion in Ancient Malwa and the Vikramaditya Tradition (Delhi, Munshiram Manoharlal 1969), 156-7: "It is only natural to think that the Vikrama and Saka reckonings may after all be the same as the two foreign eras known from epigraphic sources.... The identification of the two groups is certainly more logical."

17 Sircar, ibid., 103. Also see 102-4.

18 Ibid., 164-6.

[admin]

“All was delusion, nought was truth”- Faery Glamour
by BritishFairies
January 2, 2022

[T]he oldest, and, nominally, the most weighty, authorities of the Brahmans, for their religion and institutions, are the Vedas, of which works four are usually enumerated: the Rich, or Rig-Veda; the Yajush, or Yajur-Veda; the Saman, or Sama-Veda; and the Atharvana, or Atharva-Veda. Many passages are to be found in Sanskrit writings, some in the Vedas themselves, which limit the number to three; and there is no doubt that the fourth, or Atharva-Veda, although it borrows freely from the Rich, has little in common with the others, in its general character, or in its style: the language clearly indicates a different and later era. It may, therefore, be allowably regarded rather as a supplement to three, than as one of the four, Vedas....

The Rig-Veda consists of metrical prayers, or hymns, termed Suktas, — addressed to different divinities, — each of which is ascribed to a Rishi, a holy or inspired author. These hymns are put together with little attempt at methodical arrangement, although such as are dedicated to the same deity sometimes follow in a consecutive series. There is not much connexion in the stanzas of which they are composed; and the same hymn is, sometimes, addressed to different divinities. There are, in the Veda itself, no directions for the use and application of the Suktas, no notices of the occasions on which they are to be employed, or of the ceremonies at which they are to be recited. These are pointed out, by subsequent writers, in Sutras, or precepts relating to the ritual; and, even for the reputed authors of the hymns, and for the deities in whose honour they are composed, we are, for the most part, indebted to independent authorities, especially to an Anukramanika, or index, accompanying each Veda. The Yajur-Veda ... when not borrowed from the Rich, are, mostly, brief, and in prose, and are applicable to the consecration of the utensils and materials of ceremonial worship ... The Sama-Veda is little else than a recast of the Rich, being made up, with very few exceptions, of the very same hymns, broken into parts, and arranged anew, for the purpose of being chanted on different ceremonial occasions. As far, also, as the Atharva-Veda is to be considered as a Veda, it will be found to comprise many of the hymns of the Rich.

From the extensive manner, then, in which the hymns of the Rig-Veda enter into the composition of the other three, we must, naturally, infer its priority to them ... In truth, it is to the Rig-Veda that we must have recourse, principally, if not exclusively, for correct notions of the oldest and most genuine forms of the institutions, religious or civil, of the Hindus....

Besides the Sanhitas, the designation Veda includes an extensive class of compositions, entitled, collectively, Brahmana, which all Brahmanical writers term an integral portion of the Veda....

Of the Brahmana portions of the Rig-Veda, the most interesting and important is the Aitareya Brahmana, in which a number of remarkable legends are detailed ... Connected with, and dependent upon, the Vedas generally, also are the treatises on grammar, astronomy, intonation, prosody, ritual, and the meaning of obsolete words, called the Vedangas. But these are not portions of the Veda itself, but supplementary to it, and, in the form in which we have them, are not, perhaps, altogether genuine, and, with a few exceptions, are not of much importance....

From a careful examination of the Aitareya Brahmana, with an excellent commentary by Sayana Acharya, it is sufficiently evident, that this work, at least, is of a totally distinct description from the collection of the Mantras, or the Sanhita, of the Rig-Veda.... it is, manifestly, of a date long subsequent to the original Suktas, or hymns, from the manner in which they are quoted, — not systematically, or continuously, or completely, but separately, unconnectedly, and partially; a few phrases only being given, forming the beginning, not even of an entire hymn, but of an isolated stanza, occurring in any part of the hymn, or in any part of the Sanhita.... Again, we find, in the Brahmana, the whole system of social organization developed, the distinction of caste fully established, and the Brahmana, Kshattrhja, Vaisya, and Sudra repeatedly named by their proper appellations, and discriminated by their peculiar offices and relative stations, as in the code of Manu. A cursory inspection of the Satapatha Brahmana, as far as published, and of some of its sections in manuscript, shows it to be of a character similar to the Aitareya; or it may be even, perhaps, of a later era: and we may venture to affirm, in opposition to the consentient assertions of Brahmanical scholars and critics, that neither of these works has the slightest claim to be regarded as the counterpart and contemporary of the Sanhita, or as an integral part of the Veda ...

[A]ccepting [the Brahmanas] as valuable illustrations of the application of the primitive hymns and texts of the Sanhita, we must look to the latter alone, as a safe guide, in our inquiries into the most ancient condition of the Hindus.... [T]he Veda which has been taken as the text of the following translation ... may be regarded as the source and model of the other works similarly named....

Each Sukta has, for its reputed author, a Rishi, or inspired teacher, by whom, in Brahmanical phraseology, it has been originally seen ... For the names of the Rishis, except when incidentally mentioned in the hymn, we are indebted, as above remarked, to an index of the contents of the Veda ... inasmuch as it is of later composition than the text, it may not, always, be regarded as of unquestionable correctness. Most of the Rishis are familiar to the legends of the Puranas, as Gotama, Kanwa, Bharadwaja, Vasishtha, Viswamitra, and others.... perhaps, only of imaginary existence ...

The absence of any obvious dependency of the Suktas upon one another is sufficiently indicative of their separate and unsystematic origin.... Besides the internal evidence afforded by difference of style, the hymns, not unfrequently, avow a difference of date; and we find some ascribed to ancient Rishis, while others admit their being of new or newest composition. The great variety of metres employed shows, also, a progressive development of the powers of the language, which could have been the effect only of long and diligent cultivation. There can be little doubt, therefore, that they range through a considerable interval.... [T]here can be little doubt that the hymns were taught, originally, orally, and that the knowledge of them was perpetuated by the same mode of tuition. This is sufficiently apparent from their construction: they abound with elliptical phrases; with general epithets, of which the application is far from obvious, until explained; with brief comparisons, which cannot be appreciated without such additional details as a living teacher might be expected to supply; and with all those blanks and deficiencies which render the written text of the Vedas still unintelligible, in many passages, without the assistance of the Scholiast, and which he is alone enabled to fill up by the greater or less fidelity with which the traditional explanations of the first viva voce interpreters, or, perhaps, of the authors of the hymns themselves, have come down to his time. The explanation of a living teacher, or of a commentator, must have been indispensable to a right understanding of the meaning of the Suktas, in many passages, from the moment of their first communication: and the probability is in favour of an oral instructor, as most in harmony with the unconnected and unsystematic currency of the hymns; with the restricted use of writing, — even if the art were known in those early times (a subject of considerable doubt), — and with the character of Sanskrit teaching, even in the present day, in which the study of books is subordinate to the personal and traditional expositions of the teacher, handed down to him through an indefinite series of preceding instructors.

At last, however, there arrived a period ... [which] suggested ... the expediency of rescuing the dispersed and obsolete Suktas from the risk of oblivion, and moulding them into some consistent and permanent shape. The accomplishment of this object is traditionally ascribed to the son of Parasara Rishi, Krishna Dwaipayana, thence surnamed Vyasa, the Arranger; a person of rather questionable chronology and existence.... [T]here were numerous Sakhas, or branches, of each Sanhita, studied in as many separate schools. The precise nature of these distinctions is not very satisfactorily known at present, as they have almost wholly disappeared; but they consisted, apparently, of varieties of form, (not of substance), containing the same hymns and formulae arranged in a different order, according to the conceptions of the teacher.... Of the Sanhitas of the Rig-Veda the only one now in use is that ascribed to a teacher named Vedamitra, or Sakalya. Whether the authorities which profess to detail the multiplicity of these compilations be entitled to entire confidence may be matter of question....

The foundation of the Vedanta philosophy, and the compilation of the Itihasas and Puranas, are, also, ascribed to Vyasa. It would be out of place to enter into any examination of the question here, beyond the remark, that there seems to be little satisfactory evidence for the tradition; several of the Puranas being, in fact, ascribed to other persons....

The interest evinced in the collection and preservation of their ancient hymns and formulae is the more remarkable from their having ... afforded little countenance to the religious and social institutions.... It is yet, perhaps, scarcely safe to hazard any positive assertion respecting the system of religious belief and practice taught in the Rig-Veda, or the state of society which prevailed when its hymns were composed.... In offering any opinion on these points, therefore, it must be understood that they are derived solely from what is actually before us, — the First Book of the Rig-Veda, now translated [by Max Muller],— and that they are subject to confirmation, or to contradiction, according to the further evidence that may be produced.... It will be sufficient, therefore, for the present, to confine ourselves to the evidence at hand, and deduce, from it, a few of the most important conclusions to which it appears to lead, regarding the religious and mythological belief of the people of India, — whose sentiments and notions the Suktas enunciate, — and the circumstances of their social condition, to which it occasionally, though briefly, adverts.

The worship which the Suktas describe comprehends offerings ... chiefly, oblations and libations: clarified butter poured on fire, and the expressed and fermented juice of the Soma plant, presented, in ladles, to the deities invoked, — in what manner does not exactly appear ... The ceremony takes place in the dwelling of the worshipper, in a chamber appropriated to the purpose, and, probably, to the maintenance of a perpetual fire; although the frequent allusions to the occasional kindling of the sacred flame are rather at variance with this practice....

There is no mention of any temple, nor any reference to a public place of worship; and it is clear that the worship was entirely domestic....

That animal victims were offered on particular occasions may be inferred from brief and obscure allusions in the hymns of the first book and it is inferrible, from some passages, that human sacrifices were not unknown, although infrequent, and, sometimes, typical.... The blessings prayed for are, for the most part, of a temporal and personal description, — wealth, food, life, posterity, cattle, cows, and horses, protection against enemies, victory over them, and, sometimes, their destruction, particularly when they are represented as inimical to the celebration of religious rites, or, in other words, people not professing the same religious faith.

There are a few indications of a hope of immortality and of future happiness; but they are neither frequent nor, in general, distinctly announced; although the immortality of the gods is recognized.... There is little demand for moral benefactions, although, in some few instances, hatred of untruth and abhorrence of sin are expressed, a hope is uttered that the latter may be repented of, or expiated; and the gods are, in one hymn, solicited to extricate the worshipper from sin of every kind. The main objects of the prayers, however, are benefits of a more worldly and physical character.... There is nothing, however, which denotes any particular potency in the prayer, or hymn, so as to compel the gods to comply with the desires of the worshipper; — nothing of that enforced necessity which makes so conspicuous and characteristic a figure in the Hindu mythology of a later date, by which the performance of austerities for a continued period constrains the gods to grant the desired boon, although fraught with peril, and even destruction, to themselves.

The next question is: Who are the gods to whom the praises and prayers are addressed? And here we find, also, a striking difference between the mythology of the Rig-Veda and that of the heroic poems and Puranas. The divinities worshipped are not unknown to later systems: but they there perform very subordinate parts; whilst those deities who are the great gods — the Dii majores — of the subsequent period are either wholly unnamed in the Veda, or are noticed in an inferior and different capacity. The names of SIVA, of MAHADEVA, of DURGA, of KALI, of RAMA, or KRISHNA, never occur, as far as we are yet aware. We have a RUDRA, who, in after times, is identified with SIVA, but who, even in the Puranas, is of very doubtful origin and identification, whilst, in the Veda, he is described as the father of the winds, and is, evidently, a form of either Agni or Indra. The epithet Kapardin, which is applied to him, appears, indeed, to have some relation to a characteristic attribute of Siva, — the wearing of his hair in a peculiar braid: but the term has, probably, in the Veda, a different signification, — one now forgotten.... At any rate, no other epithet applicable to SIVA, occurs; and there is not the slightest allusion to the form in which, for the last ten centuries, at least, he seems to have been almost exclusively worshipped in India, — that of the Linga or Phallus. Neither is there the slightest hint of another important feature of later Hinduism, the Trimurti, or triune combination of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, as typified by the mystical syllable Om; although, according to high authority on the religions of antiquity, the Trimurti was the first element in the faith of the Hindus, and the second was the Lingam....

[T]he sun does not hold that prominent place, in the Vaidik liturgy, which he seems to have done in that of the ancient Persians; and he is chiefly venerated as the celestial representative of Fire....

The Scholiast endeavours to connect the history of their origin with that narrated in the Puranas, but without success....

The Sabeism of the Hindus — if it may be so termed — differs entirely from that of the Chaldeans, in omitting the worship of the planets. The constellations are never named as objects of veneration or worship; and, although the moon appears to be occasionally intended under the name Soma, — particularly, when spoken of as scattering darkness, — yet the name and the adoration are, in a much less equivocal manner, applied to the Soma plant, the acid asclepias, actual or personified. The great importance attached to the juice of this plant is a singular part of the ancient Hindu ritual.... The only explanation of which it is susceptible is, the delight, as well as astonishment, which the discovery of the exhilarating, if not inebriating, properties of the fermented juice of the plant must have excited in simple minds, on first becoming acquainted with its effects. This, however, is, of course, wholly different from any adoration of the moon or planets, as celestial luminaries, in which they do not appear to have participated with the sun....

Female divinities make their appearance: but they are merely named, without anything being related of them; and we have, as yet, no sufficient materials on which to construct any theory of their attributes and character. The only exception is that of Ila, who is called the daughter of Manus, and his instructress in the performance of sacrifice; but what is meant by this requires further elucidation....

We thus find, that most, if not all, the deities named in the hymns of the Rich — as far as those of the first Ashtaka extend, — are resolvable into ... two, Agni and Indra.... There is nothing, however ... to warrant the other assertion of Yaska, that “all the gods are but parts of one atma, or soul, subservient to the diversification of his praises through the immensity and variety of his attributes.”...

The notion of a soul of the world belongs, no doubt, to a period long subsequent to the composition of the Suktas. Whether their authors entertained any belief in a creator and ruler of the universe certainly does not appear from any passage hitherto met with; but, at the same time, the objects of the early worship of the Hindus — fire, the sky, the Soma plant, even the sun, — are addressed in language so evidently dictated by palpable physical attributes, or by the most obvious allegorical personifications, that we can scarcely think they were inspired by any deep feeling of veneration or of faith ...

Leaving the question of the primary religion of the Hindus for further investigation, we may now consider what degree of light this portion of the Veda reflects upon their social and political condition. It has been a favourite notion, with some eminent scholars, that the Hindus, at the period of the composition of the hymns, were a nomadic and pastoral people. This opinion seems to rest solely upon the frequent solicitations for food, and for horses and cattle, which are found in the hymns, and is unsupported by any more positive statements. That the Hindus were not nomads is evident from the repeated allusions to fixed dwellings, and villages, and towns; and we can scarcely suppose them to have been, in this respect, behind their barbarian enemies, the overthrow of whose numerous cities is so often spoken of. A pastoral people they might have been, to some extent; but they were, also, and, perhaps, in a still greater degree, an agricultural people, as is evidenced by their supplications for abundant rain and for the fertility of the earth, and by the mention of agricultural products, particularly, barley. They were a manufacturing people; for the art of weaving, the labours of the carpenter, and the fabrication of golden and of iron mail, are alluded to: and, what is more remarkable, they were a maritime and mercantile people....

That they had extended themselves from a more northern site, or that they were a northern race, is rendered probable from the peculiar expression used, on more than one occasion, in soliciting long life, — when the worshipper asks for a hundred winters (himas); a boon not likely to have been desired by the natives of a warm climate. They appear, also, to have been a fair-complexioned people, at least, comparatively, and foreign invaders of India; as it is said that Indra divided the fields among his white-complexioned friends, after destroying the indigenous barbarian races: for such, there can be little doubt, we are to understand by the expression Dasyu, which so often recurs, and which is often defined to signify one who not only does not perform religious rites, but attempts to disturb them, and harass their performers: the latter are the Aryas, the Arya, or respectable, or Hindu, or Arian race. Dasyu, in later language, signifies a thief, a robber; and Arya, a wealthy or respectable man: but the two terms are constantly used, in the text of the Veda, as contrasted with each other, and as expressions of religious and political antagonists; requiring, therefore, no violence of conjecture to identify the Dasyus with the indigenous tribes of India, refusing to adopt the ceremonial of the Aryas, a more civilized, but intrusive, race, and availing themselves of every opportunity to assail them, to carry off their cattle, disturb their rites, and impede their progress, — to little purpose, it should seem, as the Aryas commanded the aid of Indra, before whose thunderbolt the numerous cities, or hamlets, of the Dasyus were swept away.

We have no particular intimation of the political condition of the Hindus, except the specification of a number of names of princes, many of which are peculiar to the Veda, and differ from those of the heroic poems and Puranas. A few are identical; but the nomenclature evidently belongs to a period anterior to the construction of the dynasties of the Sun and Moon, no allusion to which, thus far, occurs....

Upon a subject of primary importance in the history of Hindu society, the distinctions of caste, the language of the Suktas—of the first Ashtaka, at least, — is by no means explicit. Whenever collectively alluded to, mankind are said to be distinguished into five sorts, or classes, or, literally, five men, or beings([pancha kshitayah).... We do not meet with the denominations Kshattriya or Sudra in any text of the first book, nor with that of Vaisya; for Vis, which does occur, is, there, a synonym of man in general. Brahmana is met with, but in what sense is questionable. In the neuter form, Brahma, it usually implies prayer, or praise, or sacrificial food, or, in one place, preservation; in its masculine form, Brahma, it occurs as the praiser, or reciter, of the hymn, or as the particular priest, so denominated, who presides over the ceremonial of a sacrifice: and in neither case does it necessarily imply a Brahmana by caste; for, that the officiating priests might not be Brahmans appears from the part taken by Viswamitra at the sacrifice of Sunahsepa, who, although, according to tradition, by birth a Kshattriya, exercises the functions of the priesthood.... A hymn that occurs in a subsequent part of the Veda has, however, been translated by Mr. Colebrooke, in which the four castes are specified by name, and the usual fable of their origin from Brahma, alluded to. Further research is necessary, therefore, before a final sentence can be pronounced.

From this survey of the contents of the first book of the Rig-Veda, although some very important questions remain to be answered, it is indisputably evident that the hymns it comprises represent a form of religious worship, and a state of society, very dissimilar to those we meet with in all the other scriptural authorities of the Hindus, whether Brahmanas, Upanishads, Itihasas (or heroic poems), or Puranas.... [A]ll the most popular deities, possibly the principal laws and distinctions of society, and the whole body of the heroic and Pauranik dramatis personae, have no place, no part, in the Suktas of the Rig-Veda. That the latter preceded the former by a vast interval is, therefore, a necessary inference.... If the hymns of the Sanhita are genuine,... a thousand years would not be too long an interval for the altered conditions which are depictured in the older and in the more recent compositions.... The Suktas themselves are, confessedly, the compositions of various periods, — as we might conclude from internal evidence, — and were, probably, falling into forgetfulness, before they were collected into the Sanhitas....

After the Brahmanas come the Sutras ... the Vedanta Sutras being, also, posterior to the Upanishads. Now, all these writings are older than Manu, whose cosmogony is, evidently, a system of eclecticism compiled from the Upanishads, the Sankhya, and the Vedanta, and many of whose laws, I learn from Dr. Muller, are found in the liturgical Sutras. Yet Manu notices no Avataras, no Kama, no Krishna, and is, consequently, admitted to be long anterior to the growth of their worship as set forth in the Ramayana and Mahabharata.

There is, in Manu, a faint intimation that Buddhistical opinions were beginning to exert an influence over the minds of men, — in the admission that the greatest of virtues is abstinence from injury to living beings....

All this is, no doubt, to be received with very great reservation; for, in dealing with Hindu chronology, we have no trustworthy landmarks, no fixed eras, no comparative history, to guide us. In proposing the above dates, therefore, nothing more than conjecture is intended; and it may be wide of the truth....

The text which has served for the following translation comprises the Suktas of the Rig-Veda and the commentary of Sayana Acharya, printed, by Dr. Muller, from a collation of manuscripts, of which he has given an account in his Introduction.

Sayana Acharya was the brother of Madhava Acharya, the prime minister of Vira Bukka Raya, Raja of Vijayanagara in the fourteenth century [14th century], a munificent patron of Hindu literature. Both the brothers are celebrated as scholars; and many important works are attributed to them, — not only scholia on the Sanhitas and Brahmanas of the Vedas, but original works on grammar and law....

The scholia of Sayana on the text of the Rig-Veda comprise three distinct portions. The first interprets the original text, or, rather, translates it into more modern Sanskrit, fills up any ellipse, and, if any legend is briefly alluded to, narrates it in detail; the next portion of the commentary is a grammatical analysis of the text, agreeably to the system of Panini, whose aphorisms, or Sutras, are quoted; and the third portion is an explanation of the accentuation of the several words. These two last portions are purely technical, and are untranslateable. The first portion constitutes the basis of the English translation; for, although the interpretation of SAYANA may be, occasionally, questioned, he undoubtedly had a knowledge of his text far beyond the pretensions of any European scholar, and must have been in possession, either through his own learning, or that of his assistants, of all the interpretations which had been perpetuated, by traditional teaching, from the earliest times.

In addition to these divisions of his commentary, Sayana prefaces each Sukta by a specification of its author, or Rishi; of the deity, or deities, to whom it is addressed; of the rhythmical structure of the several Richas, or stanzas; and of the Vini-yoga, the application of the hymn, or of portions of it, to the religious rites at which they are to be repeated. I have been unable to make use of this latter part of the description; as the ceremonies are, chiefly, indicated by their titles alone, and their peculiar details are not to be determined without a more laborious investigation than the importance or interest of the subject appeared to me to demand.

-- RigVeda Sanhita. A Collection of Ancient Hindu Hymns, Constituting the First Ashtaka, or Book of the Rig-Veda: The Oldest Authority for the Religious and Social Institutions of the Hindus. Translated from the Original Sanskrita by H.H. Wilson, M.A., F.R.S., Member of the Royal Asiatic Society, of the Asiatic Societies of Calcutta and Paris, and of the Oriental Society of Germany; Foreign Member of the National Institute of France; Member of the Imperial Academies of Petersburgh and Vienna, and of the Royal Academies of Munich and Berlin; Ph.D., Breslau; M.D. Marburg, &c., and Boden Professor of Sanskrit in the University of Oxford. Published under the patronage of the Court of Directors of the East-India Company. 1866.

Charles Robinson, illustration for Evelyn Sharp, The Story of the Weathercock, Blackie & Son, [1907].

The faery power of conjuring delusion is usually termed ‘glamour.’ It’s worth knowing something about the origins and etymology of this word, because this tells us a good deal about our ancestors’ understanding of the nature and use of this form of magic.

The word is originally Scots and was introduced into the literary English by Sir Walter Scott. It’s a corrupt form of the word ‘grammar’ and is related to the noun ‘gramarye’ (which sometimes appears in texts as ‘glomery’) and thence to the French grimoire. The latter is a spell book, which clearly shows us that ‘glamour’ was originally conceived as being a form of verbal spell or charm.

Originally, glamour was not considered to be unique to faery kind. It could be cast by witches, wizards and, most intriguingly, by gypsies. One early example of its use is in the eighteenth-century ballad Johnny Faa (first printed by Ritson in Scottish Songs (1794) vol.2, 177): “As soon as they saw her well far’d face, They coost the glamer o’er her.” Johnny Faa is the king of gypsies who is best known today from the folk song the Raggle Taggle Gypsies. Other uses are found in works by Allan Ramsay, for instance the 1720 poem The Rise & Fall of Stocks:

“Like Belzie when he nicks a witch,
Wha sells her saul she may be rich;
He, finding this the bait to damn her,
Casts o’er her e’en his cheating glamour:”

In the 1721 Glossary to his poems, Ramsay gives this definition of the word: “When devils, wizards or jugglers deceive the sight, they are said to cast glamour o’er the eyes of the spectator.” At the end of the same century, Robert Burns confirmed the associations seen so far: “Ye gipsy-gang that deal in glamor, And you, deep-read in hell’s black grammar, Warlocks and witches.” (R. Burns Poems, 2nd edition, 1793, vol.2, 220)

The Paisley poet Ebenezer Picken used an interesting compound term in 1813, referring to a ‘glamour gift:’

“May be some wily lass has had the airt,
Wi’ spells, an’ charms, to win our Robin’s heart;
An’ hauds him, wi’ her Glaumour gift, sae fell.”

-- Picken, Misc. Poems, vol.1, 21

This would seem to imply an innate talent rather than something acquired, whether by learning or reading.

Despite these frequent Scots uses in published works, it was really Sir Walter Scott that popularised the term to the entire British reading public. In 1805, in the Lay of Last Minstrel (Canto 3, verse 9), he gave an extended illustration of the word in close association with an elf, thereby irrevocably linking the two:

“The iron band, the iron clasp,
Resisted long the elfin grasp:
For when the first he had undone
It closed as he the next begun.
Those iron clasps, that iron band,
Would not yield to unchristen’d hand
Till he smear’d the cover o’er
With the Borderer’s curdled gore;
A moment then the volume spread,
And one short spell therein he read:
It had much of glamour might;
Could make a ladye seem a knight;
The cobwebs on a dungeon wall
Seem tapestry in lordly hall;
A nut-shell seem a gilded barge,
A sheeling seem a palace large,
And youth seem age, and age seem youth:
All was delusion, nought was truth.”

Here, glamour is a ‘might,’ a power possessed by the character. Scott expanded upon the nature of glamour further in his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft of 1830, when in letter three he wrote that “This species of Witchcraft is well known in Scotland as the glamour, or deceptio visus, and was supposed to be a special attribute of the race of Gipsies.”


Gladys Checkley, Fairies in the Orchard

The word was now established in the wider English tongue. In 1832, US author John Pendleton Kennedy used it in his novel, Swallow Barn (c.30): “It was like casting a spell of ‘gramarie’ over his opponents.” In 1859, Lord Tennyson took up the term in the poem Enid in Idylls of King, when making reference to Blodeuwedd in the Mabinogion: “That maiden in the tale, Whom Gwydion made by glamour out of flowers.”

The nature of glamour is to deceive or to defeat humans’ sense of vision. In the ballad Hind Etin, the eponymous faery hero abducts a woman using a spell: “He’s coosten a mist before them all/ And away this lady has ta’en.” However, although much of the evidence indicates that glamour is purely to do with visual illusions, there is one incident, recorded by Evans Wentz, which suggests that it is a more complete deception of human senses. The story was related to him one Christmas Day morning by a Mrs Dinah Moore of Glen Meay on the Isle of Man:

“I heard of a man and wife who had no children. One night the man was out on horseback and heard a little baby crying beside the road. He got off his horse to get the baby, and, taking it home, went to give it to his wife, and it was only a block of wood. And then the old fairies were outside yelling [in Manx] at the man: “Eash un oie, s’cheap t’ou mollit!” (Age one night, how easily thou art deceived!).”

-- Fairy Faith p. 127

Typical faery deployments of glamour are to make people believe that they are in grand homes or halls, that they’ve been offered delicate and delicious food or that they have been given faery gold. What they will have really experienced is, respectively, a cave, some dung or some dried leaves.

All their glamour was grammar.

The example given by Evans-Wentz would appear to imply that glamour is more than a superficial disguise but can alter the very fabric of an item so that it is no longer its natural self but takes on all the characteristics of whatever substance or object the faeries wish it to resemble.

Using their power of “mirage,” as Lewis Spence termed it, the fae seem to be able to transform the look and feel of physical items for as long as they wish. Very typically, though, the delusion will be withdrawn in an instant- the purported palace or fine feast vanishing suddenly. In Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands, he recounts the story of The Daughter of the King of Underwaves, in which the fairy woman conjured up a magnificent castle where she and Diarmuid, the mortal man who had fallen for her, lived contentedly for several days. He, however, began to pine for his friends and his hunting hounds, so she abandoned him, taking away the illusion in a moment. Diarmuid was left lying in a damp mossy hole on the moor, just as happens to Welsh men who have visit what I’ve called the ‘glamour houses’ of the tylwyth teg. (J. F. Campbell, Popular Tales, vol.3, 421)


Rene Cloke, Fairy Artists

[admin]

Undeciphered writing systems
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 2/3/23


Seals showing Indus script, an ancient undeciphered writing system


Page 32 of the Voynich manuscript, a medieval manuscript written with an undeciphered writing system

An undeciphered writing system is a written form of language that is not currently understood.

Many undeciphered writing systems date from several thousand years BC, though some more modern examples do exist. The term "writing systems" is used here loosely to refer to groups of glyphs which appear to have representational symbolic meaning, but which may include "systems" that are largely artistic in nature and are thus not examples of actual writing.

The difficulty in deciphering these systems can arise from a lack of known language descendants or from the languages being entirely isolated, from insufficient examples of text having been found and even (such as in the case of Vinča) from the question of whether the symbols actually constitute a writing system at all. Some researchers have claimed to be able to decipher certain writing systems, such as those of Epi-Olmec, Phaistos and Indus texts; but to date, these claims have not been widely accepted within the scientific community, or confirmed by independent researchers, for the writing systems listed here (unless otherwise specified).

Proto-writing

Certain forms of proto-writing remain undeciphered and, because of a lack of evidence and linguistic descendants, it is quite likely that they will never be deciphered.

Neolithic signs in China

Yellow River civilization

• Jiahu symbols – Peiligang culture, from China, c. 6600 - 6200 BC.
• Damaidi symbols - Damaidi, from China, earliest estimated dates range from Paleolithic to c. 3000 years ago
• Dadiwan symbols - Dadiwan, from China, c. 5800 - 5400 BC.
• Banpo symbols – Yangshao culture, from China, 5th millennium BC.
• Jiangzhai symbols - Yangshao culture, from China, 4th millennium BC.
• Dawenkou symbols - Dawenkou culture, c. 2800 - 2500 BC.
• Longshan symbols - Longshan culture, from China, c. 2500 - 1900 BC.

Yangtze civilization

• Wucheng symbols - Wucheng culture, from China, c. 1600 BC

Other areas

• Sawveh - Guangxi, from China; possible proto-writing or writing


Jiahu symbols


Banpo symbols


Longshan symbols


Sawveh

Neolithic signs in Europe

• Dispilio Tablet – Neolithic Europe, from Greece, c. 5202 BC.
• Vinča symbols – Neolithic Europe, from Central Europe and Southeastern Europe, c. 4500 BC - 4000 BC.


Dispilio tablet


Vinca symbols

Afro-Eurasian scripts

Indian Sub continent

• Indus script, c. 3300 BC to 1900 BC.
• Vikramkhol inscription, c. 1500 BC
• Megalithic graffiti symbols, c. 1000 BC - 300 AD, possible writing system and possible descendant of Indus script
• Pushkarasari script – Gandhara, 3rd century BC to 8th century AD.
• Shankhalipi, c. 4th to 8th century


Indus script


Vikramkhol inscription


Pushkarasari script


Shankhalipi

West Asia

• Proto-Elamite, c. 3200 BC
• Byblos syllabary – the city of Byblos, c. 1700 BC
• Cypro-Minoan syllabary, c. 1550 BC
• Para-Lydian script, known from a single inscription found in Sardis Synagogue, c. 400–350 BC.[1]
• Sidetic script – Asia Minor, c. 5th to 3rd centuries BC.


Proto-Elamite script


Byblos syllabry


Cypro-Minoan syllabry


Sidetic script

East Asia

• Ba–Shu scripts, 5th to 4th century BC.
• Khitan large script and Khitan small script – Khitan, 10th century, not fully deciphered.
• Tujia script


Ba script


Khitan large script


Khitan small script


Tujia script

Southeast Asia

• Singapore Stone, a fragment of a sandstone slab inscribed with an ancient Southeast Asian script, perhaps Old Javanese or Sanskrit. At least 13th century, and possibly as early as 10th to 11th century


Singapore Stone

Detail from a drawing of three fragments from a sandstone block that once stood at the Singapore River mouth, showing the fragment called the Singapore Stone which is now in the National Museum of Singapore.


India-Singapore relations

Central Asia

• Issyk inscription, Kazakhstan, c. 4th century BC


Issyk inscription

Europe

• Cretan hieroglyphs, c. 2100 BC.
o Linear A and Cretan hieroglyphs are both believed to be an example of the Minoan language.[citation needed] Several words have been decoded from the scripts, but no definite conclusions on the meanings of the words have been made.
• Phaistos Disc, c. 2000 BC.
• Linear A, c. 1800 BC, a syllabary
• Grakliani Hill script - Grakliani Hill, c. 11th - 10th century BC
• Paleohispanic scripts
o Southwest Paleohispanic script, from c. 700 BC
• Sitovo inscription
• Alekanovo inscription, c. 10th - 11th century
• Rohonc Codex
• Folio 7r-v of British Library manuscript MS 73525, pre-1550, possibly liturgical.[2]
• Voynich manuscript, carbon dated to the 15th century.[3]
• Some scholars consider the corpus of Pictish symbol stones to be an undeciphered writing system[4]


Cretan hieroglyphs


Linear A


Phaistos disc


Southwest Paleohispanic Script


Sitovo inscription


Folio 7r of MS 73525


Folio 7v of MS 73525

North Africa

• The Starving of Saqqara - possibly dating to pre-dynastic Egypt
• Ancient inscriptions in Somalia, According to the Ministry of Information and National Guidance of Somalia, inscriptions can be found on various old Taalo Tiiriyaad structures. These are enormous stone mounds found especially in northeastern Somalia. Among the main sites where these Taalo are located are Xabaalo Ambiyad in Alula District, Baar Madhere in Beledweyne District, and Harti Yimid in Las Anod District.[5]
• Numidian language (although the script, Libyco-Berber, has been almost fully deciphered, the language has not)
• Meroitic language, c. 300 BC to 400 AD, though the Meroitic script is largely deciphered, the underlying language is not.
• Ṣǝḥuf ʾǝmni inscription (although written in the well-known South Arabian script, the language has not yet been identified)


Libyco-Berber


Meroitic script

Sub-Saharan Africa

• Ikom monoliths – Cross River State, sometimes believed to be an ancient precursor to Nsibidi.
• Eghap script – Cameroon, c. 1900, partially deciphered


Ikom monoliths

American scripts

Andean South America

• Khipu – Inka Empire and predecessor states, like the Wari Empire or the Caral-Supe Civilization, c. 2600 BC - 17th century, with some variants still in use today; it could possibly be a writing system or a set of writing systems.


Khipu

Mesoamerica

• Olmec (Cascajal Block) – Olmec civilization, c. 900 BC, possibly the oldest Mesoamerican script, if proven authentic.
• Isthmian, c. 500 BC–500 AD, apparently logosyllabic. Possible ancestor of the Maya script.
• Zapotec – Zapotec. Possibly logosyllabic, c. 500 BC–700 AD.
• Teotihuacan. Possibly descended from the Zapotec script, and itself being the probable ancestor of the Post-classic Mixtec and Aztec scripts, c. 100 BC - 700 AD.
• Mixtec – Mixtec, 14th century, pictographic, with phonetic elements related specifically to the Mixtec languages which work in a similar way as the Aztec script. It also includes tonal determiners, since the Mixtec languages are tonal. Many of the pictographic elements of the script are well-understood, but semantic and linguistic components are less well known.


Cascajal block


Isthmian script


Zapotec script


Teotihuacan glyph


Mixtec Script

Pacific scripts

• Rongorongo – Rapa Nui (aka Easter Island), before 1860.


Rongorongo

Related concepts: texts that are not writing systems

One very similar concept is that of false writing systems, which appear to be writing but are not. False writing cannot be deciphered because it has no semantic meaning. These particularly include asemic writing created for artistic purposes. One prominent example is the Codex Seraphinianus.

Another similar concept is that of undeciphered cryptograms, or cipher messages. These are not writing systems per se, but a disguised form of another text. Of course any cryptogram is intended to be undecipherable by anyone except the intended recipient so vast numbers of these exist, but a few examples have become famous and are listed in list of ciphertexts.

References

1. "From the Harvard Art Museums' collections Cast of an Inscribed Marble Stele from the Sardis Synagogue". Harvardartmuseums.org. Retrieved 13 September 2018.
2. "MS 73525". Retrieved 2021-09-18.
3. "Mysterious Voynich manuscript is genuine, scientists find". Archived from the original on 2009-12-07. Retrieved 2009-12-07.
4. Lee, Rob; Jonathan, Philip; Ziman, Pauline (2010-09-08). "Pictish symbols revealed as a written language through application of Shannon entropy". Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences. 466 (2121): 2545–2560. Bibcode:2010RSPSA.466.2545L. doi:10.1098/rspa.2010.0041. ISSN 1364-5021.
5. Ministry of Information and National Guidance, Somalia, The writing of the Somali language: A Great Landmark in Our Revolutionary History, (Ministry of Information and National Guidance: 1974)

External links

• Proto-Elamite (CDLI link)
• Vinča signs (The Old European Script: Further evidence - Shan M. M. Winn)

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Claude de Visdelou
by Encyclopedia.com
Accessed: 2/24/23

Fourmont's Dirty Little Secret

When Joseph DE GUIGNES (1721-1800) at the young age of fifteen was placed with Etienne FOURMONT (1683-1745), Fourmont enjoyed a great reputation as one of Europe's foremost specialists of classical as well as oriental languages. As an associate of Abbe Bignon (the man so eager to stock the Royal Library with Oriental texts), Fourmont had met a Chinese scholar called Arcadius HOANG (1679-1716) and had for a short while studied Chinese with him (Elisseeff 1985:133ff.; Abel-Remusat 1829:1.260). In 1715 the thirty-two-year-old Fourmont was elected to the chair of Arabic at the College Royal. Hoang's death in 1716 did not diminish Fourmont's desire to learn Chinese, and in 1719 he followed Nicolas FRERET (1688-1749) in introducing Europe to the 214 Chinese radicals. This is one of the systems used by the Chinese to classify Chinese characters and to make finding them, be it in a dictionary or a printer's shop, easier and quicker.

Thanks to royal funding for his projected grammar and dictionaries, Fourmont had produced more than 100,000 Chinese character types. But in Fourmont's eyes the 214 radicals were far more than just a classification method. Naming them "clefs" (keys), he was convinced that they were meaningful building blocks that the ancient Chinese had used in constructing characters. For example, Fourmont thought that the first radical (-) is "the key of unity, or priority, and perfection" and that the second radical (׀) signifies "growth" (Klaproth 1828:234). Starting with the 214 basic "keys," so Fourmont imagined, the ancient Chinese had combined them to form the tens of thousands of characters of the Chinese writing system. However, as Klaproth and others later pointed out, the Chinese writing system was not "formed from its origin after a general system"; rather, it had evolved gradually from "the necessity of inventing a sign to express some thing or some idea." The idea of classifying characters according to certain elements arose only much later and resulted in several systems with widely different numbers of radicals ranging from a few dozen to over 700 (Klaproth 1828:233-36).

Like many students of Chinese or Japanese, Fourmont had probably memorized characters by associating their elements with specific meanings. A German junior world champion in the memory sport, Christiane Stenger, employs a similar technique for remembering mathematical equations. Each element is assigned a concrete meaning; for example, the minus sign signifies "go backward" or "vomit," the letter A stands for "apple," the letter B for "bear," the letter C for "cirrus fruit," and the mathematical root symbol for a root. Thus, "B minus C" is memorized by imagining a bear vomiting a citrus fruit, and "minus B plus the root of A square" may be pictured as a receding bear who stumbles over a root in which a square apple is embedded.

Stenger's technique, of course, has no connection whatsoever to understanding mathematical formulae, but Fourmont's "keys" can indeed be of help in understanding the meaning of some characters. While such infusion of meaning certainly helped Fourmont and his students Michel-Ange-Andre le Roux DESHAUTERAYES (1724-95) and de Guignes in their study of complicated Chinese characters, it also involved a serious misunderstanding. Stenger understood that bears and fruit were her imaginative creation in order to memorize mathematical formulae and would certainly not have graduated from high school if she had thought that her mathematics teacher wanted to tell her stories about apples and bears.

But mutatis mutandis, this was exactly Fourmont's mistake. Instead of simply accepting the 214 radicals as an artificial system for classifying Chinese characters and as a mnemonic aide, he was convinced that the radicals are a collection of primeval ideas that the Chinese used as a toolset to assemble ideograms representing objects and complex ideas. Fourmont thought that the ancient Chinese had embedded a little story in each character. As he and his disciples happily juggled with "keys," spun stories, and memorized their daily dose of Chinese characters, they did not have any inkling that this fundamentally mistaken view of the genesis of Chinese characters would one day form the root for a mistake of such proportions that it would put de Guignes's entire reputation in jeopardy.

Apart from a series of dictionaries that never came to fruition, Fourmont was also working on a Chinese grammar. He announced its completion in 1728, eight years before the arrival of de Guignes. The first part of this Grammatica sinica with Fourmont's presentation of the 214 "keys" and elements of pronunciation appeared in 1737. The second part, prepared for publication while de Guignes sat at his teacher's feet, contained the grammar proper as well as Fourmont's catalog of Chinese works in the Bibliotheque Royale and was published in 1742. When Fourmont presented the result to the king of France, he had de Guignes accompany him, and the king was so impressed by the twenty-one-year-old linguistic prodigy that he endowed him on the spot with a pension (Michaud 1857:18.126).

But de Guignes's teacher Fourmont had a dirty little secret. He had focused on learning and accumulating data about single Chinese characters, but his knowledge of the Chinese classical and vernacular language was simply not adequate for writing a grammar. By consequence, the man who had let the world know that a genius residing in Europe could master Chinese just as well as the China missionaries decided to plagiarize -- what else? -- the work of a missionary. No one found out about this until Jean-Pierre Abel-Remusat in 1825 carefully compared the manuscript of the Arte de La lengua mandarina by the Spanish Franciscan Francisco Varo with Fourmont's Latin translation and found to his astonishment that Fourmont's ground-breaking Grammatica sinica was a translation of Varo's work (Abel-Remusat 1829:2.298). In an "act of puerile vanity," Abel-Remusat sadly concluded, Fourmont had appropriated Varo's entire text "almost without any change" while claiming that he had never seen it (1826:2.109).2

While de Guignes helped prepare this grammar for publication, Fourmont continued his research on chronology and the history of ancient peoples. During the seventeenth century, ancient Chinese historical sources had become an increasingly virulent threat to biblical chronology and, by extension, to biblical authority. As Fourmont's rival Freret was busy butchering Isaac Newton's lovingly calculated chronology, de Guignes's teacher turned his full attention to the Chinese annals. These annals were in general regarded either as untrustworthy and thus inconsequential or as trustworthy and a threat to biblical authority. However, in a paper read on May 18, 1734, at the Royal Academy of Inscriptions, Fourmont declared with conviction that he could square the circle: the Chinese annals were trustworthy just because they confirmed the Bible.

Dismissing Freret's and Newton's nonbiblical Middle Eastern sources as "scattered scraps," he praised the Chinese annals to the sky as the only ancient record worth studying apart from the Bible (Fourmont 1740:507-8).

But Fourmont's lack of critical acumen is as evident in this paper as in his Critical reflections on the histories of ancient peoples of 1735 and the Meditationes sinicae of 1737. In the "avertissement" to the first volume of the Critical reflections, Fourmont mentions the question of an India traveler, Chevalier Didier, who had conversed with Brahmins and missionaries and came in frustration to Paris to seek Fourmont's opinion about an important question of origins: had Indian idolatry influenced Egyptian idolatry or vice versa? Fourmont delivered his answer after nearly a thousand tedious pages full of chronological juggling:

With regard to customs in general, since India is entirely Egyptian and Osiris led several descendants of Abraham there, we have the first cause of that resemblance of mores in those two nations; but with regard to the religion of the Indians, they only received it subsequently through commerce and through the colonies coming from Egypt. (Fourmont 1735:2-499)

For Fourmont the Old Testament was the sole reliable testimony of antediluvian times, and he argued that the reliability of other accounts decreases with increasing distance from the landing spot of Noah's ark. Only the Chinese, whose "language is the oldest of the universe," remain a riddle, as their antiquity "somehow rivals that of Genesis and has caused the most famous chronologists to change their system" (1735:1.lii). But would not China's "hieroglyphic" writing system also indicate Egyptian origins? Though Fourmont suspected an Egyptian origin of Chinese writing, he could not quite figure out the exact mechanism and transmission. He suspected that "Hermes, who passed for the inventor of letters" had not invented hieroglyphs but rather "on one hand more perfect hieroglyphic letters, which were brought to the Chinese who in turn repeatedly perfected theirs; and on the other hand alphabetic letters" (Fourmont 1735:2.500). These "more perfect hieroglyphs" that "seemingly existed with the Egyptian priests" are "quite similar to the Chinese characters of today" (p. 500).

Fourmont was studying whether there was any support for Kircher's hypothesis that the letters transmitted from Egypt to the Chinese were related to Coptic monosyllables (p. 503); but though he apparently did not find conclusive answers to such questions, the problem itself and Fourmont's basic direction (transmission from Egypt to China, some kind of more perfect hieroglyphs) must have been so firmly planted in his student de Guignes's mind that it could grow into the root over which he later stumbled. Fourmont's often repeated view that Egypt's culture was not as old as that of countries closer to the landing spot of Noah's ark made it clear that those who regarded Egypt as the womb of all human culture were dead wrong and that China, in spite of its ancient culture, was a significant step removed from the true origins.

Though the Chinese had received their writing system and probably also the twin ideas that in his view "properly constitute Egyptianism" -- the idea of metempsychosis and the adoration of animals and plants (p. 492) -- Fourmont credited the Chinese with subsequent improvements also in this respect: "My studies have thus taught me that the Chinese were a wise people, the most ancient of all peoples, but the first also, though idolatrous, that rid itself of the mythological spirit" (Fourmont 1735:2.liv). This accounted for their excellent historiography and voluminous literature:

I said that the Chinese Annals can be regarded as a respectable work. First of all, as everybody admits, for more than 3,500 years China has been populated, cultivated, and literate. Secondly, has it lacked authors as its people still read books, though few in number, written before Abraham? Thirdly, since few scholars know the Chinese books, let me here point out that the Chinese Annals are not bits and pieces of histories scattered here and there like the Latin and Greek histories which must be stitched together: they consist of at least 150 volumes that, without hiatus and the slightest interruption, present a sequence of 22 families which all reigned for 3, 4, 8, 10 centuries. (p. liv)

While Fourmont cobbled together hypotheses and conjectures, the Bible always formed the backdrop for his speculations about ancient history. A telling example is his critique of the Chinese historian OUYANG Xiu (1007-72), who argued that from the remote past, humans had always enjoyed roughly similar life spans. Lambasting this view as that of a "skeptic," Fourmont furnished the following argument as "proof" of the reliability of ancient Chinese histories:

We who possess the sacred writ: must we not on the contrary admire the Chinese annals when they, just in the time period of Arphaxad, Saleh, Heber, Phaleg, Rea, Sarug, Nachor, Abraham, etc., present us with men who lived precisely the same number of years? Now if someone told us that Seth at the age of 550 years married one of his grand-grand-nieces in the fourteenth generation: who of us would express the slightest astonishment? ... It is thus clear that all such objections are frivolous, and furthermore, that attacks against the Chinese annals on account of a circumstance [i.e., excessive longevity] which distinguishes them from all other books will actually tie them even more to Scripture and will be a sure means to increase their authority. (Fourmont 1740:514)

No comment is needed here.

Immediately after Fourmont's death in 1745, the twenty-four-year-old Joseph de Guignes replaced his master as secretary interpreter of oriental languages at the Royal Library. It was the beginning of an illustrious career: royal censor and attache to the journal des Scavans in 1752, member of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1753, chair of Syriac at the College Royal from 1757 to 1773, garde des antiques at the Louvre in 1769, editor of the Journal des Savants, and other honors (Michaud 1857:18.(27). De Guignes had, like his master Fourmont, a little problem. The pioneer Sinologists in Paris were simply unable to hold a candle to the China missionaries. Since 1727 Fourmont had been corresponding with the figurist China missionary Joseph Henry PREMARE (1666-1736), who, unlike Fourmont, was an accomplished Sinologist (see Chapter 5). Premare was very liberal with his advice and sent, apart from numerous letters, his Notitia Linguae sinicae to Fourmont in 1728. This was, in the words of Abel-Remusat,

neither a simple grammar, as the author too modestly calls it, nor a rhetoric, as Fourmont intimated; it is an almost complete treatise of literature in which Father Premare not only included everything that he had collected about the usage of particles and grammatical rules of the Chinese but also a great number of observations about the style, particular expressions in ancient and common idiom, proverbs, most frequent patterns -- and everything supported by a mass of examples cited from texts, translated and commented when necessary. (Abel-Remusat 1829:2.269)

Premare thus sent Fourmont his "most remarkable and important work," which was "without any doubt the best of all those that Europeans have hitherto composed on these matters" (p. 269).

But instead of publishing this vastly superior work and making the life of European students of Chinese considerably easier, Fourmont compared it unfavorably to his own (partly plagiarized) product and had Premare's masterpiece buried in the Royal Library, where it slept until Abel-Remusat rediscovered it in the nineteenth century (pp. 269-73). However, Fourmont's two disciples Deshauterayes and de Guignes could profit from such works since Fourmont for years kept the entire China-related collection of the Royal Library at his home where the two disciples had their rooms; thus Premare was naturally one of the Sinologists who influenced de Guignes.4 So was Antoine GAUBIL (1689-1759), whose reputation as a Sinologist was deservedly great.

But there is a third, extremely competent Jesuit Sinologist who remained in the shadows, though his knowledge of Chinese far surpassed that of de Guignes and all other Europe-based early Sinologists (and, one might add, even many modern ones). His works suffered a fate resembling that of the man who was in many ways his predecessor, Joao Rodrigues (see Chapter 1) in that they were used but rarely credited. The man in question was Claude de VISDELOU (1656-1737), who spent twenty-four years in China (1685-1709) and twenty-eight years in India (1709-37). One can say without exaggeration that the famous Professor de Guignes owed this little-known missionary a substantial part of his fame -- and this was his dirty little secret.

De Visdelou's Brahmins

The fact that the reader has already encountered one of de Visdelou's seminal ideas without realizing it is symptomatic. De Visdelou was the direct source of Le Gobien's "Brahmin followers of Fo" mixup that reached, as we have seen in the previous chapter, such a large European readership via Bayle's and Diderot's "Brachmanes" articles. After his arrival in China in 1685, the linguistically gifted Frenchman made such fast progress in learning Chinese that even China's crown prince was astonished. In a letter dated January 20, 1728, De Visdelou remembers a scene from the year 1790:

When I was five years in China and had begun to devote myself to reading Chinese books for barely four years, emperor Kangxi ordered me and one of my companions to come from Canton to Beijing. We were directly led to the palace. The emperor was gravely ill, and we could not see him. The crown prince of the empire who conducted affairs in place of his father was told that a European had arrived who within four years had acquired knowledge of the canonical books and the classics. The prince soon appeared at the door asking where that foreigner was. Here he is, I answered, after I had prostrated in the manner of the land. The prince immediately ordered that a volume of the canonical book called Shujing be brought, i.e., the Canonical History. Opening it at random, he asked me to stand up and read it; I did so and explained it in the presence of several persons who accompanied the prince. Since the Chinese have a high opinion of themselves and their products, the prince was in admiration and said the following words: "Ta-ting, i.e., he understands very well." The crown prince did not leave it at this verbal testimony but also wanted to provide an authentic attestation, written in Chinese characters on a piece of satin one aune in length and half an aune in width. It said: "We recognize that this man from Europe is loftier in intelligence [lumiere] and in the knowledge of Chinese characters than the clouds floating above our heads, and that he is more profound in penetration and knowledge than the abyss on which we tread." (de Visdelou 1760:341-42)

Seven years after this incident, de Visdelou dictated a few pages about the religions of China to the visiting Mr. Basset in order to explain the background of a regional persecution of Christians. Basset's notes made their way to Paris and into the hands of Father Le Gobien who edited and used them as introduction to his book about the edict of tolerance issued by the Chinese emperor (1698), which was then used by Bayle and Diderot. Already the first few lines show the extent and character of Le Gobien's editorial interference. He was an inclusivist in the line of Matteo Ricci who shared the opinion of the vast majority of Jesuits that the ancient religion of China (and Confucianism as its successor) had venerated the true God. De Visdelou, by contrast, was one of the few dissenters in the line of Joao Rodrigues who thought that ancient Chinese religion and Confucianism were forms of atheism. Already the initial paragraphs of de Visdelou's report as taken down by Basset were heavily edited by Le Gobien and exhibit an immense difference of opinion. De Visdelou only discussed modern Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism and lost no word about an ancient Chinese monotheism. The latter was added by Le Gobien, who claimed that this ancient Confucianism was still extant with the Chinese emperor as head; see Table 5, where major differences are highlighted in gray.

[Table Omitted]

Leaving aside the missionary's discussion of Neoconfucianism (de Visdelou's first and Le Gobien's second religion), we will here focus on the passages that for the first time provided support from the Chinese side for Kircher's idea that the Brahmins were the missionaries who brought Xaca's religion from India to China. Though Basset, who wrote down the text dictated by de Visdelou, appears to have left out a few words, the overall meaning of de Visdelou's statement is clear: it is de Visdelou who calls this "sect" that "has many names in China" by the name of "brachmanes of China." In the parentheses he adduces two reasons to justify his choice: (1) its representatives call themselves polomen, which is the Chinese pronunciation of brahmin; and (2) this religion was brought from the Indies to China by the brachmanes. Today we know that boluomen seng (Brahmin monk) was mainly used for Buddhist monks who had come from India to China and that on some occasions it served as a generic honorific for monks (as the Italian "monsignore" would flatter Catholic priests of any country). De Visdelou's choice to call Chinese Buddhism "the sect of the brachmanes of China" was not based on Chinese custom but rather on the Western idea, popular since the publication of Kircher's China illustrata (1667), that the religion of Xaca/Fo (that is, Buddhism) had been brought to China by Brahmins. In fact, after the parentheses explaining his reasons for this choice, de Visdelou clearly states that this religion "has many names in China" and that its priests are commonly called hochan (Ch. heshang, reverend) and not polomen. In Le Gobien's published text, de Visdelou's "I call" becomes "can be called," and de Visdelou's choice turns into an official nomenclature since "they themselves call it by this name." Under Le Gobien's pen, de Visdelou's "sect of the brachmanes of China" loses both the "of China" and its "many names" and turns straight into Brahmanism by becoming "the religion of the Brachmanes or Bramenes" -- and there can be no doubt about this since "they themselves call it by that name." These changes might be regarded as minor, but they are not. As the explanations continue, de Visdelou keeps calling the priests of this religion by the name they use themselves, namely, hocham, whereas Le Gobien changed this into Bramenes.

This was not de Visdelou's (or Basset's?) only confusing sect name; he called his third religion (which we now call Daoism) the sect of the "bonzes," a term usually employed for Buddhist priests. Here, de Visdelou once more emphasizes that this is his choice rather than that of the Daoists, and in the first section of Table 6 he justifies this by pointing once more to the origin of the "sect" (which in this case is China).

De Visdelou's hochans are transformed by Le Gobien into Bramenes, and this choice of words contributed to the "mixup" that filled the critics of Bayle and Diderot with so much indignation. But Le Gobien's confusion is understandable. As the second section of Table 6 shows, de Visdelou seems to have held that the religion brought by brachmanes from India to China has priests called hochan, and that hochan from different countries venerate three identical treasures: Buddha, dharma, and "the rule of the brachmanes."

[Table Omitted]

Like Rodriguez and Kircher, de Visdelou thus seems to have thought that the religion of Fo had been brought to China by Indian Brahmins and that the old "rule of the brachmanes" was still operative in China. But he neither mentioned a "God Fo" nor "books" containing "particular rules." Instead of simplifying things as he intended, Le Gobien added another layer of confusion. Hardly anybody had access to de Visdelou's dictation text or knew that de Visdelou was the source of this information. Bayle, Diderot, de Guignes and others could thus only refer to Le Gobien's description with its clear-cut identification of Indian Brahmanism with Fo, his law, and his "books." The identification of the religion of India's ancient Brachmanes with the religion of Fo in China, where it was imported by Brahmins (polomen), was the first seminal idea of de Visdelou that shaped de Guignes's outlook.

Huns from Shinar

Claude de Visdelou got much unattributed exposure in Paris when Le Gobien's book on the Chinese emperor's edict (whose introduction, as we have seen, is a heavy-handed edition of de Visdelou's dictated words about Chinese religions) became the joint subject of a hearing at the Sorbonne on July 1, 1700. One of the five propositions that was condemned on October 18 of the same year was from Le Gobien's Histoire de l'edit de l'empereur de La Chine (1698) and the rest from Lecomte's Nouveaux memoires sur l'etat present de La Chine (whose 1698 edition also contained Le Gobien's book, as previously mentioned) and his Lettre au due du Maine sur les ceremonies de la Chine. The central point of contention of all five condemned propositions is exactly the "first religion" that Le Gobien had added to de Visdelou's report. De Visdelou, like Rodrigues before him, was familiar enough with Chinese literature and religion to realize that Ricci's and his successors' monotheistic idealization of ancient Chinese religion and of classical Confucianism was a pipe dream. He was also staunchly opposed to Bouvet's, Premare's, and Foucquet's attempts to somehow make the Yijing (Book of Changes), the Daodejing (Book of the Way and its Power), or other Chinese classics into a kind of Asian Old Testament where the Dao would appear as creator God and prophecies of lambs, sacrificed saviors, and virgin mothers abounded.

De Visdelou's opposition to such views and his willingness to furnish proofs from Chinese sources to those who fought such figurist and accommodationist fantasies eventually led to his consecration as a bishop, his ouster from China and the Jesuit order, and twenty-eight years of exile in southeast India. The French government did not allow him to return to France, and he was forced to spend the rest of his life (1709-37) in exile at the house of the French Franciscans in Pondicherry. There he used his large library of Chinese books to produce works, reports, and translations of rare quality. Unlike his colleagues in the China mission, he could devote almost all his time to study, and unlike the scholars in Paris scavenging his work, he had twenty-four years of China experience under his belt and was arguably the most competent Western Sinologist of his time. Like Fourmont (his junior by seventeen years) and later de Guignes, de Visdelou was able to use sources not only in the major European languages and Chinese but also in Arabic and Persian. He was thus perfectly positioned to correct and supplement the famous Bibliotheque Orientale of seventeenth-century Europe's foremost Orientalist, Barthelemy D'HERBELOT DE MOLAINVILLE (1625-95), one of de Guignes's eminent predecessors as holder of the chair of Syriac from 1692 to 1695. De Visdelou remarked that d'Herbelot's Turkic, Arabic, and Persian sources contained much information about Central and East Asia that was either incorrect or questionable, and he decided to "redress the Mahometan histories in what they falsely assert about China and Tartary" by furnishing alternative or supplementary information from Chinese sources.

The resulting work by de Visdelou, written at the beginning of the eighteenth century, only saw publication in 1779. De Visdelou gave it a title that almost says it all:

Abbreviated history of Tartary, containing the origin of the people who appeared with verve in this vast land more than two thousand years ago; their religion, their manners, customs, wars, and the revolutions of their empires together with the chronological and genealogical sequence of their emperors; all of this preceded and followed by critical observations on several entries of the Bibliotheque Orientale. (1779:46)

His manuscript came in four tomes that -- according to the geographer Jean- Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville (1776:33) -- were sent from Pondicherry to the Academician and economic historian Jean-Roland Mallet.

D'Anville, whose New Atlas of China appeared in the year of de Visdelou's death (1737), appreciated de Visdelou's manuscripts for their precious information about many places in Central and North Asia whose Chinese names de Visdelou had managed to identify and whose descriptions from Chinese sources he furnished and expertly translated.5 D'Anville must have been particularly interested in de Visdelou's additions to d'Herbelot, his summary and translations from Chinese dynastic histories about the nations north and west of China, and his Latin translation of the history of the Mongols (Herbelot et al. 1779:4.333). If both the academician Mallet (who died in 1736) and d'Anville (member of the Academy of Inscriptions and Literature) had their hands on these precious manuscripts, it is likely that fellow Academy member Fourmont -- at the time the only man in Paris reputed to be expert in both Arabic and Chinese -- and/or his disciples de Guignes and Deshauterayes were also in the loop. Apart from his work on Tartary and the Mongols, de Visdelou had also sent an annotated translation of the Shujing (Classic of History; unpublished but used by Deshauterayes), an annotated translation of the eighth-century Nestorian stele of Xi' an (partly published by Voltaire's nephew Abbe Vincent Mignot in 1760), and a long letter about the Yijing or Book of Changes (used by Mignot in 1761-62 and published by de Guignes in 1770). De Visdelou's four-volume work on Tartary and the inserted manuscript with his annotated translation of the Nestorian stele somehow ended up in The Hague where Jean Neaulme, the well-known publisher of Voltaire and Rousseau, purchased them for 400 Dutch florins and communicated them to the bibliophile Prosper Marchand (c. 1675-1756) and others (Herbelot et al. 1779:4.iii).

Jean Neaulme resided in Paris between 1740 and 1750 (p. iv) and sought the advice of specialists regarding its publication. In the course of this examination, the inserted small manuscript containing Visdelou's expertly annotated translation of the Nestorian stele of Xian was also discovered. Neaulme asked several professors for advice (the names s'Gravensande and de Joncourt are mentioned, p. iii); and if anybody in Paris would be consulted for this prospective publication involving Chinese as well as Arabic and Persian, it would have been Fourmont or his disciples de Guignes and Deshauterayes. Abel-Remusat6 and others had long suspected that de Guignes had used de Visdelou's Tartar manuscript; but only in the summer of 2008 did I find the conclusive proof of this among the papers of Fourmont at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. The Fourmont dossier contains dozens of pages in de Guignes's hand, copied word for word from de Visdelou's Tartar manuscript. The notes contain references indicating that these copies from de Visdelou's manuscript were very voluminous.7

In 1751 de Guignes published a 24-page prospectus for a large work on the origin of the Huns and Turks (Memoire historique sur l'origine des Huns et des Turks, adresse a M. Tavenot) whose central argument and methodology eerily resemble those of de Visdelou's manuscript on the Tartars. In various places in his manuscript, de Visdelou had advanced the idea that the Xiongnu, a horse-mounted nomad people of the steppe that had for many centuries invaded and threatened the Chinese empire, might correspond to the people known to Europe as "the Huns."8 The first section of de Visdelou's Abbreviated History of Tartary in the same manuscript deals exactly with the empire of the Xiongnu and begins as follows:

The Toum-hou, or Oriental Tartars, recognize as first father of their nation Yen-yue, son of the emperor of China named Kao-sin who began his reign 2,432 years before the Christian era .... The Hioum-nou or Occidental Tartars (which may be the Huns whom the Greeks called [x] and the Romans Hunni) drew their origin from Chun-vei, son of a Chinese emperor of the Hia dynasty, which ended in the year 1767 before the Christian era. (Herbelot et al. 1779:48)

De Visdelou then goes on to cite at length Chinese historians about the Xiongnu and concludes that this people (which the Chinese eventually labeled Hioum-nou [Xiongnu]) "may be those who appeared in Europe in the fourth century under the name of Huns" (p. 51).

De Guignes's Visdelou-inspired view that the Xiongnu are identical with the Huns formed the basis of his 4-volume magnum opus: Histoire generale des Huns, des Turcs, des Mogols, et des autres tartares occidentaux, & c. avant Jesus-Christ jusqu a present. It was an immediate success and received praise from many eminent men including Edward Gibbon, the author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, who called it a "great history" and praised de Guignes for having "laid open new and important scenes in the history of mankind" (Pocock 2005:110). Such interest was understandable since the hitherto isolated islands of Chinese dynastic histories and the history of the late Roman Empire received a connecting link that showed the origins of Europe in a new, far more global light.

But where did the Chinese and the Huns ultimately come from? De Guignes addresses this question at the beginning of his second volume. Like his teacher Fourmont, de Guignes's vision of origins was thoroughly biblical: "Only Moses has in few words reported the sequence of generations before the deluge, and it is a fact worthy of mention that the histories of all nations stop in unison around the times that approach this great catastrophe" (de Guignes 1756:1.2.2). As the fictions of antiquity-obsessed Egyptians and Chaldeans had supposedly all vanished under the gaze of critical scholars like Fourmont, it was now de Guignes's turn to confirm that the histories of the Chinese "do not at all contradict the account of Moses" but rather "indirectly confirm it" (p. 2).

The Huns do not seem less ancient than these famous people. They are mentioned in the history from the first beginnings of Chinese monarchy; they thus are part of those colonies that abandoned the plains of Shinar shortly after the deluge. One might be tempted to believe that these two nations [the Huns and the Chinese] stem from the same people. (p. 2)

Though de Guignes was reluctant to discuss topics without any base in some historical record, he developed a scenario that traced the course of the Chinese people from Shinar in Mesopotamia to Persia and along the Silk Road to China. Another colony turned north from Shinar toward Armenia where it split into a western and eastern branch. The first went on to form the ancient Europeans, whereas the second formed the Tartar nations including those that the Chinese from the Han period onward called Hiong-nou or Huns (pp. 3-13). These Huns had reportedly established an empire as early as 1230 B.C.E. (p. 21), and de Guignes spent much of the rest of his four volumes tracing their fate.

In the nineteenth century, de Guignes's view of the identity of the Huns and their connections with the Mogols and Turks came under heavy fire and was no longer accepted. But de Visdelou's and de Guignes's conjecture of an initial identity has recently found unexpected support through the analysis of a few letters that Sir Aurel Stein dug out of the desert sand 55 miles west of Dunhuang. These "Sogdian Ancient letters" confirm "a long-suspected but never proven link between the Xiongnu of old Chinese sources and the Huns unleashed on Europe from 370," even though they "do not imply that the Huns of Europe or Central Asia after A. D. 350 are themselves descendants of the Xiongnu" (de la Vaissihe 2004:22). On the other hand, the Bible-inspired scenario linking the Chinese and the Huns to the plains of Shinar was abandoned by its author de Guignes barely two years after publication. In 1758, just before the fourth and last volume of his History of the Huns went to press, de Guignes had the printer set the following stunning announcement on the last page of his work:

At the beginning of the second part of the first volume of this work, I made some reflections about the origin of the Chinese. I then believed that these peoples came directly from the plains of Shinar. New researches oblige me to change my view and to beg the reader not to pay any attention to what is said about this subject in the first two or three pages. The Chinese are only a rather modern colony of the Egyptians. I have proved this in a paper read at the Academy. The Chinese characters are nothing more than monograms formed by Egyptian and Phoenician letters, and the first emperors of China are the ancient Kings of Thebes. This I intend to show in a separate work. (de Guignes 1758:4.518)

How could an author who had just finished his 4-volume magnum opus, erected on the reliability of Chinese annals, rip out its foundation on the last page? It was by no means only a problem of "the first two or three pages," as de Guignes suggested. If the Chinese were a "rather modern colony of the Egyptians," then central pillars of de Guignes's argument like "the Huns were not less ancient than the Chinese who knew them even before the Hia Dynasty, which began its reign in 2207 before Jesus Christ" (de Guignes 1756:1.2.16) or "the establishment of the empire of the Huns must be dated to the year 1230 before Jesus Christ" (p. 21), crumbled to dust. What in the world had happened?

De Guignes's Egyptian Enlightenment

Two major events had triggered this spectacular change of opinion. The first is not obvious unless one carefully reads de Guignes's response to a review of his first volumes in the Memoires de Trevoux. De Guignes printed this letter to the editors just before the index at the end of the fourth volume of his History of the Huns, but it was written in 1757, that is, before de Guignes's "Egyptian enlightenment" of 1758. In this letter he criticizes "modern writers" who believe in the "authenticity of Chinese Annals and the Chinese Chronology" in order to attack that of the Bible (1758:4.347). De Guignes's main target is obvious since his name appears twice: Voltaire. Voltaire's Essai sur les moeurs first appeared in the year 1756, the very year that also saw publication of the first volumes of de Guignes's Histoire des Huns. The view of origins in these two works is indeed diametrically opposed. For de Guignes, everything has its roots in the plain where Noah's ark landed, whereas Voltaire began his work by making fun of such "oriental fables" and "vain ideas" that are "an insult to reason" and "suffocate what little we know about antiquity under a mass of forced conjectures" (Voltaire 1756:4-7). Arguing that the Jesuits themselves had confirmed by calculation of solar eclipses that the Chinese Annals were both old and reliable, Voltaire had begun his universal history with a chapter on China that stated that twenty-five centuries before Christ the Chinese already had a well-established empire (p. 11). De Guignes sharply criticized such enthusiasm that makes the Chinese empire "begin well before the deluge and possibly even before the epoch of creation" (de Guignes 1758:4.348). Insisting that "nothing is as uncertain as this kind of chronology" (p. 349), de Guignes went on to dismiss the historical value of the very sources on which his early history of the Huns and of the Chinese was based. He now held that Chinese annals delivered neither detailed nor reliable information and were mostly late works that are "barely more ancient that Herodotus ... who flourished around 480 B.C.E." (p. 351):

The Chou-king, which is the most ancient, contains only some haphazard events without chronology. The Tsou-chou, whose authority is contested by the Chinese themselves and that was composed around 300 B.C.E. is, as it were, no mote than a chronological table. The Chuntchieou of Confucius is only a very dry short chronology; and the Chipen is very short. That's all there is of Chinese sources. (p. 351)


As we have seen in Chapter 1, Voltaire was at this point still unsure whether he should assign the role of cradle of human civilization to China or to India. But his sarcastic dismissal of biblical history and his initial chapters on China and India -- which relegated the Mediterranean cultural region and Israel to the also-rans -- ruffled many feathers. Furthermore, Voltaire's argument that the constant inundations of the Nile must have prevented early settlement in Egypt (Voltaire 1756:30) was a provocation to the majority of the encyclopedists and the egyptophile antiquarians of the time. As the author of an entire volume of chronological tables (vol. 1) and a history that took Chinese chronology and annals very seriously, de Guignes had good reason to fear being instrumentalized by Bible-averse critics like Voltaire. While his letter at the end of the fourth volume was a brave attempt at preventing such misuse, it also risked throwing the baby out with the bath water.

But there was another, far more decisive event that led to de Guignes's radical change of mind. After reading the abstract of an April 1758 report by Abbe Jean-Jacques Barthelemy on the Phoenician alphabet, de Guignes decided "to work on the manner in which alphabetical letters could have formed" (de Guignes 1760:36). Having before him a table with Phoenician letters, de Guignes happened to glance at a Chinese dictionary with old forms of characters. The similarity of ancient Chinese character elements and Phoenician letters struck him so forcefully that he was soon convinced that not only the Chinese characters "but also the laws, form of government, the sovereign, the ministers governing under him, and the entire Empire were Egyptian; and that the entire ancient history of China was nothing other than the history of Egypt inserted before that of China proper" (p. 37). Utterly convinced of having made an epoch-making discovery, de Guignes on November 14, 1758, read a report to the public assembly of the Royal Academy of Inscriptions and Literature in Paris. In the following year he published an abstract of this report together with some older opinions about Egypto-Chinese connections along with part of Abbe Barthelemy's paper on Phoenician letters in form of a booklet with the title "Report in which one proves that the Chinese are an Egyptian colony" (de Guignes 1760). De Guignes argued, to the astonishment of missionaries and academics alike that the Chinese had constructed their characters using a toolset of Phoenician letters. Unaware that these letters represent sounds, he explained, me Chinese interpreted them as elements of meaning or keys -- that is, character radicals in Fourmont-style -- and in this manner constructed myriads of characters with a hidden story they themselves could not grasp. It is here that, in Indiana Jones style, Professor de Guignes bursts upon the scene and discovers me hidden code.9 If the first Chinese radical (according to Fourmont) "signifies unity among the Chinese," aleph has the same meaning for the people of the Middle East; and "for both groups it also signifies preeminence and the action of steering" (de Guignes 1760:61). Soon enough, de Guignes drew up a kind of Ur-alphabet that was "perhaps very analogous to the primitive alphabet of all nations" (pp. 61-62). This would of course be the kind of writing system used in the plains of Shinar before peoples and languages multiplied. "New combinations gave me new letters, and I saw my alphabet develop imperceptibly to my eyes" (p. 63).

But if the Chinese had adopted alphabetic letters as hieroglyphic elements of meaning, men there had to be a proof of the pudding: it had to be possible to disassemble Chinese characters and get Egyptian or Phoenician words....

-- The Birth of Orientalism, by Urs App

Sinologist and opponent of the chinese rites; b. Château de Bienassis, Pléneuf, France, Aug. 22, 1656; d. Pondicherry, French India, Nov. 11, 1737. He entered the Society of Jesus on Sept. 5, 1673, and was sent to China in 1685. Although he laid the foundations for the celebrated French Beijing mission, he is more renowned as a Sinologist than as an active missionary. When Charles de tournon, papal legate for Clement XI, arrived in Canton, April 8, 1705, Visdelou was the sole Jesuit adverse to the adoption of the Chinese rites. Tournon, who had banned the Malabar rites in India on June 23, 1704, was banished from Beijing by Emperor K'ang-hi for attempting a similar prohibition in China. The legate traveled to Nanjing and there issued a decree on Jan. 25, 1707, obliging all missionaries under pain of excommunication to abolish the rites. He also made Visdelou vicar apostolic of Guiyang with the title of bishop of Claudiopolis. Against the opposition of his Jesuit superiors, Visdelou was consecrated at Macao on Feb. 12, 1708, and in June of that year moved to Pondicherry. There he lived in retirement with the Capuchins until his death. During these 28 years he wrote on the rites, and composed a chronology of Chinese history, a life of Confucius, and the valuable Histoire de Tartarie.

Bibliography: c. sommervogel, Bibliotèque de la Compagnie de Jésus, 11 v. (Brussels-Paris 1890–1932) 8:838–843.

[admin]

Diogo do Couto
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 2/25/23

-- Da Asia De Diogo De Couto. Dos Feitos, Que Os Portuguezes Fizeram Na Conquista, E Descubrimento Das Terras, E Mares Do Oriente. Decada Quinta. Parte Primeira. Anno 1779. Of Asia. Of the feats that the Portuguese did in the conquest and discovery of the lands and seas of the East. Fifth Decade. Part One. Year 1779. By Diogo De Couto.
https://archive.org/stream/daasiadediog ... t_djvu.txt

The First European Account of the Vedas

It was only toward the end of the sixteenth century that the Vedas are first mentioned, by Agostinho de Azevedo, an Augustinian. Azevedo’s biography has been reconstructed by Georg Schurhammer, who thinks it possible he first went to India as a soldier before joining the Augustinian order in Goa in the 1570s. Azevedo was sent back to Portugal to ordain and train, returning to India in 1586. From 1589 to 1600 he was in Hormuz, from where he returned overland to Portugal, where he completed a Relação do Estado da Índia.16 Azevedo’s report provides an overview of Portuguese settlements in Asia from the Arabian Gulf to the spice islands, devoting particular attention to Hormuz and Ceylon. It is notable that in his accounts of both, Azevedo draws on local textual sources. For Hormuz, he claims that he read these sources himself, but for Ceylon he relied on an interpreter’s simultaneous translation of Sinhalese chronicles recited for him when he met Sinhalese princes in Goa around 1587. There is a similar emphasis on textual sources in his section on India, entitled “Of the opinions, rites, and ceremonies of all the gentiles of India between the river Indus and the Ganges and that which is contained in their original scriptures which their learned men teach in their schools.” The Brahmins, the “masters of their religion,” teach a unified doctrine of God, creation, and the corruption of creatures. They have, writes Azevedo,

many books in their Latin, which they call Geredão [Grantha] which contain everything they are to believe, and all the ceremonies they are to perform. These books are divided into bodies, limbs, and joints, whose origins are some [books] which they call Veados, which are divided into four parts, and these further into fifty-two parts in the following manner: six are called Xastra, which are the bodies; eighteen are called Purana, which are the limbs; twenty-eight called Agamon which are the joints.

Azevedo’s brief account of the content of the four “origins” makes clear that he had no real access to the Vedas themselves. When he comes to elaborate on the content of the fourfold Veda, he in fact names a series of other texts—all in Tamil. The first part of the Vedas, he writes, deals with the first cause

according to the books which they have called Tirumantiram and Tiruvācakam, which are summas of their theology which they read in the schools. They say that this first cause is God, and that he is a pure spirit, incorporeal, infinite, full of all power and knowledge and truth, and present everywhere, which they call Carvēsparaṉ [Xarves Zibarum] which means the creator of all.21

For the second part of the Vedas, “dealing with the regents who have dominion over all things,” Azevedo again cites a Tamil text: “They say that this supreme [being] which they call God has infinite names, given in a particular book called Tivākaram.”22 His account of the third part of the Vedas, on moral doctrine, singles out the author of Tirukkuṟaḷ as the great teacher of moral precepts. Like many later missionary authors, Azevedo suggests Tiruvaḷḷuvar had derived these from St Thomas. Finally, Azevedo refers to a further book, Cātikaḷ Tōṭṭam, on castes. This text is difficult to identify, but its southern provenance is confirmed by the names of the four primary castes: kings, brahmins, chettis, and vellalas.

Despite his claim, then, that the Vedas are the original scriptures that prescribe what the gentiles of India are to believe and what rites they are to perform, Azevedo’s actual sources are all much later Tamil sources: Tirumantiram, Tiruvācakam, Tivākaram, Tirukkuṟaḷ, and the text on caste. This combination—identification of the Vedas as the oldest authoritative sources, together with a reliance on quite different texts for the actual details of the religious practices of those who so acknowledged the Vedas—would be repeated in the works of many of those who wrote from India. But the identification of the Vedas as the oldest and most authoritative works meant that it was only the Vedas that gained widespread recognition in Europe as the sacred texts of the Indians.

Azevedo In Other Authors

Although Azevedo’s work was not published until the twentieth century, it had an extraordinary impact on European understanding of the Vedas in the seventeenth century. Diogo do Couto, who had met Azevedo in Goa, used Azevedo’s work in his continuation of João de Barros’s chronicle of the Portuguese Asian empire, the Décadas da Ásia (see n. 16 above). The third and fourth chapters of the sixth book of Couto’s fifth decade, published at Lisbon in 1612, are taken almost verbatim from Azevedo. Couto’s work, in turn, was used by João de Lucena in his life of Xavier. The Dutch chaplain, Abraham Rogerius, followed one or the other of these works very closely in the account of the Vedas in his De Open-Deure tot het Verborgen Heydendom (1651), adding only the names of the Vedas, which he is the first to report in print in Europe. Through his primary informant, a Tamil Brahmin named Padmanābha, Rogerius was even able to give a paraphrase of part of a Sanskrit text (the Nītiand Vairāgya-śatakas of Bhartṛhari), although he again relies on other sources including some in Tamil. While Rogerius emphasizes that the Brahmins “must submit themselves to the Veda, and cannot contradict it in the least or object when a text from it is cited,” he adds that there are often strong disputes over the sense of the text: “one interprets a word thus, the other so,” so that to resolve such disputes reference is made to the “śāstra, which betokens so much as an explanation or exposition.” This was perhaps suggested to him to explain why texts other than the Vedas were those to which he was referred, despite the Veda’s acknowledged ultimate authority. Burnell suggests that, rather than the Vedas, Rogerius’s work in fact reflects the Tamil Vaiṣṇava canonical collection, the Nālāyira Tiviyappirapantam. Rogerius’s work gives a great deal of detailed information on brahminical Hinduism, but it was his repetition of Azevedo’s summary content of the Vedas that was most important for their reputation in Europe.

Rogerius’s work was quickly translated into German (1663) and French (1670), plagiarized in Dutch by Philip Baldaeus (1672) and Olfert Dapper (1672), and extracted in English and French in the works of John Ogilby (1673) and of Jean-Frédéric Bernard and Bernard Picart (1723, 1731). Each of these included Azevedo’s summary of the Vedas, and in this way it was very widely disseminated in Europe. Even late in the eighteenth century, Azevedo’s account of the Vedas was repeated almost verbatim in the work of the Italian Capuchin, Marco della Tomba. Although Couto, who repeats almost the whole of Azevedo’s account, retained all the references to Tamil texts, none of these subsequent works (with the partial exception of Lucena, who retains only the reference to Tiruvaḷḷuvar) mention any of the Tamil sources, despite Azevedo’s claim that these are the “summas of their theology.” In this way the idea was firmly established in Europe that it was the Vedas, above all and almost to the exclusion of other texts, that were the sacred books of India.

___________

16. Georg Schurhammer, Francis Xavier: His Life, His Times, vol. 2: India 1541–1545 (Rome: Jesuit Historical Institute, 1980), 614–16. Two versions of Azevedo’s “Estado da Índia e aonde tem o seu principio,” from manuscripts in the British Library and the Bibliotheca Nacional de Madrid, are printed in António da Silva Rego and Luıś de Albuquerque, eds., Documentação ultramarina portuguesa (Lisboa: Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1960–63), I: 197–263 and II: 40–147. I cite from the first version, except where noted. Schurhammer (Xavier, 2: 616–20) notes that there are close parallels in three sections of these texts with parts of the fifth of Diogo do Couto’s Décadas da Asiá. In the case of the first two—which relate to the history of Hormuz (210–12) and of Ceylon (235– 54)—Azevedo mentions that Couto had asked him to provide information (205, 235). Couto, who elsewhere does mention his sources, nowhere acknowledges Azevedo. There are also close parallels in the section on Indian religion in Azevedo and Couto and also with that which appears in João de Lucena in his life of Xavier. Lucena’s work was published in 1600, Schurhammer dates the final version of Azevedo’s text to 1603 (Xavier, 2: 616), and Couto’s work did not appear until 1612. Nevertheless it appears that Lucena used the manuscript of Couto’s fifth decade, a version of which was sent to Lisbon as early as 1597 (Marcus de Jong, ed., Década quinta da “Asia”: Texte inédit, publ. d’après un manuscrit de la Bibliothèque de l’Univ. de Leyde [Coimbra: Biblioteca da Universidade, 1937], 47). In a letter sent from Goa in November 1603, Couto complained bitterly about Lucena’s use of information which he claimed to have acquired at great effort and expense from the schools of the Brahmins in the kingdom of Vijayanagara (Schurhammer, Xavier, 2: 620). Despite Couto’s claim here that “in all my Decades I have given to each his due,” it seems likely that he had again used without acknowledgment material provided to him by Azevedo. The account of Indian religion was likely prepared by Azevedo during his second period in India between 1586 and 1589, and later incorporated into his Relação do Estado da Índia, completed in Lisbon by 1603....

21. The names of the texts in Rego’s transcription are “Ferum Mandramole e Trivaxigao” (Azevedo, “Estado da Índia,” 251) or “Tonem, Mandramolé e Trivaxigao” (Silva Rego, Documentação ultramarina portuguesa, II: 134). In the 1612 editio princeps of Couto these appear as “Terúm, Mandramole, Etrivaxigão.” From Couto’s work, Willem Caland was confident in identifying the latter as Tiruvācakam, less so the first as Tirumantiram (De ontdekkingsgeschiedenis van den Veda [Amsterdam: Johannes Müller, 1918], 273). Although neither Tirumantiram nor Tiruvācakam uses carvēsparaṉ, or the more common carvēccuraṉ (Sanskrit, sarveśvara), to refer to God, there can be no doubt that Tiruvācakam is meant here, and good reason to think that Tirumantiram could also have been intended.

22. Azevedo, “Estado da Índia,” 255. In both Rego’s transcriptions, and Couto, the title of the work is given as Tivarum. Although Caland (Veda, 318) suggests Tēvāram, Azevedo’s description of the content leaves little doubt that it is rather Tivākaram, an important early Tamil lexicon that begins with a list of the divine names, which is meant....

135. Caland concluded his 1918 essay by noting the limits of most Brahmins’ knowledge of the Vedas, adding that while it was not that there were no Brahmins who could have given Europeans a better and fuller account of the Vedas “do Couto, Rogerius and all the others knocked on the wrong door” (Veda, 303). Ludo Rocher expressed similar “reservations concerning the weight that has been given to the secrecy argument” (“Orality and Textuality in the Indian Context,” Sino-Platonic Papers, 49 [1994]: 5). Rocher was “convinced that there was, far more often, a second reason why Westerners were denied a knowledge of the Vedas; their Indian contacts, who were supposed to provide them with information on the Vedas, did not possess it themselves, and, therefore, were unable to communicate it” (“Max Müller and the Veda,” in Mélanges d’islamologie: Volume dédié à la mémoire de Armand Abel par ses collègues, ses élèves et ses amis, ed. Armand Abel and Pierre Salmon, vol. 2 [Leiden: Brill, 1974], 223).

-- The Absent Vedas, by Will Sweetman

The text which has served for the following translation comprises the Suktas of the Rig-Veda and the commentary of Sayana Acharya, printed, by Dr. Muller, from a collation of manuscripts, of which he has given an account in his Introduction.

Sayana Acharya was the brother of Madhava Acharya, the prime minister of Vira Bukka Raya, Raja of Vijayanagara in the fourteenth century, a munificent patron of Hindu literature. Both the brothers are celebrated as scholars; and many important works are attributed to them, — not only scholia on the Sanhitas and Brahmanas of the Vedas, but original works on grammar and law; the fact, no doubt, being, that they availed themselves of those means which their situation and influence secured them, and employed the most learned Brahmans they could attract to Vijayanagara upon the works which bear their name, and to which they, also, contributed their own labour and learning. Their works were, therefore, compiled under peculiar advantages, and are deservedly held in the highest estimation.

-- RigVeda Sanhita. A Collection of Ancient Hindu Hymns, Constituting the First Ashtaka, or Book of the Rig-Veda: The Oldest Authority for the Religious and Social Institutions of the Hindus. Translated from the Original Sanskrita by H.H. Wilson

With regard to the twelve MSS. of the Commentary to the first Ashtaka of the Riv-veda, I have only succeeded in reducing them to three independent classes. It is not very likely that MSS. should still be found in India contemporaneous with Sayana, though, if we could trust native authorities, copies of Sayana's works have been buried in the ground near Vidyanagara [Vijayanagara]. Excluding these MSS. the existence of which is extremely problematical, I am convinced that there are no Mss. at present which have any claim to be considered as exhibiting the Commentary exactly such as it came from the hands of Sayana....

It would have been equally wrong, however, to consider Sayana's commentary as an infallible authority with regard to the interpretation of the Veda. Sayana gives the traditional, but not the original, sense of the Vaidik hymns. These hymns -- originally popular songs, short prayers and thanksgivings, sometimes true, genuine, and even sublime, but frequently childish, vulgar, and obscure -- were invested by the Brahmans with the character of an inspired revelation, and made the basis of a complete system of dogmatic theology. If therefore we wish to know how the Brahmans, from the time of the composition of the first Brahmana to the present day, understood and interpreted the hymns of their ancient Rishis, we ought to translate them in strict accordance with Sayana's gloss. This is the object which Professor Wilson has always kept in view in his translation of the Veda; and for the history of religion, which in India, as elsewhere, represents the gradual corruption of simple truth into hierarchical dogmatism and philosophical hallucination, his work will always remain the most trustworthy guide. Nor could it be said, that the tradition of the Brahmans, which Sayana embodied in his work, after the lapse of at least three thousand years, had changed the character of the whole of the Rig-veda. By far the greater part of these hymns is so simple and straightforward, that there can be no doubt that their original meaning was exactly the same as their traditional interpretation. But no religion, no poetry, no law, no language, can resist the wear and tear of thirty centuries; and in the Veda, as in other works, handed down to us from a very remote antiquity, the sharp edges of primitive thought, the delicate features of a young language, the fresh hue of unconscious poetry, have been washed away by the successive waves of what we call tradition, whether we look upon it as a principle of growth or decay. To restore the primitive outlines of the Vaidik period of thought will be a work of great difficulty....

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The princely and truly patriotic liberality of His Highness the Maharajah of Vijayanagara has enabled me to take up once more in the evening of my life that work which has occupied me during my youth and during my advancing years....

I received a letter from His Highness the Maharajah of Vijayanagara, offering to defray the whole expense of a new edition, if I were still willing to undertake the labour of revising the text.

-- Rig-Veda-Sanhita: The Sacred Hymns of the Brahmans, Together with the Commentary of Sayanacharya, edited by Dr. Max Muller

Already in Ricci's and de Nobili's time, around the beginning of the seventeenth century, the claim surfaced that the Vedas of India were the repository of ancient Indian monotheism. Of course, the approach of Nobili and his successors in the Jesuit Madurai mission was anchored in the idea that India had once been a land reigned by pure monotheism; but the locus classicus for the monotheism of the Vedas is the description in Diogo do Couto's Decada Quinta da Asia of 1612 (124Vff.). Schurhammer (1977:614-18) has shown that Couto plagiarized the report by the Augustinian missionary Agostinho de Azevedo, but it was through Couto that this view of the Vedas as a monotheistic scripture, hidden by the Brahmans from the people to whom they preached polytheism, became popular. Since Couto's description was a central source for Holwell, I will discuss it in more detail in Chapters 5 and 6; here its summary by Philip Baldaeus will suffice:

The first of these Books treated of God and of the Origin and Beginning of the Universe. The second, of those who have the Government and Management thereof. The third, of Morality and true Virtue. The fourth of the Ceremonials in their Temples, and Sacrifices. These four Books of the Vedam are by them call' d Roggo Vedam, Jadura Vedam, Sama Vedam, and Tarawana Vedam; and by the Malabars Icca, Icciyxa, Saman, and Adaravan. The loss of this first Part is highly lamented by the Brahmans. (Baldaeus 1703:891)

Though various descriptions based on Azevedo and Giacomo Fenicio made the rounds, no European had yet managed to get access to more than fragments of these prized Vedas....

De Guignes's "Indian Religion"

....

De Guignes from the outset based his view on two specific texts. He devoted the entire second part of his 1753 paper to their analysis and included partial translations from the Arabic and Chinese (de Guignes 1759:791-804). The first of these texts, the so-called Anbertkend (sometimes also spelled Ambertkend), is today known as the Amrtakunda (Pool of Nectar), a Hatha Yoga text of Indian origin that has nothing to do with Buddhism.... For him the Anbertkend was an important text of the so-called "Indian religion" that "contains the principles admitted by the Yogis, particularly those related to magic" (p. 791)." The second text discussed by de Guignes is presented as "the work of Fo himself that includes all the moral teachings he bequeathed to his disciples" (p. 791). While this second text is well known under the title Forty-Two Sections Sutra and is extant in Chinese, the Anbertkend or Amrtakunda is not exactly a household word. De Guignes described it as an Indian book that was "translated into the Persian language by the Imam Rokneddin Mohammed of Samarkand who had received it from a Brahmin called Behergit of the sect of the Yogis" and was subsequently translated into Arabic by Mohieddin-ben-al-arabi. D'Herbelot's Bibliotheque Orientale features the following information under the heading "Anbertkend" (1697:114):

Book of the Brachmans or Bramens which contains the religion and philosophy of the Indians; this word signifies the cistern where one draws the water of life. It is divided into fifty Beths or Treatises of which each has ten chapters. A Yogi or Indian dervish called Anbahoumatah, who converted to Islam, translated it from the Indian into Arabic under the title Merat al maani, The Mirror of Intelligence; but though it was translated, this book cannot be understood without the help of a Bramen or Indian Doctor.

Four decades after d'Herbelot, Abbe Antoine BANIER (1673-1741) widely disseminated the idea that the four Vedas contain "all the sciences and all religious ceremonies" whereas the Anbertkend "contains the doctrines of the Indians" (Banier 1738:1.128-29). De Guignes also thought that "this book is not at all the Vedam of the Indians" but regarded it as "a work of the contemplative philosophers who, far from accepting the Vedam, reject it as useless based on the great perfection they believe to have attained" (de Guignes 1759:791-92). This description very much resembles the one given by Bartholomaus Ziegenbalg and La Croze of the Gnanigol [Ganiguels] and their (Tamil Siddha) literature including the Civaviikkiyam. According to de Guignes, the Anbertkend is a "summary of the contemplatives of India" (p. 796) that advocates that "to become happy one must annihilate all one's passions, not let oneself be seduced by the senses, and be in the kind of universal apathy that is so much recommended in the book of Fo" (p. 793). Apart from this, the only apparent connection to Fo or Buddha is a mantra connected with the contemplation of the planet "Boudah or Mercury" (p. 800)....

Relying on several authors of European antiquity whose view of Indian religions La Croze had popularized, de Guignes accepted that in ancient India there were two main factions: the "ancient Brakhmanes," and the "Germanes, Sarmanes, or Samaneens" (p. 770). Supplementing the sparse information from Greek and Roman authors, de Guignes proposed to "make use of clarifications from Chinese and Arab authors in order to provide a more exact idea about the sect of the Samaneens by examining who their founder is, in which country it originated, and what doctrine he left to his disciples at his death" (p. 770)....

What I have reported based on the Greek and Latin writers compels me to believe that there is little difference between the Samaneens and the Brachmanes, or rather, that they are two sects of the same religion. In effect, one still finds in the Indies a crowd of Brachmanes who appear to have the same doctrine and live in the same manner [as the Samaneens described by Greek and Latin writers]; but those who resemble the ancient Samaneens most perfectly are the Talapoins of Siam: like them, they live retired in rich cloisters, have no personal possessions, and enjoy great reputation at court; but more austere ones exclusively live in woods and forests, and there are also women under the direction of these Talapoins. (p. 773)...

But what is this religion of which the Brachmanes and the Samaneens supposedly constitute two separate sects? De Guignes simply calls it "the Indian religion" (la religion Indienne; p. 779). It is likely that de Guignes was also inspired by Johann Jacob Brucker's treatise on Asian philosophy (Brucker 1744:4B.804-26) and by Nicolas FRERET (1688-1749), who had studied Chinese even before Fourmont and had read a paper in 1744 that advanced exactly this opinion (see the beginning of Chapter 7). Freret asserted that "La religion indienne" is extremely widespread in Asia; reigning in India as "la religion des Brahmes," "Indian religion" has also conquered Tibet, Bhutan, China since the year 64 C.E., Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Siam, Burma, and so on (Freret 1753:36). But while Freret sought the doctrine of this religion in Diogo do Couto's description of the Vedas and combined it with some Buddhist elements, de Guignes decided to take the Buddhist track and identified the founder of his "religion Indienne" as Buddha who is venerated under various names in different countries of Asia....

The Shastah and the Vedas

...

[H]ere we will concentrate on Couto whose report about sacred Indian literature, unlike Azevedo's, was used by Holwell who could handle Portuguese. Couto's report of 1612 describes Indian sacred literature as follows:

They possess many books in their Latin, which they call Geredaom, and which contain everything they have to believe and all ceremonies they have to perform. These books are divided in bodies, members, and articulations. The fundamental texts are those they call Vedas which form four parts, and these again form fifty-two in the following manner: Six that they call Xastra which are the bodies; eighteen they call Purana which are the members; and twenty-eight called Agamon which are the articulations. (Couto 1612:125r)

TABLE 11. Do COUTO'S VEDAS AND HOLWELL'S SACRED SCRIPTURES OF INDIA
Couto / Holwell (1767)
4 Vedas / I / 4 scriptures of divine words of the mighty spirit (Chartah Bhade Shastah of Bramah)
6 Xastras / II / 6 scriptures of the mighty spirit (Chatah Bhade of Bramah)
18 Puranas / III / 18 books of divine words (Aughtorrah Bhade Shastah)
28 Agamon / IV / Divine words of the mighty spirit (Viedam of Brummah)

The numbers four, six, and eighteen first made me think that Holwell's weird history of Indian sacred literature might be modeled on Couto's report. As we have seen, Holwell also mentioned four textual bodies. The number of scriptures of the first three bodies thus correspond exactly to Couto's, as shown in Table II....

[Holwell] must have preferred Couto's description of the Veda's content:

To better understand these [Vedaos] we will briefly distinguish all of them. The first part of the four fundamental texts treats of the first cause, the first matter [materia prima], the angels, the souls, the recompense of good, the punishment of evil, the generation of creatures, their corruption, what sin is, how one can attain remission and be absolved, and why. The second part treats of the regents and how they exert dominion over all things. The third part is all about moral doctrine, advice exhorting to virtue and obliging to avoid vice, and also for monastic and political life, i.e., active and contemplative life. The fourth part treats of temple ceremonies, offerings, and their festivals; and also about enchantment, witchcraft, divination, and the art of magic since they are much taken by this kind of thing. (Couto 1612:125r)

TABLE 12. CONTENTS OF Do COUTO'S FIRST VEDA AND THE FIRST BOOK OF HOLWELL'S SHASTAH
Couto's first Veda in Decada Quinta (1612:125r) / First book of Holwell's Shastah (1767:30)
first cause, materia prima / God and his attributes
angels / creation of angelic beings
souls (of angels in human bodies) / lapse of angelic beings
punishment, recompense / punishment, mitigation
remission, absolution / final sentence leading to remission

The comparison of this description with Holwell's summary (1767=30) of the contents of his Shastah (see Table 12) shows that they are also quite a good match. This common inspiration may explain another contradiction in Holwell's portrayal of Indian sacred literature, namely, why -- in spite of his rantings against the Veda as a late and degenerate text -- Holwell claimed that both his Shastah (Text I) and the Viedam (Text IV) were "originally one":

Both these books [the Viedam and Shastah] contain the institutes of their respective religions and worships, often couched under allegory and fable; as well as the history of their ancient Rajahs and Princes -- their antiquity is contended for by the partisans of each -- but the similitude of their names, idols, and a great part of their worship, leaves little room to doubt, nay plainly evinces, that both these scriptures were originally one. (Holwell 1765:1.12)

If Couto's summary of Veda content does not seem overly concerned with angels, the more detailed explanations (Couto 1612:125v) provide details that were certainly of great interest to a man so thoroughly converted to Jacob Ilive's system as Holwell. Couto wrote that Indian manuals of theology portray God as first cause and as "a pure, incorporal, infinite spirit, endowed with all might, all knowledge, and all truth" who "is everywhere, which is why they call him Xarues Zibaru which signifies creator of all" (p. 125v). According to Couto, the first Veda then describes three kinds of angels: the good angels that remain in heaven with God; the delinquent angels who must go through rehabilitation imprisoned in human bodies on earth; and the angels shut in hell. It furthermore treats of the immortality of souls and their transmigration during the rehabilitation process on earth: "They believe that the souls are immortal; but they think that a sinner's soul at death passes into the body of some living being where it continues purification until it merits rising to heaven" (p. 125v). Couto goes into considerable detail about the meaning of transmigration and its deep connection with the punishment of evil and recompense of good: the souls of the worst sinners transmigrate after death into the most terrible animals, and those of the good into an ever better body. In this way they can purify themselves and atone until they become ready to regain their original state before the fall (pp. 125v-126r)....

If Holwell was trying to find the Vedas, he was not alone; but Couto's description of the first Veda, which seemed so similar to Ilive's ideas, certainly brought more motivation and focus to his search. He knew that he was looking for an extremely ancient scripture treating of God, the creation Story, angels and their fall, the immortality of souls, the purification of delinquent angels in human bodies, transmigration, the punishment of evil and reward of good, and remission and salvation.

-- The Birth of Orientalism, by Urs App

Diogo do Couto
Born c. 1542
Lisbon, Kingdom of Portugal
Died 1616
Goa, Portuguese India
Nationality Portuguese
Occupation Historian
Diogo do Couto (Lisbon, c. 1542 – Goa, 10 December 1616) was a Portuguese historian.

Biography

He was born in Lisbon in 1542 to Gaspar do Couto and Isabel Serrão Calvos. He studied Latin and Rhetoric at the College of Saint Anthony the Great (Colégio de Santo Antão), an important Jesuit-run educational institution in Lisbon. He also studied philosophy at the Convent of Saint Dominic (Convento de São Domingos de Benfica) in Benfica.[1]

In March 1559 (Armada of Pêro Vaz de Sequeira) he traveled to Portuguese India. As a soldier he took part in the Surat campaign in March 1560, living in Bharuch in 1563.

He returned to Lisbon with D. António de Noronha in 1569.

He was a close friend of the poet Luís de Camões, and described him in Ilha de Moçambique in 1569, as indebted and unable to fund his return to Portugal. Couto and other friends took it upon themselves to help Camões, who was thus enabled to take his most significant work, the Lusiads, to the capital.

Couto arrived in Lisbon on board the Santa Clara in April 1570, only to discover that the port was closed due to plague. Upon receiving permission from the King of Portugal (who he met in Almeirim), the ship docked in Tejo.

Shortly after Couto returned to Goa in the Armada of D. António de Noronha, he married Luisa de Melo and worked in a supply warehouse.

In 1595, Couto was invited to organize the Goa archive (being appointed "Guarda-Mor do Tombo da India") and to continue writing the Décadas (a history of the Portuguese in India, Asia, and southeast Africa) of João de Barros.

The 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th Décadas were published during his lifetime. After Couto died, his other works were in the hands of his brother-in-law, the priest Deodato da Trindade.

Works

• Decada Quarta (Dos feitos que os portugueses fizeram na conquista e descobrimento das terras e mares do Oriente, em quanto governaram na India Lopo Vaz de Sampaio e parte de Nuno da Cunha), Lisboa 1602;
• Decada Quinta (Dos feitos...em quanto governaram na India Nuno da Cunha, Garcia de Noronha, Estevão da Gama e Martim Afonso de Sousa), Lisboa 1612
• Decada Sexta (Dos feitos...em quanto governaram na India João de Castro, Garcia de Sá, Jorge Cabral e Afonso de Noronha), Lisboa 1614
• Decada Setima (Dos feitos... em quanto governaram na India Pedro de Mascarenhas, Francisco Barreto, Constantino Conde de Redondo, Francisco Coutinho e João de Mendonça), Lisboa 1616;
• Decada Oitava (Dos feitos...em quanto governaram na India Antão de Noronha e Luis de Ataíde), Lisboa 1673 (edited by Joao da Costa e Diogo Soares);
• Decada Nona (written in 1614, and stolen, with the OITAVA);
• Decada Décima (Dos feitos...em quanto governaram na India Fernão Telles, Francisco de Mascarenhas e Duarte de Menezes), Lisboa 1778
• Decada Undecima (lost or stolen, during the lifetime of the author);
• Decada Duodecima ("Tratado os Cinco Livros da Década XII"), Paris 1645;
• "Fala que fez em nome da Câmara de Goa ... a André Furtado Mendonça, em dia do Espírito Santo de 1609" (Lisboa 1810);
• Vida de Paulo de Lima Ferreira, Capitão Mor das Armadas do Estado da India
• O Soldado Prático (the original was stolen, and the author re-made it in 1610, and sent it to Manuel Severim de Faria), Lisboa 1790 (2nd ed. 1954, 3rd ed. 1980);
• Tratado de todas as cousas socedidas ao valeroso Capitão Dom Vasco da Gama primeiro conde da Vidigueira: almirante do mar da India: no descobrimento,e conquista dos mares, e terras do Oriente: e de todas as vezes que ha India passou, e das cousas que socederão nella a todos seus filhos, Lisboa 1998.

References

1. Couto, Diogo do; Caminha, Antonio Lourenço (1808). Obras ineditas de Diogo do Couto [New works by Diogo do Couto] (in Portuguese). Imperial e Real.

Bibliography

Loureiro, Rui Manuel, A biblioteca de Diogo do Couto, Macau, Instituto Cultural de Macau, 1998.

Diogo do Couto orador. Discursos oficiais proferidos na Câmara de Goa, edited by Maria Augusta Lima Cruz, Nuno Vila-Santa and Rui Manuel Loureiro, Portimão, Arandis/ISMAT, 2016.

Vila-Santa, Nuno, "O Primeiro Soldado Prático de Diogo do Couto e os seus contemporâneos" in Memórias 2017, Lisboa, Academia de Marinha, vol. XLVII, 2018, pp. 171–190. [1]

Vila-Santa, Nuno, "Diogo do Couto e Belchior Nunes Barreto: similitudes e diferenciações de dois interventores políticos contemporâneos" in Diogo do Couto. História e intervenção política de um escritor polémico, Edições Humus, Vila Nova de Famalicão, 2019, pp. 191–220. [2]

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Sutra of Forty-two Chapters [The Forty-Two Sections Sutra]
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 2/25/23

In the course of my studies on this subject, I noticed that Church fathers like Eusebius and Lactantius, Renaissance admirers of hermetic literature like Marsilio Ficino, Jesuits like Athanasius Kircher and the figurist Joachim Bouvet, and numerous other "ancient theologians" including Chevalier Ramsay (Chapter 5) were all confronting other religions and tried to link their own religion to an "ancient" (priscus), "original," and "pure" teaching of divine origin. Reputedly extremely ancient texts such as hermetic literature, Chaldaic oracles, and the Chinese Yijing (Book of Changes) played a crucial role in establishing this link to primordial wisdom. However, I found the same endeavor also in non-Abrahamic religions such as Buddhism where neither the creator God nor Adam, Noah, or the Bible plays a role.

A good example is the Forty-Two Sections Sutra, one of the most important texts in East Asian Buddhism, which also happens to be the first Buddhist sutra translated into a European language. Though the text originated roughly 1,000 years after the birth of Buddhism [65 CE] and in China, it came to be presented as the original teaching of the Buddha (his first sermon after enlightenment) and thus also formed a link to an "original teaching." The case studies of this book show that such misdated texts -- and the urge to establish a link between one's own creed and a most ancient teaching -- played an extraordinary role in the Western discovery of Asian religions.

Many texts mentioned in our pages are concerned with some "Ur-tradition" -- God's instructions to Adam, Buddha's instructions to his closest disciples, the "original" doctrine of the Vedas revealed by Brahma, and so on. These texts are covered with the fingerprints of various reformers and missionaries. On the Forty-Two Sections Sutra I found fingerprints of an eighth-century reformist Zen master; on the Yijing those of Jesuit figurists; on the Upanishads those of Shankara and the Sufi Prince Dara; on the Ezour-vedam those of Jean Calmette and Voltaire; and on the Shastah of Bramah those of Holwell. As much as their respective agendas differ, they possess a common denominator in the obsession with vestiges of an ancient true religion that happens to support their mission. As discussed in Chapter 5, "ancient theology" thus reveals itself not as a unique European phenomenon but rather as a local form of a universal mechanism operative in the birth of religious or quasi-religious movements. This mechanism is characterized by the use of supposedly very ancient texts and unique transmission lines designed to legitimize new or reformist views by linking such views to a founder figure's old, "original" teaching....

2. The Chinese Model (Seventeenth Century)

The man who most systematically applied Japanese insights to Chinese religions, Joao Rodrigues, did extensive research on Japanese and Chinese religions and was an exceptional linguist capable of handling primary sources in both languages. He is a hitherto mostly ignored key figure whose views exerted a profound and lasting influence on European perceptions of Asian religions. Unlike Matteo Ricci, whose 1615 report about China and its religions had gained a broad readership in Europe and opened many a European's eye, Rodrigues remained in the background. His groundbreaking research on the history of Chinese religions, chronology, and geography was used by others but rarely credited to him. However, in the form of Martino Martini's publications and of documents that proved decisive in the Chinese Rites controversy, Rodrigues's ideas reached a relatively broad readership. His reports were intensively studied in missionary circles, and his distinction between esoteric and exoteric forms of Chinese and Japanese religions became widely adopted.

The two major divergent views of the China and India missions -- Ricci's and de Nobili's "good" monotheist transmission model versus Rodrigues's "evil" idolatry model -- spilled over into other realms and also had important repercussions in Rome, where Athanasius Kircher in 1667 published under the title of China Illustrata a synthesis of an enormous amount of data from the Jesuit archives and personal communication with travelers and missionaries. He thought, like Rodrigues, that the Brahmans of India were representatives of Xaca's religion who had infected the entire East with their creed. A Chinese Buddhist text helped in fostering this mistaken view: the Forty-Two Sections Sutra. Its preface explained that Buddhism was introduced to China from India in the year 65 C.E. This text played an extraordinary role not only in the European discovery of Buddhism but also in that of China, Japan, and even America (see Chapter 4)....

Couplet's Buddha

The essence of Jesuit knowledge about the religion of Foe (Ch. Fo, Buddha) in the second half of the seventeenth century is contained in the 106-page introduction of the famous Confucius Sinarum philosophus of 1687. Dedicated to King Louis XIV of France, this book -- and in particular its introduction signed (though not wholly written) by the Jesuit Philippe Couplet (1623- 93) -- played a central role in the diffusion of knowledge about Far Eastern religions among Europe's educated class and created quite a stir. A review in the Journal des Sravans of 1688 shows that it was especially Couplet's vision of the history of Chinese religions that attracted interest. The anonymous reviewer (who according to David Mungello [1989:289] was Pierre-Sylvain Regis) calculated on the basis of the chronological tables in Couplet's book that the Chinese empire had begun shortly after the deluge -- provided that one use not the habitual Vulgata chronology but the longer one of the Septuaginta (Regis 1688:105). The reviewer summarized Couplet's argument about the history of Chinese religions as follows:

Following this principle, Father Couplet holds that the first Chinese received the knowledge of the true God from Noah and named him Xanti [Ch. Shangdi, supreme ruler]. One must note that the first emperors of China lived as long as the [biblical] Patriarchs and that they therefore could easily transmit this knowledge to their descendants who preserved it for 2,761 years until the reign of Mim-ti [emperor Ming] ... who through a bizarre adventure strangely altered it. (pp. 105-6)

This "bizarre adventure" was the introduction of Buddhism in China as related by Matteo Ricci, who had, with almost Voltairian guile, transformed the Forty-Two Sections Sutra's story of Emperor Ming's embassy to India in search of Buddhism into a botched quest for Christianity.17 In its course, the Chinese ambassadors supposedly stopped "on an island close to the Red Sea where the religion of Foe (this great and famous idolater of the East Indies) reigned" and ended up bringing Foe's idolatry instead of Christianity to China (p. 106). The religion of Foe or Fo was thus seen as the major cause for the loss of true monotheism in China. The role of the Jesuit missionaries, by implication, is analogous to that of Chumontou in the Ezour-vedam: it was their task to show how the true original religion of the natives had become disfigured and to prepare the ground for its restoration and perfection under the sign of the cross....

Diderot's Oriental Blend

As explained at the beginning of this chapter, Diderot's encyclopedia article on the "Bramines" (1751:2.393-94) portrays them as "priests of the god Fo" who "principally revere three things, the god Fo, his law, and the books containing their constitutions." His description of these priests combines characteristics of Fo's esoteric teaching (as reported by Japan and China missionaries) with facets of Indian religions, for example, the doctrines of emanation, cosmic illusion (maya), and ascetic quietism as described by Bernier. According to Diderot, the Brahmin priests of Fo "assert that the world is nothing but an illusion, a dream, a magic spell, and that the bodies, in order to be truly existent, have to cease existing in themselves, and to merge into nothingness, which due to its simplicity amounts to the perfection of all beings" (trans. Halbfass 1990:59-60). Thrown into the blender were also some lumps from missionary reports about Zen as well as the Forty-Two Sections Sutra (see next chapter), for example, the notion that "saintliness consists in willing nothing, thinking nothing, feeling nothing, and removing one's mind so far from any idea, even that of virtue, that the perfect quietude of the soul stays unaltered" (Diderot 1751:2.393).11 Diderot's Brahmins pretend, as in Kircher, to have sprung from the head of the god Brahma, to possess "ancient books that they call sacred," and to have preserved the ancient language of these texts (p. 393). Diderot also associates these "Brahmin priests of Fo" with some of the doctrines that form the staple of descriptions of Indian religion since Henry Lord (1630) and Abraham Roger (1651).Under Diderot's label of philosophie asiatique, the readers of the Encyclopedie thus found a blend of "Asian" teachings and practices that were all associated with Brahmins who propagated the religion of Fo....

The Forty-Two Sections Sutra

De Guignes had a kind of Bible for all things Chinese. Whether he was writing about Chinese history or religion, on virtually every page he either refers to or quotes from the Wenxian tongkao (Comprehensive examination of literature) compiled by MA Duanlin (1245-1322). Published after twenty years of work in 1321, this masterpiece of Chinese historiography soon became indispensable because it provided thematically arranged extracts from a very wide range of other Chinese works. Students preparing for China's civil service examinations sometimes memorized Ma's chapter introductions, and missionaries and early Western Sinologists appreciated the giant work because it furnished so much (and so judiciously selected) textual material from original sources.

One can say that this excellent work is by itself equivalent to an entire library and that even if Chinese literature would only consist of this work it would be worth the trouble to learn Chinese just to read this. It is not only about China that one would learn much but also a large part of Asia, and regarding everything that is most important and noteworthy about its religions, legislation, rural economics and politics, commerce, agriculture, natural history, history, physical geography, and ethnography. One only has to choose the subject which one wants to study and then to translate what Ma Duanlin has to say about it. All the facts are reported and classified, all sources indicated, and all authorities cited and discussed. (Abel-Remusat 1829:2.170)

This was the work that men like de Visdelou and de Guignes always seemed to have at hand; and some China missionaries only appeared to be so well read because they failed to mention that Ma Duanlin was the source of their quotations from so many Chinese works (p. 171). It was in the Wenxian tongkao that de Guignes found much of the material for his History of the Huns, and the influence of this collection was so great that Abel-Remusat stated in 1829 that Ma Duanlin alone was at the origin "of the large part of positive knowledge that one has so far acquired in Europe about Chinese antiquity" (p. 171-72). While this may be a bit exaggerated in view of the translations of Chinese classics and histories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there is no doubt that for de Guignes this collection was of supreme importance. For example, fascicles 226 and 227 of Ma Duanlin's work, which deal with Buddhism and its literature, are the source of much of the solid information (as opposed to speculation) that de Guignes conveyed about this topic to his pan-European readership.

In the introduction to his Buddhism sections, Ma Duanlin recounts the traditional story about the dream of Emperor Ming of the Han dynasty (re. 58-75 CE.) and the introduction of Buddhism to China. The emperor saw a spirit flying in his palace courtyard, was told that this had to do with an Indian sage called Buddha, and sent an embassy to India. Accompanied by two Indian monks, this embassy brought the Forty-Two Sections Sutra and a statue of the Buddha on a white horse back to China in 65 CE. The famous White Horse Monastery (Baimasi) was built near the capital Chang'an (today's Xian) in order to store this precious text and China's first Buddha statue.

This is the story de Guignes was familiar with. But the more modern Sinologists led by Maspero (1910) learned about it, the more this Story turned out to be a classic foundation myth. Today we know that there is no evidence that such an embassy ever took place; that the oldest extant Story of Emperor Ming's dream had a man as leader of the ambassadors who had lived two hundred years earlier; that Buddhism was introduced to China before the first century of the common era; that the first references to a White Horse Monastery date from the third century CE.;16 and of course, as is the rule with such myths, that striking details -- such as the first Buddha image and the two Indian monks accompanying the white horse -- enter the game suspiciously late (here in the fifth century).

While this tale of the introduction of Buddhism to China is today regarded as a legend without any historical basis, the Forty-Two Sections Sutra itself has a reasonable claim to antiquity. It is an exaggeration to say that "most scholars believe that the original Scripture of Forty-Two Sections, whatever its origins, was indeed in circulation during the earliest period of Buddhism in China" (Sharf 2002:418). One can only state with confidence that some of its maxims and sayings are documented from the second century onward and that some of the vocabulary of the text indicates (or wants to indicate) an origin in the first centuries CE. The scholarly consensus in Japan holds that the text as we know it stems not from the first or second century but is a Chinese compilation dating from the fifth century CE. that combined passages and sayings from a number of different Buddhist texts (Okabe 1967).

Twentieth-century research has also revealed that there are three major versions of this text (Okabe 1967). The first, included in the Korean Buddhist canon, appears to more or less closely reproduce the original fifth-century compilation and is here called "standard version." The version used by de Guignes, by contrast, first emerged around 800 CE. and contains some sections that are strikingly different from the standard version. Figure 9 shows the genealogy of editions of the Forty-Two Sections Sutra.


Figure 9. Stemma of major Forty-Two Sections Sutra editions (Urs App)

Since exactly these modified sections (Yanagida 1955) are of central importance for de Guignes's interpretation of "Indian religion," a bit more information is needed here. The book entitled Baolin zhuan ("Treasure Forest Biographies") of 801 -- which was the first text to include the modified Forty-Two Sections Sutra -- is known as a scripture of the Chan or Zen tradition of Chinese Buddhism. Rather than a separate "sect" in the ordinary sense, this was a typical reform movement involving Buddhist monks of a variety of different affiliations who had a particular interest in meditation17 and wanted to link their reform to the founder's "original teaching." For this purpose, lineages of transmission were created out of whole cloth, and soon enough the founder Buddha was linked to his eighth-century Chinese "successors" by a direct line of Indian patriarchs at whose end stood Bodhidharma, the legendary figure who fulfills the role of transmitter and bridge between India and China. Needless to say, all this was a pious invention to legitimize and anchor the reform movement in the founder's "original" teaching that supposedly was transmitted "mind to mind" by an unbroken succession of enlightened teachers reaching back to the Buddha. According to this very creative Story line, the Buddha once showed a flower to his assembly and only one member, his disciple Mahakashyapa, smiled. He thus became the first Indian "Zen" patriarch who had received the Buddha's formless transmission. Such transmission lineages had much evolved since their modest beginnings in genealogies of Buddhist masters of Kashmir and in Tiantai Buddhist lore. In the eighth century, Zen sympathizers tested a number of variants until, in the year 801, a model emerged that carried the day (Yampolsky 1967:47-50). This was the model of the Baolin zhuan featuring twenty-seven Indian patriarchs and the twenty-eighth patriarch Bodhidharma, the legendary founder of Zen whom Engelbert Kaempfer had depicted crossing the sea to China on a reed (see Figure 10 below).

The partially extant first chapter of this "Treasure Forest" text presented the biography of the founder, Shakyamuni Buddha, and this chapter contained the modified text of the Forty-Two Sections Sutra. The setting is, of course, significant: the sutra is uttered just after the Buddha's enlightenment and thus constitutes the founder's crucial first teaching. This alone was quite a daring innovation that turned a collection of maxims, anecdotes, and rules into a founder's oration. But the ninth-century editor of the Baolin zhuan went one significant step further. Not content faithfully to quote the conventional text of the sutra, he changed various sections and added passages that clearly reflected his own reformist "Zen" agenda. This method of putting words into the founder's mouth was and is, of course, popular in many religions; but in this case it was a particularly effective ploy. Not only did the Buddha now utter things that furthered the editor's sectarian agenda-and turned the text into a "sutra" -- but he said these things in his very first speech after enlightenment! And this speech formed a text that was not just any text but the reputedly first and oldest text of Buddhism and for good measure also the first one to make its way to China and to be translated into Chinese! What better pedigree and vehicle for reformist teachings could one wish for?

The Zen movement as a whole was crowned with brilliant success, as Ma Duanlin's list of Buddhist literature in fascicle 227 of his work shows: more than one-third of the eighty-three listed texts are products of the Zen tradition (for example, the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, Blue Cliff Record, and Records of Linji). The "Zen-ified" text of the Forty-Two Sections Sutra, too, was a smashing success. It became by far the most popular version of this sutra, was printed and reprinted with various commentaries, and in the Song period was even included as the first of the "three classics" (Ch. sanjing) of Buddhism.18 A copy of it found its way into the Royal Library in Paris, and this is the text de Guignes set out to translate in the early 1750S.19 It is worthy of note that it was exactly the most "Zen-ified" version of this text that served to introduce Europe to Buddhist sutras, that is, sermons purportedly uttered by the Buddha.20

The difference between the three major versions of the Forty- Two Sections Sutra is of great interest as it exhibits the motives of their respective editors. For example, the end of section nine of the standard version reads as follows:

Feeding one billion saints is not as good as feeding one solitary buddha (pratyekabudda). Feeding ten billion solitary buddhas is not as good as liberating one's parents in this life by means of the teaching of the three honored ones. To teach one hundred billion parents is not as good as feeding one buddha, studying with the desire to attain buddhahood, and aspiring to liberate all beings. But the merit of feeding a good man is [still] very great. It is better for a common man to be filial to his parents than for him to serve the spirits of Heaven and Earth, for one's parents are the supreme spirits. (Sharf 2002:424)

Whether one regards the portions of the text that are here emphasized by bold type as interpolations or not, their emphasis on filial piety clearly exhibits the Chinese character of this text and fits into the political climate of fifth-century China. The Imperial Zhenzong edition (Zen version A), which adopted a number of the "Zen" changes from the Baolin zhuan, leaves out part of the first phrase but also praises filial piety:

Feeding one billion saints is not as good as feeding one solitary buddha (pratyekabudda). Feeding ten billion solitary buddhas is not as good as feeding one buddha, studying with the desire to attain buddhahood, and aspiring to liberate all beings. But the merit of feeding a good man is [still] very great. It is better for a common man to be filial to his parents than for him to serve the spirits of Heaven and Earth, for one's parents are closest.

For a religion whose clergy must "leave home" (ch. chujia) and effectively abandon parents and relatives in order to join the family of the monastic sangha, this call for filial piety may seem a little odd; but this kind of passage certainly helped fend off Confucian criticism about Buddhism's lack of filial piety. Compared to the standard edition, the "imperial" edition (Zen version A) effectively sidelined the issue and made it clear that "feeding one buddha, studying with the desire to attain buddhahood, and aspiring to liberate all beings" is the highest goal. The Shousui text (Zen version B), by contrast, mentions not one word about filial piety and advocates a rather different ideal:

Feeding one billion saints is not as good as feeding one solitary buddha (pratyekabudda). Feeding ten billion solitary buddhas is not as good as feeding one of the buddhas of the three time periods. And feeding one hundred billion buddhas of the three time periods is not as good as feeding someone who is without thought and without attachment, and has nothing to attain or prove.

This goal reflects the agenda of the Zen sympathizer who edited the Forty-Two Sections Sutra around the turn of the ninth century and decided to put this novel teaching straight into the mouth of the newly enlightened Buddha. De Guignes, who used a "Zen version B" text, translated the part emphasized by bold type quite differently from my rendering above:

One billion O-lo-han are inferior to someone who is in the degree of Pie-tchi-fo, and ten billion Pietchi-fo inferior to someone who has reached the degree of San-chi-tchu-fo. Finally, one hundred billion Sanchi- tchu-fo are not comparable to one who no more thinks, who does nothing, and who is in a complete insensibility of all things. (de Guignes 1759:1.2.229)

This last passage played a crucial role in de Guignes's definition of the Samaneens and their ideal. He interpreted the different stages of perfection as stages of rebirth and purification. This conception lies at the heart of his view that the ideal Samaneens, who in the Zen version B text are credited with exactly such absence of discriminating thought and attachment, represent the ultimate stage of transmigration before union with the Supreme Being. Theirs is the "religion of annihilation" (la religion de l'aneantissemen) de Guignes found at the very beginning of the Sutra text where the Buddha says, "He who abandons his father, his mother, and all his relatives in order to occupy himself with the knowledge of himself and to embrace the religion of annihilation is called Samaneen" (de Guignes 1759:1B.227) The corresponding standard text defines the Samaneens as follows: "The Buddha said: Those who leave their families and their homes to practice the way are called sramanas." The Zen text version A and also version B used by de Guignes, by contrast, have: "The Buddha said: A home-leaver or sramana cuts off all desire and frees himself from attachment, understands the source of his own mind, attains the Buddha's profound principle, and awakens to the doctrine of wu-wei." This "doctrine of wu-wei" (literally, "nonaction") was interpreted by de Guignes as "religion of annihilation."21 It was thus exactly the eight-character-phrase [x] ("know the mind / reach the source / understand the doctrine of wu-wei") that the Zen editor had slipped into the opening passage that inspired de Guignes to define the religion of the Samaneens as a "religion of annihilation." He found this ideal confirmed in other passages of his Forty-Two Sections Sutra. The second section, which is also exclusive to the Zen versions, is shown in Table 7.

TABLE 7. SECTION OF DE GUiGNES'S FORTY-TWO SECTIONS SUTRA TRANSLATION

"Zen" version B (Shousui text) / English translation based on de Guignes (1756:I.2.228) / English translation based on the Chinese text (App)

[x] / A Samaneen, after having abandoned everything and smothered his passions, must always occupy himself with contemplating the sublime doctrine of Fo; / A "home-leaver" or sramana cuts off all desire and frees himself from attachment, understands the source of his own heart-mind, attains the Buddha's profound principle, and awakens to the doctrine of wu-wei.

[x] / then there is nothing to desire any more, his heart is no more bound, nothing touches him, and he thinks of nothing. / He has nothing to attain inside and nothing to search for outside; his heart-mind is not bound to the Way nor is he tied to karma. Free of thought and action, he has nothing to cultivate and nothing to prove.

De Guignes's translation in places reads more like a paraphrase; some phrases are left untranslated, and there is a very understandable ignorance of technical terminology. For example, de Guignes translates the text's "nor is he tied to karma" as "nothing touches him." The lack of specialized dictionaries and a tenuous grasp of classical Chinese grammar must have made translation not just a tedious but also a hazardous enterprise. So much more astonishing is the degree of confidence that de Guignes seemed to have in his skill as a translator and interpreter of Chinese texts.

The God of the Samaneens

An anonymous British reviewer once described de Guignes as a man who is "almost always wading through the clouds of philology, to snuff up conjectures."22 He must have been thinking of de Guignes's theories about the Egyptian origin of the Chinese people or his conviction, built on a flimsy legend in Ma Duanlin's work, that Chinese Buddhist missionaries had discovered America in the fifth century C.E. (de Guignes 1761). But de Guignes's tendency to take some ambiguous drop of information and to wring earth-shattering torrents of conclusions from it is already in evidence in his very first translation from the Forty-Two Sections Sutra. His interpretation of the first word of the sutra's preface, as it happens, was just such a "cloud of philology," and the house of cards de Guignes built on this one-legged stool was of a truly astonishing scale. This was de Guignes's first attempt to come to terms with the content and history of the creed that he called "Indian religion" and to introduce the central and oldest text by this religion's founder, so it is no surprise that many readers and other authors were inspired.23 De Guignes's mistranslation and misinterpretation of the first word of this preface thus not only set his own interpretation of Buddhism on the wrong footing but misled a generation of readers unable to read Chinese who naturally relied on de Guignes's "expertise."

Zen version B's short preface appears to have been authored by the editor of the Baolin zhuan around the turn of the ninth century. Since that editor wanted to portray the Forty-Two Sections Sutra -- which he had so cleverly used as a host for his reformist "Zen" agenda -- as the first sermon of the Buddha after his enlightenment, his "Zen Version B" text, of course, situated the action at the Deer Park in Saranath where the Buddha first taught (turned the dharma wheel of the Four Noble Truths); see Table 8.

TABLE 8. BEGINNING OF DE GUIGNES'S FORTY-TWO SECTIONS SUTRA PREFACE

Zen version B text / English tramslation based on de Guignes (1759:802-3) / English translation based on the Chinese text (App)

[x] / The veritable law of the adoration of Chi only consists in meditations, in the removal of one's passions, and in perfect apathy. The one who has reached the greatest perfection in this law, / When [Buddha] the World-honored One had attained the Way [buddhahood] he had the following thought: "To free oneself of desire and be calm is most excellent."

[x] / after having lost himself in profound contemplations, can submit the spirits, go in the middle of deserts, / Absorbed in a great state of meditation [samadhi], he subdued all demonic ways, and while in the Deer Park

[x] / traverse the revolutions of the four Ti, meditate on the five famous philosophers and particularly on Kiao-chin-ju, / he revolved the Dharma wheel of the Four [Noble] Truths. He converted Kaudinya, etc., the five companions.

[x] / and finally pass through the different degrees of sanctity that one acquires by practicing the law. / and had them attain the fruit of the Way.

De Guignes's translation of this preface makes one doubt his grasp of classical Chinese and confirms that he would hardly have been in a position to produce the translations in his History of the Huns without the constant help of de Visdelou's manuscripts. But translating such texts in mid-eighteenth-century Paris was an extremely difficult undertaking. Some reading of Buddhist texts would have quickly showed that "the world-honored one" is a very common epithet of the Buddha. But there were few such texts at hand, and the Chinese character dictionaries of the Royal Library (Leung 2002:196-97) as a rule did not list compounds. Still, the "subject-verb-past particle" structure should have suggested something like "XX having attained the Way ... " rather than de Guignes's wayward "the veritable law of the adoration of Chi only consists in ... " For de Guignes everything turned around this "adoration of Chi." In his view this "veritable law" consisted in "meditations, removal of one's passions, and in perfect apathy." Furthermore, de Guignes thought that this preface outlined a process through which those who practice this law "pass through the different degrees of sanctity" before reaching the greatest perfection, and used this as textual support for his conception of the Samaneens as the ultimate stage of the transmigration process. But ultimately de Guignes's interpretation hinged on the meaning of the first two characters that he translated as "adoration of Chi." The first character chi (which today is romanized as shi) usually means "century" or "world." But here it forms part of the compound shizun, which in Chinese Buddhist texts is one of the most common appellations of the Buddha. It literally means "the world-honored one" and is as common in Buddhist texts as in Christian texts the phrase "our savior" that, as everyone knows, refers to Jesus. Probably due to lack of exposure to Buddhist texts, de Guignes did not realize this and explained the meaning of the first character chi or shi as follows:

Chi, in the Chinese language, means century and corresponds to the Arabic word Alam, which the translator of the Anbertkend employed in the same sense; it is thus the adoration of the century that is prescribed in both works. What Masoudi reports of the Hazarouan-el-alam, a duration of 36,000 years (or according to others 60,000 years) was adopted by the Brahmins and is the same as this Chi of the Chinese. This Hazarouan possessed the power over things and governed them all. In the Indian system, the Chi or Hazarouan corresponds perfectly to this Eon of the Valentinians who pretend that the perfect Eon resides in eternity in the highest heaven that can neither be seen nor named. They called it the first principle, the first father. (de Guignes 1759:803)

In support of this view, de Guignes here referred to the famous two-volume Critical History of Mani and Manichaeism (1734/1739) by Isaac de BEAUSOBRE (1659-1738). Citing St. Irenaeus, Beausobre had characterized this Eon of the Valentinians as "invisible, incomprehensible, eternal, and alone existing through itself" and as "God the Father" who is also called "First Father, First Principle, and Profundity" (Beausobre 1984:578). Following Beausobre, de Guignes stated that these Christian heretics "admitted a perfect Eon, the Eon of Eons," and concluded without further ado that exactly this Eon of Eons "is the Chi of the Samaneens" (de Guignes 1759:804). For de Guignes and his readers this appeared to be solid textual evidence in support of a monotheistic interpretation of esoteric Buddhism, an interpretation that some had already encountered in Brucker (1742-44:48.821-22) or Freret (1753; see Chapter 7).

De Guignes's 1753 paper on the Samaneens thus ended with a monotheistic bang. Three years later, in the History of the Huns, he spelled out some of the implications. After having once more laid out his view of the exoteric and esoteric followers of Fo and described the Samaneen as a person who "is free of all these passions, exempt of all impurity, and dies only to rejoin the unique divinity of which his soul was a detached part" (de Guignes 1756:1.2.225), de Guignes explains the Samaneen vision of God in a manner that echoes Brucker:

This supreme Being is the principle of all things, he is from all eternity, invisible incomprehensible, almighty, sovereignly wise, good, just, merciful, and self-originated. He cannot be represented by any image; one cannot worship him because he is beyond any adoration, but one can depict his attributes and worship them. This is the beginning of the idolatric cult of the peoples of India. The Samaneen who is ever occupied with meditation on this great God, only seeks to annihilate himself in order to rejoin and lose himself in the bosom of the Divinity who has pulled all things out of nothing and is itself different from matter. This is the meaning that they give to emptiness and nothingness. (de Guignes 1756:1.2.226)

For de Guignes this sovereign Being, this "great God," is the one who in the "doctrine of the Samaneens or Philosophers has the Chinese name of Chi" (p. 226). This fact forms the core of de Guignes's conception of the real (monotheist) religion of Buddha. He even read a creator God into the last section of his 1756 translation of the Forty-Two Sections Sutra. That section contains a passage that compares the Buddha's "method of skilful means" (Ch. fangbianmen) to a magician's trick ([x]). Like a magician in his own right, de Guignes pulled nothing less than the creatio ex nihilo out of this simple phrase. He translated it by "the creation of the universe that has been pulled from nothingness [I regard as] just the simple transformation of one thing into another" (p. 233).

After his translation of the Forty-Two Sections Sutra, de Guignes summarized his view of it as follows:

I thought I had to report here the major part of this work that forms the basis of the entire religion of the Samaneens. Those who glance at it will only find a Christianity of the kind that the Christian heresiarchs of the first century taught after having mixed ideas from Pythagoras on metempsychosis with some other principles drawn from India. This book could be one of those false gospels that were current at the time. With the exception of a few particular ideas, all the precepts that Fo conveys seem to be drawn from the gospel. (pp. 233-34)

De Guignes's misunderstanding and mistranslation not only confirmed his fixed idea of the monotheism of the Samaneens but also led to an entirely original assessment of the history of their religion. Without making any attempt to help his confused readers, de Guignes suggested that the purportedly oldest book of this religion was an apocryphal Christian gospel of gnostic tendency from the early first century C.E. In a paper read in the fall of 1753 he also argued -- possibly inspired by de Visdelou's annotated translation of the Nestorian stele that repeatedly made the same point -- that the Chinese had mixed up Nestorian Christians with Buddhists.24 Not content with this narrow argument based on the text of the stele, he grew convinced that the Chinese mixup of Christianity with Foism happened on such a scale that they even "gave Jesus Christ the name of Fo!' (de Guignes 1764:810). In a sense, his theory about the Forty-Two Sections Sutra was a counterpart to the story line advanced by Ruggieri (Rule 1986:10) and Ricci that proposed that Emperor Ming's dream about a saint from the West had been about Jesus Christ and that the imperial embassy had mistakenly brought back the idolatry of Fo instead of the truth of Christianity. According to de Guignes, however, the Chinese ambassadors had imported a heretical kind of Christianity and fallen victim to the delusion that it was the religion of Fo.

But what about the origin of the religion of Fo around 1000 B.C.E. that de Guignes had found documented in so many Chinese and Arabic sources? Did he now believe that its exoteric and esoteric teachings were all from the common era? Where did Pythagoras learn about metempsychosis? What were those "other principles" from (presumably pre-Christian-era) India that were supposedly mixed in? Do the Vedas belong to this religion or are they older? In the 1750s de Guignes left these and many other questions unanswered; and when he revisited the theme two decades later, the Christian heresiarchs and the view of the Forty-Two Sections Sutra as an apocryphal gospel had vanished like a magician's doves and rabbits.

-- The Birth of Orientalism, by Urs App

The Sutra of Forty-two Chapters (also called the Sutra of Forty-two Sections, Chinese: 四十二章經) is often regarded as the first Indian Buddhist sutra translated into Chinese. However, this collection of aphorisms may have appeared some time after the first attested translations, and may even have been compiled in Central Asia or China.[1] According to tradition, it was translated by two Yuezhi monks, Kasyapa Matanga (迦葉摩騰) and Dharmaratna (竺法蘭), in 67 CE. Because of its association with the entrance of Buddhism to China, it is accorded a very significant status in East Asia.[2]

Story of translation

In the Annals of the Later Han and the Mouzi lihuo lun, Emperor Ming of Han (r. 58-75 C.E.) was said to have dreamed of a spirit, who had a "gold body" and a head which emitted "rays of light".[3] His advisers identified the spirit as Buddha, who was supposed to have the power of flight.[4] The emperor then ordered a delegation (led by Zhang Qian [5]) to go west looking for the Buddha's teachings. The envoys returned, bringing with them the two Indian monks Kasyapa Matanga and Dharmaratna, and brought them back to China along with the sutra. When they reached the Chinese capital of Luoyang, the emperor had the White Horse Temple built for them.[6]

They are said to have translated six texts, the Sutra of Dharmic-Sea Repertory (法海藏經), Sutra of the Buddha's Deeds in His Reincarnations (佛本行經), Sutra of Terminating Knots in the Ten Holy Terras (十地斷結經), Sutra of the Buddha's Reincarnated Manifestations (佛本生經), Compilation of the Divergent Versions of the Two Hundred and Sixty Precepts (二百六十戒合異), and the Sutra of Forty-two Chapters. Only the last one has survived.[7]

Scholars, however, question the date and authenticity of the story. First, there is evidence that Buddhism was introduced into China prior to the date of 67 given for Emperor Ming's vision. Nor can the sutra be reliably dated to the first century. In 166 C.E., in a memorial to Emperor Huan, the official Xiang Kai referred to this scripture multiple times. For example, Xiang Kai claims that, "The Buddha did not pass three nights under the [same] mulberry tree; he did not wish to remain there long," which is a reference to Section 2 of the scripture. Furthermore, he also refers to Section 24 of the scripture, when Xiang Kai tells the story of a deity presenting a beautiful maiden to the Buddha, to which the Buddha replies that "This is nothing but a leather sack filled with blood."[8] Nonetheless, while these sections seem to mirror the extant edition of the text, it is possible that the edition we now have differs substantially from the version of the text circulating in the second century.

Structure and comparison with other works

The Sutra of Forty-two Chapters consists of a brief prologue and 42 short chapters (mostly under 100 Chinese characters), composed largely of quotations from the Buddha. Most chapters begin "The Buddha said..." (佛言...), but several provide the context of a situation or a question asked of the Buddha. The scripture itself is not considered a formal sutra, and early scriptures refer to the work as "Forty-two Sections from Buddhist Scriptures" or "The Forty-two Sections of Emperor Xiao Ming."[9]

It is unclear whether the scripture existed in Sanskrit in this form, or was a compilation of a series of passages extracted from other canonical works in the manner of the Analects of Confucius. This latter hypothesis also explains the similarity of the repeated "The Buddha said..." and "The Master said," familiar from Confucian texts, and may have been the most natural inclination of the Buddhist translators in the Confucian environment, and more likely to be accepted than a lengthy treatise.[10] Among those who consider it based on a corresponding Sanskrit work, it is considered to be older than other Mahayana Sutras, because of its simplicity of style and naturalness of method.[11] Scholars have also been able to find the aphorisms present in this scripture in various other Buddhist works such as Digha, Majjhima, Samyutta, Anguttara Nikayas, and Mahavagga. Furthermore, scholars are also uncertain if the work was first compiled in India, Central Asia, or China.[12]

In fiction

Main article: The Deer and the Cauldron

In Jin Yong's novel The Deer and the Cauldron, the Sutra of Forty-two Chapters is the key to the Manchu's treasures. The Shunzhi Emperor, who is unwilling to let out the secret, spread rumours about it being the source of life of the invading Manchus. The protagonist, Wei Xiaobao, manages to get hold of all the eight books at the end of the novel.

In modern Buddhism

The Sutra in Forty-two Chapters is well known in East Asian Buddhism today. It has also played a role in the spread of Buddhism to the West. Shaku Soen (1859-1919), the first Japanese Zen master to teach in the West, gave a series of lectures based on this sutra in a tour of America in 1905-6. John Blofeld, included a translation of this scripture in a series begun in 1947.[13]

Notes

1. Sharf 1996, p.360
2. Kuan, 12.
3. Sharf 1996, p.360
4. Sharf 1996, p.360
5. Sharf 1996, p.360
6. Sharf 1996, p.361
7. Kuan, 19-24.
8. Sharf 1996, p.361
9. Sharf 1996, p.361-362
10. Soyen Shaku. "The Sutra of Forty Chapters". Zen for Americans. Retrieved 2007-03-21.
11. Beal, S. (1862). "The Sutra of Forty-two Sections". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 19, 337-349. Retrieved 2007-03-21.
12. Sharf 1996, p.362
13. Sharf 1996, p.362.

References

• Sharf, Robert H. "The Scripture in Forty-two Sections" Religions of China In Practice Ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Princeton: Princeton University Press,1996. 360-364. Print.
• Cheng Kuan, tr. and annotater. The Sutra of Forty-two Chapters Divulged by the Buddha: An Annotated Edition. Taipei and Howell, MI: Vairocana Publishing Co., 2005.
• Urs App:
o "Schopenhauers Begegnung mit dem Buddhismus." [Schopenhauer and Buddhism, by Peter Abelsen] (PDF, 1.56 Mb, 28 p.) Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch 79 (1998), pp. 35-58.
o Arthur Schopenhauer and China. Sino-Platonic Papers Nr. 200 (April 2010) (PDF, 8.7 Mb, 164 p.) (This book contains a chart with the textual history of The Sutra of Forty-two Chapters, discusses its first translation into a European language by de Guignes, traces Western translations such as those by de Guignes, Huc, D. T. Suzuki, and Schiefner to specific text versions, and discusses the sutra's early influence on Schopenhauer).

Text of the Sutra

Translations

English

• Shaku, Soyen: Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro, trans. (1906). The Sutra of Forty-two Chapters, in: Sermons of a Buddhist Abbot, Zen For Americans, Chicago, The Open Court Publishing Company, pp. 3-24
• Matanga, Kasyapa, Ch'an, Chu, Blofeld, John (1977). The Sutra of Forty-Two Sections, Singapur: Nanyang Buddhist Culture Service. OCLC
• The Buddhist Text Translation Society (1974). The Sutra in Forty-two Sections Spoken by the Buddha. Lectures by the Venerable Master Hsuan Hua given at Gold Mountain Monastery, San Francisco, California, in 1974. (Translation with commentaries)
• Beal, Samuel, trans. (1862). The Sutra of the Forty-two Sections, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 19, 337-348.
• Chung Tai Translation Committee (2009), The Sutra of Forty-Two Chapters, Sunnyvale, CA
• Sharf, Robert H. (1996). "The Scripture in Forty-two Sections". In: Religions of China In Practice Ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 360-364
• Heng-ching Shih (transl.), The Sutra of Forty-two Sections, in: Apocryphal Scriptures, Berkeley, Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2005, pp 31-42. ISBN 1-886439-29-X
• Matsuyama, Matsutaro, trans. (1892): The Sutra of forty-two sections and other two short Sutras, transl. from the Chinese originals, Kyoto: The Buddhist Propagation Society

German

• Karl Bernhard Seidenstücker (1928). Die 42 Analekta des Buddha; in: Zeitschrift für Buddhismus, Jg. 1 (1913/14), pp. 11–22; München: revised edition: Schloß-Verlag. (based on D.T. Suzuki's translation)

Latin

• Alexander Ricius, Orsa Quadraginta duorum capitum

[admin]

The Discourse of the Teaching Bequeathed by the Buddha (just before His Parinibbana) [Bequeathed Teachings of Buddha]
Translated into Chinese by the Indian Acarya Kumarajiva sometime prior to the year 956 Buddhist Era.
[Around 344-413 AD.]

Between the 1750s and the 1770s, de Guignes thus sought to find additional textual evidence for his pan-Asian religion of Indian origin with esoteric and exoteric branches. This search constituted, as we will also see in the next chapters, a powerful force that propelled traditional orientalism toward an ever more secularized modern form -- a form able to dispassionately and competently investigate ancient sacred texts and monuments.[???] The literature of the esoteric branch seemed increasingly voluminous to de Guignes who quoted various texts, from the Anbertkend (de Guignes 1781b:60) and a text excerpted by Dow, the Neadirsen (p. 63), to the so-called Bequeathed Teachings of Buddha (p. 61). The latter is an apocryphal Buddhist text grouped by a Zen monk of the Song dynasty with the "zen-ified" Forty-Two Sections Sutra and a text of his own Guishan lineage to form the so-called Fozu sanjing, the Three Sutras of Buddha and Patriarch (Ch. Fozu sanjing).

-- The Birth of Orientalism, by Urs App

I. OCCASION

WHEN LORD BUDDHA, Sage of the Sakyas, first turned the Wheel of the Dhamma, Venerable Annakondanna crossed over (the ocean of birth and death); while as a result of his last Discourse Venerable Subhadda crossed over likewise. All those who were (ready) to cross over, them he (helped) to cross over. When about to attain Final Nibbana, he was lying between the twin sala trees in the middle watch of the night. No sound disturbed the calm and silence; then, for the sake of the disciples (savaka), he spoke briefly on the essentials of Dhamma:

II. ON THE CULTIVATION OF VIRTUE IN THIS WORLD

1. Exhortation on keeping the Precepts

O bhikkhus, after my Parinibbana you should reverence and honor the Precepts of the Patimokkha. Treat them as a light which you have discovered in the dark, or as a poor man would treat a treasure found by him. You should know that they are your chief guide and there should be no difference (in your observance of them) from when I yet remained in the world. If you would maintain in purity the Precepts, you should not give yourselves over to buying, selling or barter. You should not covet fields or buildings, nor accumulate servants, attendants or animals. You should flee from all sorts of property and wealth as you would avoid a fire or a pit. You should not cut down grass or trees, neither break new soil nor plough the earth. Nor may you compound medicines, practice divination or sorcery according to the position of the stars, cast horoscopes by the waxing and waning of the moon, nor reckon days of good fortune. All these are things which are improper (for a bhikkhu).

Conduct yourselves in purity, eating only at the proper times and living your lives in purity and solitude. You should not concern yourselves with worldly affairs, nor yet circulate rumors. You should not mumble incantations, mix magic potions, nor bind yourselves in friendship to powerful persons, showing to them and the rich (special) friend-liness while treating with contempt those lacking (in worldly wealth, power and so forth). All such things are not to be done!

You should seek, with a steadfast mind, and with Right Mindfulness (samma sati), for Enlightenment. Neither conceal your faults (within), nor work wonders (without), thereby leading (yourself and) other people astray. As to the four offerings, be content with them, knowing what is sufficient. Receive them when offered but do not hoard them. This, briefly, is what is meant by observing the Precepts. These Precepts are fundamental (to a life based on Dhamma-Vinaya) and accord exactly with freedom (mokkha), and so are called the Patimokkha. By relying on them you may attain all levels of collectedness (samadhi) and likewise the knowledge of the extinction of dukkha (unsatisfactoriness). It is for this reason, bhikkhus, that you should always maintain the Precepts in purity and never break them. If you can keep these Precepts pure you possess an excellent (method for the attainment of Enlightenment), but if you do not do so, no merit of any kind will accrue to you. You ought to know for this reason that the Precepts are the chief dwelling-place of the merit which results in both body and mind (citta) being at rest.

2. Exhortation on the control of Mind and Body.

O bhikkus, if you are able already to keep within the Precepts, you must next control the five senses, not permitting the entry of the five sense desires by your unrestraint, just as a cowherd by taking and showing his stick prevents cows from entering another's field, ripe for the harvest. In an evil-doer indulging the five senses, his five desires will not only exceed all bounds but will become uncontrollable, just as a wild horse unchecked by the bridle must soon drag the man leading it into a pit. If a man be robbed, his sorrow does not extend beyond the period of his life but the evil of that robber (sense-desires) and the depredations caused by him bring calamities extending over many lives, creating very great dukkha. You should control yourselves!

Hence, wise men control themselves and do not indulge their senses but guard them like robbers who must not be allowed freedom from restraint. If you do allow them freedom from restraint, before long you will be destroyed by Mara. The mind is the lord of the five senses and for this reason you should well control the mind. Indeed, you ought to fear indulgence of the mind's (desires) more than poisonous snakes, savage beasts, dangerous robbers or fierce conflagrations. No simile is strong enough to illustrate (this danger). But think of a man carrying a jar of honey who, as he goes, heeds only the honey and is unaware of a deep pit (in his path)! Or think of a mad elephant unrestrained by shackles! Again, consider a monkey who after climbing into a tree, cannot, except with difficulty, be controlled! Such as these would be difficult to check; therefore hasten to control your desires and do not let them go unrestrained! Indulge the mind (with its desires) and you lose the benefit of being born a man; check it completely and there is nothing you will be unable to accomplish. That is the reason, O bhikkhus, why should strive hard to subdue your minds.

3. Exhortation on the moderate use of food.

O bhikkhus, in receiving all sorts of food and drinks, you should regard them as if taking medicine. Whether they be good or bad, do not accept or reject according to your likes and dislikes; just use them to support your bodies, thereby staying hunger and thirst. As bees while foraging among the flowers extract only the nectar, without harming their color and scent, just so, O bhikkhus, should you do (when collecting alms-food). Accept just enough of what people offer to you for the avoidance of distress. But do not ask for much and thereby spoil the goodness of their hearts, just as the wise man, having estimated the strength of his ox, does not wear out its strength by overloading.

4. Exhortation on sleeping.

O bhikkhus, by day you should practice good Dhamma and not allow yourselves to waste time. In the early evening and late at night do not cease to make an effort, while in the middle of the night you should chant the Suttas to make yourselves better informed. Do not allow yourselves to pass your lives vainly and fruitlessly on account of sleep. You should envisage the world as being consumed by a great fire and quickly determine to save yourselves from it. Do not (spend much time in) sleep! The robbers of the three afflictions forever lie in wait to kill men so that (your danger) is even greater than in a household rent by hatred. So, fearful, how can you sleep and not arouse yourselves? These afflictions are a poisonous snake asleep in your own hearts. They are like a black cobra sleeping in your room. Destroy the snake quickly with the sharp spear of keeping to Precepts! Only when that dormant snake has been driven away will you be able to rest peacefully. If you sleep, not having driven it away, you are men without shame (hiri). The clothing of shame (hiri) among all ornaments, is the very best. Shame can also be compared to an iron goad that can control all human wrong-doing; for which reason, O bhikkhus, you should always feel ashamed of unskillful actions (akusalakamma). You should not be without it even for a moment, for if you are parted from shame, all merits will be lost to you. He who has fear of blame (ottappa) has that which is good, while he who has no fear of blame (anottappa) is not different from the birds and beasts.

5. Exhortation on refraining from anger and ill will.

O bhikkhus, if there were one who came and dismembered you joint by joint, you should not hate him but rather include him in your heart (of friendliness -- metta). Besides, you should guard your speech and refrain from reviling him. If you succumb to thoughts of hatred you block your own (progress in) Dhamma and lose the benefits of (accumulated) merits. Patience (khanti) is a virtue which cannot be equaled even by keeping the Precepts and (undertaking) the Austere Practices. Whosoever is able to practice patience can be truly called a great and strong man, but he who is unable to endure abuse as happily as though he were drinking ambrosia, cannot be called one attained to knowledge of Dhamma. Why is this? The harm caused by anger and resentment shatters all your goodness and so (greatly) spoils your good name that neither present nor future generations of men will wish to hear it. You should know that angry thoughts are more terrible than a great fire, so continually guard yourselves against them and do not let them gain entrance. Among the three robbers (the afflictions), none steals merit more than anger and resentment: Those householders dressed in white who have desires and practice little Dhamma, in them, having no way to control themselves, anger may still be excusable; but among those become homeless (pabbajjita) because they wish to practice Dhamma and to abandon desire, the harboring of anger and resentment is scarcely to be expected, just as one does not look for thunder or lightning from a translucent, filmy cloud.

6. Exhortation on refraining from arrogance and contempt.

O bhikkhus, rubbing your heads you should deeply consider yourselves in this way: 'It is good that I have discarded personal adornment. I wear the russet robe of patches and carry a bowl with which to sustain life.' When thoughts of arrogance or contempt arise, you must quickly destroy them by regarding yourselves in this way. The growth of arrogance and contempt is not proper among those wearing white and living the household life: how much less so for you, gone forth to homelessness! You should subdue your bodies, collecting food (in your bowls) for the sake of Dhamma-practice to realize Enlightenment.

7. Exhortation on flattery.

O bhikkhus, a mind inclined to flattery is incompatible with Dhamma, therefore it is right to examine and correct such a mind. You should know that flattery is nothing but deception, so that those who have entered the way of Dhamma-practice have no use for it. For this reason, be certain to examine and correct the errors of the mind, for to do so is fundamental.


III. ON THE ADVANTAGES FOR GREAT MEN GONE FORTH TO HOMELESSNESS.

1. The virtue of few wishes.

O bhikkhus, you should know that those having many desires, by reason of their desire for selfish profit, experience much dukkha. Those with few desires, neither desiring nor seeking anything, do not therefore experience such dukkha. Straight-away lessen your desires! Further, in order to obtain all kinds of merit you should practice the fewness of desires. Those who desire little do not indulge in flattery so as to away another's mind, nor are they led by their desires. Those who practice the diminishing of desires thus achieve a mind of contentment having no cause for either grief or fear and, finding the things they receive are sufficient, never suffer from want. From this cause indeed, (comes) Nibbana. Such is the meaning of 'having few wishes.'

2. The virtue of contentment.

O bhikkhus, if you wish to escape from all kinds of dukkha, you must see that you are contented. The virtue of contentment is the basis of abundance, happiness, peace and seclusion. Those who are contented are happy even though they have to sleep on the ground. Those who are not contented would not be so though they lived in celestial mansions. Such people feel poor even though they are rich, while those who are contented are rich even in poverty. The former are constantly led by their five desires and are greatly pitied by the contented Such is the meaning of 'contentment'.

3. The virtue of seclusion.

O bhikkhus, seek the joy of quietness and passivity. Avoid confusion and noise and dwell alone in secluded places. Those who dwell in solitude are worshipped with reverence by Sakka and all celestials. This is why you should leave your own and other clans to live alone in quiet places, reflecting (to devdop insight) upon dukkha, its arising and its cessation. Those who rejoice in the pleasures of company must bear as well the pains of company, as when many birds flock to a great tree it may wither and collapse. Attachment to worldly things immerses one in the dukkha experienced by all men, like an old elephant bogged down in a swamp from which he cannot extricate himself. Such is the meaning of 'secluding oneself.'

4. The virtue of energetic striving.

O bhikkhus, if you strive diligently, nothing will be difficult for you. As a little water constantly trickling can bore a hole through a rock, so must you always strive energetically. If the mind of a disciple (savaka) becomes idle and inattentive, he will resemble one who tries to make fire by friction but rests before the heat is sufficient. However much he desires fire, he cannot (make even a spark). Such is the meaning of 'energetic striving'.

5. The virtue of attentiveness.

O bhikkhus, seek for a Noble Friend (kalyanamitta). Seek him who will best (be able to) aid you (in developing) the unexcelled and unbroken attention. If you are attentive, none of the (three) robbers, the afflictions, can enter your mind. That is why you must keep your mind in a state of constant attention, for by loss of attention you lose all merits. If your power of attention is very great, though you fall among (conditions favoring) the five robbers of sense-desire, you will not be harmed by them, just as a warrior entering a battle well covered by armor has nothing to fear. Such is the meaning of 'unbroken attention.'

6. The virtue of collectedness (samadhi).

O bhikkhus, if you guard your mind, so guarded the mind will remain in a state of steady collectedness. If your minds are in a state of collectedness, you will be able to understand the arising and passing away of the impermanent world. For this reason you should strive constantly to practice the various stages of absorption (jhana). When one of these states of collectedness is reached, the mind no longer wanders. A disciple who practices (to attain collectedness) is just like an irrigator who properly regulates his dykes. As he guards water, even a small amount, so should you guard the water of wisdom, thereby preventing it from leaking away. Such is the meaning of 'collectedness'.

7. The virtue of wisdom. (PRAJNA)

O bhikkhus, if you have wisdom, then do not hunger to make a display of it. Ever look within yourselves so that you do not fall into any fault. In this way you will be able to attain freedom from (the tangle of) the interior and exterior (spheres of senses and sense-objects--ayatana). If you do not accomplish this you cannot be called Dhamma practicers, nor yet are you common persons clad in white, so there will be no name to fit you! Wisdom is a firmly -bound raft which will ferry you across the ocean of birth, old age, sickness and death. Again, it is a brilliant light with which to dispel the black obscurity of ignorance. It is a good medicine for all who are ill. It is a sharp axe for cutting down the strangling fig--tree of the afflictions. That is why you should, by the hearing-, thinking- and development-wisdoms increase your benefits (from Dhamma). If you have Insight (vipassana) stemming from (development-wisdom), though your eyes are but fleshly organs you will be able to see clearly (into your own citta.) Such is the meaning of 'wisdom'.

8. The virtue of restraint from idle talk.

O bhikkhus, if you indulge in all sorts of idle discussions then your mind will be full of chaotic thoughts, and though you have gone forth to homelessness you will be unable to attain Freedom. That is why, O bhikkhus, you should immediately cease from chaotic thoughts and idle discussions. If you want to attain the Happiness of Nibbana, you must eliminate completely the illness of idle discussion.

IV. SELF EXERTION

O bhikkhus, as regards all kinds of virtue, you should ever rid yourselves of laxity, as you would flee from a hateful robber. That Dhamma which the greatly-compassionate Lord has taught for your benefit is now concluded, but it is for you to strive diligently to practice this teaching. Whether you live in the mountains or on the great plains, whether you sojourn beneath a tree or in your own secluded dwellings, bear in mind the Dhamma you have received and let none of it be lost. You should always exert yourselves in practicing it diligently, lest you die after wasting a whole lifetime and come to regret it afterwards. I am like a good doctor who, having diagnosed the complaint, prescribes some medicine; but whether it is taken or not, does not depend on the doctor. Again, I am like a good guide who points out the best road; but if, having heard of it, (the enquirer) does not take it, the fault is not with the guide.

V. ON CLEARING UP ALL DOUBTS

O bhikkhus, if you have any doubts regarding the Four Noble Truths: of unsatis-factoriness (dukkha) and the rest, (its arising. its cessation and the Practice-path going to its cessation), you should ask about them at once. Do not harbor such doubts without seeking to resolve them.

On that occasion the Lord spoke thus three times, yet there were none who question-ed him. And why was that? Because there were none in that assembly (of bhikkhus) who harbored any doubts.

Then the venerable Anuruddha, seeing what was in the minds of those assembled, respectfully addressed the Buddha thus: 'Lord, the moon may grow hot and the sun may become cold, but the Four Noble Truths proclaimed by the Lord cannot be otherwise. The Truth of Dukkha taught by the Lord describes real dukkha which cannot become happiness. The accumulation of desires truly is the cause of the Arising of Dukkha; there can never be a different cause. If dukkha is destroyed (the Cessation of Dukkha), it is because the cause of dukkha has been destroyed, for if the cause is destroyed the result must also be destroyed. The Practice path going to the Cessation of Dukkha is the true path, nor can there be another. Lord, all these bhikkhus are certain and have no doubts about the Four Noble Truths.

In this assembly, those who have not yet done what should be done (i. e., attained to Enlightenment), will, on seeing the Lord attain Final Nibbana, certainly feel sorrowful. (Among them) those who have newly entered upon the Dhamma-way and who have heard what the Lord has (just said), they will all reach Enlightenment (in due course) seeing Dhamma as clearly as a flash of lightning in the dark of the night. But is there anyone who has done what should be done (being an Arahant), already having crossed over the ocean of dukkha who will think thus: "The Lord has attained Final Nibbana; why was this done so quickly?"

Although the Venerable Anuruddha had thus spoken these words, and the whole assembly had penetrated the meaning of the Four Noble Truths, still the Lord wished to strengthen all in that great assembly. With a mind of infinite compassion he spoke (again) for their benefit.

"O bhikkhus, do not feel grieved. If I were to live in the world for a whole aeon (kappa), my association with you would still come to an end, since a meeting with no parting is an impossibility. The Dhamma is now complete for each and every one, so even if I were to live longer it would be of no benefit at all. Those who were (ready) to cross over, both among the celestials and men, have all without exception attained Enlightenment, while those who have not yet completed their crossing (of the ocean of Samsara to the Further Shore or Nibbana) have already produced the necessary causes (to enable them to do so in course of time).

From now on, all my disciples must continue to practice (in this way) without ceasing, whereby the body of the Tathagata's Dhamma will be ever lasting and indestructi-ble. But as to the world, nothing there is eternal, so that all meeting must be followed by partings. Hence, do not harbor grief, for such (impermanence) is the nature of worldly things. But do strive diligently and quickly seek for Freedom. With the light of Perfect Wisdom destroy the darkness of ignorance, for in this world is nothing strong or enduring.

Now that I am about to attain Final Nibbana, it is like being rid of a terrible sickness. This body is a thing of which we are indeed well rid, an evil thing falsely going by the name of self and sunk in the ocean of birth, disease, old age and death. Can a wise man do aught but rejoice when he is able to rid himself of it, as others might (be glad) when slaying a hateful robber?

O bhikkhus, you should always exert the mind, seeking the Way out (of the Wandering-on, or samsara). All forms in the world, without exception, whether moving or non-moving, are subject to decay and followed by destruction. All of you should stop. It is needless to speak again. Time is passing away. I wish to cross over to Freedom (from existence in this world). These are my very last instructions."

Print version published by The Buddhist Association of the United States (BAUS). Buddhism Study and Practice Group ( http://www.sinc.sunysb.edu/Clubs/buddhism/)

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Noble lie 2 [Royal Lie] [Pious Fiction] [Pious Fraud] [Pious Invention]
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 4/27/22

-- Noble lie 1 [Royal Lie] [Pious Fiction] [Pious Fraud] [Pious Invention], by Wikipedia

However, considering on the one hand the long expectation and the just demands of the learned world, on the other the nature and composition of this work, I will confess, I have a desperate moment of my work. Indeed, the Rig-Veda is nothing but a collection of religious hymns, sung at the origin of Indian society, accumulated over time, and preserved in the memory of the sacerdotal races. And these religious hymns, can we not reproach them for bearing the imprint of this mythological spirit which some serious critics reject with a kind of disgust? She no doubt has her faults, this ingenious daughter mythology of the ancient East, this laughing fairy with two faces, this pleasant storyteller with double language, who does not blush to lie to make us accept the truth, who plays with things serious, and who philosophizes while bantering. But if mythology were only the exaggeration of a natural and true language in another respect, would it not be better to listen and try to understand this language than to reject it with disdain? If all idioms, in order to render a metetaphysical idea, are obliged to borrow their expression from the material world, how can one be surprised that myth comes to the aid of religious dogma which seeks to translate itself in the eyes of the mind, and that does he lend it the support of his broad and brilliant metaphors? A religion seems to me to be the representation, by means of external symbols, of the idea that a people has formed of the divine nature. The true philosopher must like to follow and grasp this idea under the mysterious veils with which the ancient hierophants enveloped it.

This is precisely the goal that the reader of this work will propose, supported by the curiosity of science in the midst of a sterile abundance of marvelous fictions and a prolix monotony of pious invocations, astonished by turns or by the childish naivete of thought, or of the poetic magnificence of style; for such are the qualities as well as the faults of this book. But a defect or perhaps a quality of all these ancient bards is to have no sequence, no system in their inventions. They have a capricious allure, which sometimes admits mythological allegory and sometimes rejects it, so as not to be able to hide their thought when they would like to disguise it, and to leave their fiction fully illuminated in advance of the day of truth. There is a certain pleasure in seeing, under the breath of the poet, all these divinities being born, coming to life, taking on variable and changing forms. But it also sometimes seems that, dissatisfied with his lying conceptions, the author shatters the god he has created, and returns to philosophical truth.

In nature there is a movement which is life, a regularity which is intelligence. The life, the intelligence, for the Indian of these first times, it is God; a God who has no name, who is designated only by his attributes. So he is cavi, intelligent; he is asura, author of movement; he is above all vedhas, that is to say that he exists within this inert substance, whose origin is not defined, which is perhaps only an appearance, but to which he communicates penny energy. God is in everything; but all is not God. Pantheism may be in worship, but not in dogma. Indeed, the man who is aware of his weakness seeks support around him; and, in the various parts of this nature which touches his senses, he recognizes the action of the invisible being whose help is necessary to him. He invokes him in the light that enlightens him, in the fire that warms him, in the air that refreshes him, in heaven and earth, in day and night. Wherever he sees a ray of that clarity, of that strength, of that abundance, of that charity which he needs, he worships God.

-- Rig-Veda Or Book Of Hymns, Translated from Sanskrit, by M. Langlois, Member of the Institut, 1848

In politics, a noble lie is a myth or untruth typically of religious nature, knowingly propagated by an elite to maintain social harmony or advance an agenda. The noble lie is a concept originated by Plato as described in The Republic.[2]

Do you not know, I said, that the true lie, if such an expression may be allowed, is hated of gods and men?

What do you mean? he said.

I mean that no one is willingly deceived in that which is the truest and highest part of himself, or about the truest and highest matters; there, above all, he is most afraid of a lie having possession of him.

Still, he said, I do not comprehend you.

The reason is, I replied, that you attribute some profound meaning to my words; but I am only saying that deception, or being deceived or uninformed about the highest realities in the highest part of themselves, which is the soul, and in that part of them to have and to hold the lie, is what mankind least like; — that, I say, is what they utterly detest.

There is nothing more hateful to them.

And, as I was just now remarking, this ignorance in the soul of him who is deceived may be called the true lie; for the lie in words is only a kind of imitation and shadowy image of a previous affection of the soul, not pure unadulterated falsehood. Am I not right?

Perfectly right.

The true lie is hated not only by the gods, but also by men?

Yes.

Whereas the lie in words is in certain cases useful and not hateful; in dealing with enemies — that would be an instance; or again, when those whom we call our friends in a fit of madness or illusion are going to do some harm, then it is useful and is a sort of medicine or preventive; also in the tales of mythology, of which we were just now speaking — because we do not know the truth about ancient times, we make falsehood as much like truth as we can, and so turn it to account.

Very true, he said....

Again, truth should be highly valued; if, as we were saying, a lie is useless to the gods, and useful only as a medicine to men, then the use of such medicines should be restricted to physicians; private individuals have no business with them.

Clearly not, he said.

Then if any one at all is to have the privilege of lying, the rulers of the State should be the persons; and they, in their dealings either with enemies or with their own citizens, may be allowed to lie for the public good. But nobody else should meddle with anything of the kind; and although the rulers have this privilege, for a private man to lie to them in return is to be deemed a more heinous fault than for the patient or the pupil of a gymnasium not to speak the truth about his own bodily illnesses to the physician or to the trainer, or for a sailor not to tell the captain what is happening about the ship and the rest of the crew, and how things are going with himself or his fellow sailors.

Most true, he said.

If, then, the ruler catches anybody beside himself lying in the State,

Any of the craftsmen, whether he priest or physician or carpenter.15

he will punish him for introducing a practice which is equally subversive and destructive of ship or State.

Most certainly, he said, if our idea of the State is ever carried out....

Therefore, as I was just now saying, we must enquire who are the best guardians of their own conviction that what they think the interest of the State is to be the rule of their lives. We must watch them from their youth upwards, and make them perform actions in which they are most likely to forget or to be deceived, and he who remembers and is not deceived is to be selected, and he who falls in the trial is to be rejected. That will be the way?

Yes.

And there should also be toils and pains and conflicts prescribed for them, in which they will be made to give further proof of the same qualities.

Very right, he replied.

And then, I said, we must try them with enchantments that is the third sort of test — and see what will be their behaviour: like those who take colts amid noise and tumult to see if they are of a timid nature, so must we take our youth amid terrors of some kind, and again pass them into pleasures, and prove them more thoroughly than gold is proved in the furnace, that we may discover whether they are armed against all enchantments, and of a noble bearing always, good guardians of themselves and of the music which they have learned, and retaining under all circumstances a rhythmical and harmonious nature, such as will be most serviceable to the individual and to the State. And he who at every age, as boy and youth and in mature life, has come out of the trial victorious and pure, shall be appointed a ruler and guardian of the State; he shall be honoured in life and death, and shall receive sepulture and other memorials of honour, the greatest that we have to give. But him who fails, we must reject. I am inclined to think that this is the sort of way in which our rulers and guardians should be chosen and appointed. I speak generally, and not with any pretension to exactness.

And, speaking generally, I agree with you, he said.

And perhaps the word "guardian" in the fullest sense ought to be applied to this higher class only who preserve us against foreign enemies and maintain peace among our citizens at home, that the one may not have the will, or the others the power, to harm us. The young men whom we before called guardians may be more properly designated auxiliaries and supporters of the principles of the rulers.

I agree with you, he said.

How then may we devise one of those needful falsehoods of which we lately spoke — just one royal lie which may deceive the rulers, if that be possible, and at any rate the rest of the city?

What sort of lie? he said.

Nothing new, I replied; only an old Phoenician36 tale of what has often occurred before now in other places, (as the poets say, and have made the world believe,) though not in our time, and I do not know whether such an event could ever happen again, or could now even be made probable, if it did.

How your words seem to hesitate on your lips!

You will not wonder, I replied, at my hesitation when you have heard. Speak, he said, and fear not.

Well then, I will speak, although I really know not how to look you in the face, or in what words to utter the audacious fiction, which I propose to communicate gradually, first to the rulers, then to the soldiers, and lastly to the people. They are to be told that their youth was a dream, and the education and training which they received from us, an appearance only; in reality during all that time they were being formed and fed in the womb of the earth, where they themselves and their arms and appurtenances were manufactured; when they were completed, the earth, their mother, sent them up; and so, their country being their mother and also their nurse, they are bound to advise for her good, and to defend her against attacks, and her citizens they are to regard as children of the earth and their own brothers.

You had good reason, he said, to be ashamed of the lie which you were going to tell.

True, I replied, but there is more coming; I have only told you half. Citizens, we shall say to them in our tale, you are brothers, yet God has framed you differently. Some of you have the power of command, and in the composition of these he has mingled gold, wherefore also they have the greatest honour; others he has made of silver, to be auxillaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved in the children. But as all are of the same original stock, a golden parent will sometimes have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son. And God proclaims as a first principle to the rulers, and above all else, that there is nothing which should so anxiously guard, or of which they are to be such good guardians, as of the purity of the race. They should observe what elements mingle in their off spring; for if the son of a golden or silver parent has an admixture of brass and iron, then nature orders a transposition of ranks, and the eye of the ruler must not be pitiful towards the child because he has to descend in the scale and become a husbandman or artisan, just as there may be sons of artisans who having an admixture of gold or silver in them are raised to honour, and become guardians or auxiliaries. For an oracle says that when a man of brass or iron guards the State, it will be destroyed. Such is the tale; is there any possibility of making our citizens believe in it?

Not in the present generation, he replied; there is no way of accomplishing this; but their sons may be made to believe in the tale, and their sons' sons, and posterity after them.

I see the difficulty, I replied; yet the fostering of such a belief will make them care more for the city and for one another. Enough, however, of the fiction, which may now fly abroad upon the wings of rumour, while we arm our earth-born heroes, and lead them forth under the command of their rulers. Let them look round and select a spot whence they can best suppress insurrection, if any prove refractory within, and also defend themselves against enemies, who like wolves may come down on the fold from without; there let them encamp, and when they have encamped, let them sacrifice to the proper Gods and prepare their dwellings.

Just so, he said.

-- The Republic, by Plato

In religion, a pious fiction is a narrative that is presented as true by the author, but is considered by others to be fictional albeit produced with an altruistic motivation. The term is sometimes used pejoratively to suggest that the author of the narrative was deliberately misleading readers for selfish or deceitful reasons. The term is often used in religious contexts, sometimes referring to passages in religious texts.

Plato's Republic

Main article: The Republic (Plato)

Plato presented the noble lie (γενναῖον ψεῦδος, gennaion pseudos)[3] in the fictional tale known as the myth or parable of the metals in Book III. In it, Socrates provides the origin of the three social classes who compose the republic proposed by Plato. Socrates speaks of a socially stratified society as a metaphor for the soul,[citation needed] wherein the populace are told "a sort of Phoenician tale":

...the earth, as being their mother, delivered them, and now, as if their land were their mother and their nurse, they ought to take thought for her and defend her against any attack and regard the other citizens as their brothers and children of the self-same earth...While all of you, in the city, are brothers, we will say in our tale, yet god, in fashioning those of you who are fitted to hold rule, mingled gold in their generation, for which reason they are the most precious—but in the helpers, silver, and iron and brass in the farmers and other craftsmen. And, as you are all akin, though, for the most part, you will breed after your kinds, it may sometimes happen that a golden father would beget a silver son, and that a golden offspring would come from a silver sire, and that the rest would, in like manner, be born of one another. So that the first and chief injunction that the god lays upon the rulers is that of nothing else are they to be such careful guardians, and so intently observant as of the intermixture of these metals in the souls of their offspring, and if sons are born to them with an infusion of brass or iron they shall by no means give way to pity in their treatment of them, but shall assign to each the status due to his nature and thrust them out among the artisans or the farmers. And again, if from these there is born a son with unexpected gold or silver in his composition they shall honor such and bid them go up higher, some to the office of guardian, some to the assistanceship, alleging that there is an oracle that the city shall then be overthrown when the man of iron or brass is its guardian.[4]

Socrates proposes and claims that if the people believed "this myth...[it] would have a good effect, making them more inclined to care for the state and one another."[5] This is his noble lie: "a contrivance for one of those falsehoods that come into being in case of need, of which we were just now talking, some noble one..."[6]

This story references the flaws of past societies.

Modern views

Karl Popper

-- The Open Society and Its Enemies, by Karl R. Popper

Main article: Karl Popper

Karl Popper accused Plato of trying to base religion on a noble lie as well. In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper remarks, "It is hard to understand why those of Plato's commentators who praise him for fighting against the subversive conventionalism of the Sophists, and for establishing a spiritual naturalism ultimately based on religion, fail to censure him for making a convention, or rather an invention, the ultimate basis of religion." Religion for Plato is a noble lie, at least if we assume that Plato meant all of this sincerely, not cynically. Popper finds Plato's conception of religion to have been very influential in subsequent thought.[7]

Leo Strauss

-- On Tyranny, by Leo Strauss

Main article: Leo Strauss

Strauss noted that thinkers of the first rank, going back to Plato, had raised the problem of whether good and effective politicians could be completely truthful and still achieve the necessary ends of their society. By implication, Strauss asks his readers to consider whether it is true that noble lies have no role at all to play in uniting and guiding the polis. He questions whether myths are needed to give people meaning and purpose and whether they ensure a stable society in contrast to the more skeptical attitude which posits that men dedicated to the relentless examination of, in Nietzschean language, "deadly truths" can flourish freely, all the while concluding with an inquiry into whether there can be a limit to the political and epistemic absolutes. In The City and Man, Strauss discusses the myths outlined in Plato's Republic that are required for all governments. These include a belief that the state's land belongs to it even though it was likely acquired illegitimately and that citizenship is rooted in something more than the accidents of birth. Seymour Hersh also claims that Strauss endorsed noble lies: myths used by political leaders seeking to maintain a cohesive society.[8][9] In The Power of Nightmares, documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis opines that "Strauss believed it was for politicians to assert powerful and inspiring myths that everyone could believe in. They might not be true, but they were necessary illusions. One of these was religion; the other was the myth of the nation."[10]

Desmond Lee

Main article: Desmond Lee

"Plato has been criticized for his Foundation Myth as if it were a calculated lie. That is partly because the phrase here translated 'magnificent myth' (p. 414b) has been conventionally mistranslated 'noble lie'; and this has been used to support the charge that Plato countenances manipulation by propaganda. But the myth is accepted by all three classes, Guardians included. It is meant to replace the national traditions which any community has, which are intended to express the kind of community it is, or wishes to be, its ideals, rather than to state matters of fact."[11]

Allan Bloom

Main article: Allan Bloom

Translator Allan Bloom argued for a literal translation and interpretation of Plato's expression:

At Book III 414 Socrates tells of the need for a "noble lie" to be believed in the city he and his companions are founding (in speech). Cornford calls it a "bold flight of invention" and adds the following note: "This phrase is commonly rendered 'noble lie', a self-contradictory expression no more applicable to Plato's harmless allegory than to a New Testament parable or the Pilgrim's Progress, and liable to suggest that he would countenance the lies, for the most part ignoble, now called propaganda..." (ibid., p. 106). But Socrates calls it a lie. The difference between a parable and this tale is that the man who hears a parable is conscious that it is an invention the truth of which is not in its literal expression, whereas the inhabitants of Socrates' city are to believe the untrue story to be true. His interlocutors are shocked by the notion, but—according to Cornford—we are to believe it is harmless because it might conjure up unpleasant associations. This whole question of lying has been carefully prepared by Plato from the very outset, starting with the discussion with old Cephalus (331 b-c). It recurs again with respect to the lies of the poets (377 d), and in the assertions that gods cannot lie (381 e-382 e) and that rulers may lie (380 b-c). Now, finally, it is baldly stated that the only truly just civil society must be founded on a lie. Socrates prefers to face up to the issue with clarity. A good regime cannot be based on enlightenment; if there is no lie, a number of compromises—among them private property—must be made and hence merely conventional inequalities must be accepted. This is a radical statement about the relationship between truth and justice, one which leads to the paradox that wisdom can rule only in an element dominated by falsehood. It is hardly worth obscuring this issue for the sake of avoiding the crudest of misunderstandings. And perhaps the peculiarly modern phenomenon of propaganda might become clearer to the man who sees that it is somehow related to a certain myth of enlightenment which is itself brought into question by the Platonic analysis.[12]

Pious fiction

Examples

Religious context

• Mainstream historical interpretations of the Hebrew Bible (i.e. the Tanakh or the Protestant Old Testament) often consider much of the Tanakh/Jewish Bible to be a pious fiction, such as the conquests of Joshua[13] and the histories of the Pentateuch.[14][15][16] The Book of Daniel has also been described as a pious fiction, with the purpose of providing encouragement to Jews.[17]
• Mainstream historical-critical approaches often view stories in the New Testament such as the Virgin Birth, the Visit of the Magi to Jesus, and others, as pious fictions.[18]
• The Book of Mormon, one of the Standard Works of the Latter Day Saint Movement, has been described as a hoax or pious fiction, and it is not accepted as containing divine revelation by those outside the Latter Day Saint movement.[19]
• The Quran, the sacred text of Islam, has been described as a pious fiction by several authors.[20][21][22] The hadith, likewise, have been described as a collection of various pious fictions by several authors.[verification needed].[21][23]
• Dale Eickelman writes that Muslim jurists employ a pious fiction when they assert that Islamic law is invariant, when in fact it is subject to change.[24]
• The relationship between the modern celebration of Christmas and the historical birth of Jesus has also been described as such.[25][26][27]

Other contexts

• Fredrick Pike describes some morale-boosting efforts during the Great Depression as pious fictions.[28]

See also

• Alternative facts
• Big lie – Gross distortion of the truth
• Bokononism
• Fictionalism
• Lie-to-children
• Morality play
• Paternalism
• Paternalistic deception
• Plato's Laws
• Santa Claus

References

1. Aruffo, Madeline. "Problems with the Noble Lie." Archived 2017-05-17 at the Wayback Machine Boston University. Accessed 4 December 2017.
2. Brown, Eric (2017), "Plato's Ethics and Politics in The Republic", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 2019-11-26
3. Translator Allan Bloom explains, "The word is generation which is, primarily, 'noble' in the sense of 'nobly born' or 'well bred'..." and refers to Plato's Republic 375a and 409c for comparison (p. 455 n. 65, The Republic of Plato, 2nd edition, New York: Basic Books, 1991).
4. Book 3, 414e–15c
5. Book 3, 415c–d
6. 414b–c
7. "Positive Liberty » Open Society VI: On Religion as a Noble Lie". Archived from the original on 2007-12-09. Retrieved 2019-01-15.
8. Seymour M. Hersh, "Selective Intelligence", The New Yorker, May 12, 2003, accessed June 1, 2007. Archived October 16, 2006, at the Wayback Machine
9. Brian Doherty, "Origin of the Specious: Why Do Neoconservatives Doubt Darwin?" Archived 2008-07-25 at the Wayback Machine, Reason Online, July 1997, accessed February 16, 2007.
10. The Rise of the Politics of Fear; Episode 1: "Baby It's Cold Outside"
11. Plato: The Republic, Penguin Classics, translated by Desmond Lee, p177
12. pp. xviii-xix, The Republic of Plato, 2nd edition, New York: Basic Books, 1991.
13. Borras, Judit, Jewish Studies at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, BRILL, 1999, p 117: ".. the overwhelming consensus of modern scholarship is that the conquest tradition of Joshua is a pious fiction composed by the deuteronomistic school …"
14. Pete Enns. "Briefly, 3 Edgy Things about How the Old Testament Works". Pete Enns. Retrieved 2019-01-15.
15. Pete Enns. "3 Things I Would Like to See Evangelical Leaders Stop Saying about Biblical Scholarship". Pete Enns. Retrieved 2019-01-15.
16. Stanley, Christopher, The Hebrew Bible: A Comparative Approach, Fortress Press, 2009, p 123: "Minimalists begin with the fact that the Hebrew Bible did not reach its present form until well after the Babylonian exile … most the that the story was formulated by a group of elites who wanted to justify their claims to dominate … In other words, the narrative [of the Hebrew Bible] is a pious fiction that bears little relation to the actual history of Palestine during the period it purports to narrate."
17. Carson, D. A. For the Love of God: A Daily Companion for Discovering the Riches of God's Word, Good News Publishers, 2006, p 19: "Many critics doubt that the account of Daniel 4 is anything more than pious fiction to encourage the Jews."
18. Jones, Maurice. New Testament in the Twentieth Century. p. 63.
19. Skousen, Royal, The Book of Mormon: the earliest text, Yale University Press, 2009, p x: "Outsiders generally consider this book [the Book of Mormon] a nineteenth-century hoax or pious fiction …"
20. Berkey, Jonathan P. (2008). The formation of Islam : religion and society in the Near East, 600-1800 ([Online-Ausg.] ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 286. ISBN 978-0-521-58813-3.
21. Jump up to:a b Crone and Cook, Patricia and Michael (1980). Hagarism: the Making of the Islamic World. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. p. 277. ISBN 978-0-521-29754-7.
22. Luxenberg, Christoph (2007). The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran: a Contribution to the Decoding of the Language of the Koran. Verlag Hans Schiler. p. 349. ISBN 978-3-89930-088-8.
23. Brown, Jonathan (2011). The Canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim: the Formation and Function of the Sunni Hadith Canon. Brill Academic Publishers. p. 431. ISBN 978-90-04-21152-0.
24. Eickelman, Dale, Muslim politics, Princeton University Press, 2004, p 26: "Emendations and additions to purportedly invariant and complete Islamic law (sharia) have occurred throughout Islamic history…. Muslim jurists have rigorously maintained the pious fiction that there can be no change in divinely revealed law, even as they have exercised their independent judgment (ijtihad) to create a kind of de facto legislation."
25. Michael White, L. (4 May 2010). Scripting Jesus: The Gospels in Rewrite - L. Michael White - Google Books. ISBN 9780061985379. Retrieved 2011-09-27.
26. Top 20 football chants (2006-12-21). "How December 25 became Christmas Day... - Features, Unsorted". Independent.ie. Retrieved 2011-09-27.
27. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/commen ... 405481.ece[dead link]
28. Pike, Fredrick, FDR's Good Neighbor Policy: sixty years of generally gentle chaos, University of Texas Press, 1995, p 79:

"In the Depression era, a great many Americans, north and south of the border, succumbed to the pious fiction that underlay the Krausist-Areilist-Marxist nonmaterial rewards aspect of good neighborliness… Without the occasional seasoning of pious fictions, concocted by intellectuals who in their delusions of grandeur try to introduce elements of dream live into crude reality, might not the real world be a far more vicious jungle than it is?"