FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

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Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

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Shaun Greenhalgh [Sean Greenhouse] [and George Greenlaugh and Olive Greenlaugh] [George Greenhouse and Olive Greenhouse]
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 12/22/22

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Image
Shaun Greenhalgh

Image
George Greenhalgh

Image
Olive Greenhalgh

Born: 19 September 1961, Bromley Cross, Lancashire, England, UK
Criminal status: Released
Parent(s): George and Olive Greenhalgh
Criminal charge: Conspiracy to commit fraud, money laundering
Penalty: 4 years and 8 months in prison

Shaun Greenhalgh (born 1961) is a British artist and former art forger. Over a seventeen-year period, between 1989 and 2006, he produced a large number of forgeries. With the assistance of his brother and elderly parents, who fronted the sales side of the operation, he successfully sold his fakes internationally to museums, auction houses, and private buyers, accruing nearly £1 million.[1]

The family have been described by Scotland Yard as "possibly the most diverse forgery team in the world, ever". However, when they attempted to sell three Assyrian reliefs using the same provenance as they had previously, suspicions were finally raised.[2]

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London held an exhibition of Greenhalgh's works from 23 January to 7 February 2010.[3]

The Metropolitan Police's Art and Antiques Unit built a replica model of the shed where the works were created. Many of Greenhalgh's fakes, including the Amarna Princess, a version of the Roman Risley Park Lanx, and works supposedly by Barbara Hepworth and Thomas Moran, were displayed.[4]

Family roles

Greenhalgh's family was involved in "the garden shed gang". They established an elaborate cottage industry at his parents' house in The Crescent, Bromley Cross, South Turton, which is about 3.5 miles (6 km) north of Bolton town centre.[3] His parents, George and Olive, approached clients, while his older brother, George Jr., managed the money.[5][6][7]

Other members of the family were invoked to help establish the legitimacy of the fake items. These included Olive's father who owned an art gallery,[8] a great-grandfather who it seemed had had the foresight to buy well at auctions,[2] and an ancestor who had apparently worked for the Mayor of Bolton as a cleaner and was given a Thomas Moran paintng.[5]

Shaun Greenhalgh left school at 16 with no qualifications.[9] A self-taught artist, undoubtedly influenced by his job as an antiques dealer, he worked up his forgeries from sketches, photographs, art books and catalogues.[2][5][10] He attempted a wide range of crafts, from painting in pastels and watercolours, to sketches, and sculpture, both modern and ancient, busts and statues, to bas-relief and metalwork. He invested in a large range of different materials – silver, stone, marble, rare stone, replica metal, and glass.[2][5] He also did meticulous research to authenticate his items with histories and provenance (for instance, faking letters from the supposed artists) in order to demonstrate his ownership.[11] Completed items were then stored about the house and garden shed. The latter probably served as a workshop as well.

Detective Constable Ian Lawson of Scotland Yard, who searched the house, gave an indication of Greenhalgh's activities:

There were blocks of stone, a furnace for melting silver on top of the fridge, half-finished and rejected sculptures, a watercolour under the bed, a cheque for £20,000 dated 1993, and a bust of an American president in the loft. I’d never seen anything like it.[2]


A next-door neighbour recalled: "I was finding bits of pottery and coins around the edges of the garden over 20 years back – [things like] bits of metal with old kings on."[12] While this sounds as though materials were openly displayed, it was perhaps not quite that obvious. Angela Thomas, a curator from the Bolton Museum, actually visited the family at home prior to the purchase of the Amarna Princess and reported nothing untoward.[11]

Yet for all his daring – he once boasted that he could create a Thomas Moran watercolour in half an hour[5] and claimed to have completed an "Amarna" statue in three weeks – Shaun Greenhalgh needed the help of his parents.[11] At the trial it was said by the lawyer, Brian McKenna, that Greenhalgh's mother, Olive (1925–2016),[13] made the telephone calls "because he was shy and did not like to use the telephone."[14]

Olive may have been a peripheral figure,[14] but Shaun's father, George (1923–2014),[13] was more involved. He was the frontman, who met face-to-face with potential buyers. "He looks honest, he's elderly and he shows up in a wheelchair."[15] For example, George Sr. told the Bolton Museum that he was "thinking about using [the Amarna Princess statue] as a garden ornament".[5]

Greenhalgh's parents helped establish a logical explanation for why the Greenhalghs had possession of such items in the first place, namely as family heirlooms. It allowed them to offload items when they were discovered as fakes, such as the "Eadred Reliquary", and an L.S. Lowry painting, The Meeting House.[2][11][16][17]

The Amarna Princess

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The Amarna Princess

Main article: Amarna Princess

In 1999, the Greenhalghs began their most ambitious project.[5] They bought an 1892 catalogue which listed the contents of an auction in Silverton Park, Devon, the home of the 4th Earl of Egremont. Among the items listed were "eight Egyptian figures."[18] Using the leeway this vague description allowed, Greenhalgh manufactured what became known as the Amarna Princess, a 20-inch statue, apparently made of a translucent alabaster. It later emerged within a Panorama documentary that he had bought the tools to produce this "masterpiece" from B&Q."[16]

Done in the Egyptian "Amarna period" style of 1350 BC, the statue represents one of the daughters of the Pharaoh Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti. At the time, as Greenhalgh had researched, only two other similar statuettes were known to exist in the world.[5][19] He "knocked up" his copy in his shed in three weeks out of calcite, "using basic DIY tools and making it look old by coating it in a mixture of tea and clay".[5][16]

George then approached Bolton Museum in 2002,[14] claiming the Amarna Princess was from his grandfather's "forgotten collection", bought at the Silverton Park auction.[2] He pretended to be ignorant about its true worth or value, but was careful to provide the letters Shaun had also faked, showing how the artefact had been in the family for "a hundred years".[5][16]

In 2003, after consulting experts at the British Museum and Christie's, the Bolton Museum bought the Amarna Princess for £439,767. It remained on display until February 2006. It has been subsequently re-displayed, since September 2018, as part of Bolton Museum's "Bolton's Egypt" Gallery as an example of fake Egyptian artefacts in the "Obsessions" section .[14]

Revenue

Had the Greenhalghs managed to sell all 120 artworks they had offered it is estimated that they could have earned as much as £10m.[2][5][20] This would have made the average value of each piece more than £83,000, although money received varied between £100 (for the Eadred Reliquary) and £440,000 (for the Amarna Princess). The Greenhalghs did not manage to offload most of their works. Many which they did sell, such as the Eadred Reliquary, purportedly were undersold, garnering only minimal amounts.[citation needed] Others, such as the Lowry painting The Meeting House, only gained in value from their repeated resale, which would not have benefited the Greenhalghs.

As time went on, more ambitious, expensive pieces of work were produced, some of which did sell, like the Risley Park Lanx. However, these were subject to more scrutiny and indeed it was one of these, the Assyrian reliefs, which led to their exposure and arrests, which suggests that the longevity of their scam was concentrated on the passing-off of lower level items.[21]

Balanced against this must be the success of sales to private individuals. They are unlikely to have had the same level of expertise at their disposal as institutions, and are probably less willing to advertise their losses once the forgeries were detected. Certainly they have not had the same exposure as the debacle surrounding the Bolton Museum, for example.[11] Two individual buyers, "wealthy Americans" have been identified, but only after they donated their purchase to the British Museum.[5]

Another piece sold to an unnamed private buyer came to light when the Art Institute of Chicago announced that The Faun, a ceramic sculpture on display since 1997 as the work of the 19th-century French master Paul Gauguin, was also a forgery by Shaun Greenhalgh. The museum purchased the sculpture from a private dealer in London, who had bought it at a Sotheby's auction in 1994.[22]

In addition, the bank records of the Greenhalghs only went back six years,[19] so in the final analysis the exact amount of monies involved over the seventeen-year scam has not been determined. What is known is that "two Halifax accounts... one containing £55,173 and the other £303,646" were frozen, pending a confiscation hearing in January 2008, and Shaun Greenhalgh was convicted for "conspiracy to conceal and transfer £410,392."[14] Estimates of the amount of money the Greenhalghs actually made vary from £850,000 to £1.5 million.[5][15]

Exposure

Possibly encouraged by their success in fooling experts, the Greenhalghs tried again using the same Silverton Park provenance. They produced what were purportedly three Assyrian reliefs of soldier and horses, from the Palace of Sennacherib in 600 BC.[5]

The British Museum examined them in November 2005, concluded that they were genuine, and expressed an interest in buying one of them, which seemed to match a drawing by A. H. Layard in its collection. However, when two of the reliefs were submitted to Bonhams auction house, its antiquities consultant Richard Falkiner spotted "an obvious fake".[23]

Bonhams consulted with the British Museum about various suspicious aspects, and the museum then spotted several improbable anomalies. The horses' reins were "not consistent"[15] or "atypical" with respect to other Assyrian reliefs; and the cuneiform inscription contained a spelling mistake,[5] an absent diacritical mark, which was considered extremely unlikely in a piece "destined for the eyes of the king". These concerns became full blown suspicion when George seemed too willing to part with the items at a low price.[10] The museum contacted the police, who investigated the Greenhalghs for the next 20 months.[24]

Court case, convictions and sentencing

At their trial at Bolton Crown Court in 2007, the three defendants pleaded guilty to creating the forgeries and laundering the money they received.[25] On 16 November, Shaun Greenhalgh was sentenced to 4 years and eight months, while his mother received a 12 month suspended sentence. The parents were using wheelchairs at their appearance for sentencing.[25] Judge William Morris, in sentencing Shaun Greenhalgh, stated: "This was an ambitious conspiracy of long duration based on your undoubted talent and based on the sophistication of the deceptions underpinning the sales and attempted sales. I speak of your talent but not in admiration. Your talent was misapplied to the ends of dishonest gain."[26] George Greenhalgh's sentence was delayed for medical reports in 2007,[25] eventually he received a suspended sentence of two years. If his age had not been grounds for mitigation, Judge William Morris said, he would have been sentenced to 31⁄2 years imprisonment. The prison service was unable to hold someone with his infirmities.[27]

Detective Sergeant Vernon Rapley, from the Metropolitan Police Arts and Antiquities Unit said shortly after the Greenhalgh's were sentenced: "Looking at them now I'm not sure the items would fool anyone, it was the credibility of the provenances that went with them."[16] The list of experts and institutions who were fooled is long, and includes the Tate Modern,[5] the British Museum, the Henry Moore Institute, and auction houses Bonhams, Christie's, Sotheby's and other experts from "Leeds to Vienna."[19] The Faun was displayed at the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam;[28] while the Amarna Princess went on display at the South Bank Hayward Art Gallery, in an exhibition opened by the Queen.[7] Other unnamed galleries, and various private collectors were fooled as well.[5]

Motivations and aftermath

The Greenhalgh family did not appear to make much use of the money they gained. They lived a "far from lavish life"[2] in a "shabby"[5] council house; among their possessions were "an old TV, battered sofa, and a Ford Focus", but not a computer.[2][16] According to Detective Sgt Rapley of the Metropolitan Police, the conditions were "relatively frugal" even "abject poverty".[19] Olive Greenhalgh claimed that she had "not even travelled outside of Bolton."[16]

As they did not display wealth, explanations other than desire for money have been proposed. Police suggested that Shaun Greenhalgh was motivated less by profit than by resentment at his own lack of recognition as an artist. This "general hatred"[16] became a need to "shame the art world" and "show them up", but this was denied by Greenhalgh in his autobiography, A Forger's Tale. The defence lawyer Andrew Nutall characterized Shaun Greenhalgh as a shy, introverted person, obsessed with "one outlook and that was his garden shed". The forgeries were an attempt to "perfect the love he had for such arts". By implication, the forgeries were a mere unintended, if unfortunate, consequence.[19]

In fact, institutions proclaimed the works and their achievement in obtaining them. The Art Institute of Chicago described The Faun sculpture as a "major rediscovery" and included it in their "definitive" exhibition on Gauguin.[28] Bolton Museum hailed their purchase of the Amarna Princess as "a coup," calling George Greenhalgh "a nice old man who had no idea of the significance of what he owned."[11]

After the trial, Bolton Museum scrambled to distance itself and described itself as "blameless"[11] insisting that it had followed established procedure.[14] The presiding judge, William Morris, exonerated the institution and any Council staff involved, preferring to focus on what he saw as "misapplied" talent and an "ambitious conspiracy;"[14] while the Metropolitan Police Arts and Antiquities Unit would only admit that Greenhalgh had succeeded "to a degree".[19]

However, the general public was notably more cynical in its reaction, being unimpressed by what they perceived as the experts' incompetence, and the law's heavy-handedness.[2] Richard Falkiner, the antiquities expert from Bonhams said, "I took one look at the relief and said 'don't make me laugh'...It was an obvious fake. It was far too freshly cut, was made of the wrong stone and was stylistically wrong for the period."[23]

Known forgeries

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Greenhalgh's The Faun, which was passed off for a sculpture by Gauguin

During the trial, 44 forgeries were discussed, while 120 were known to have been presented to various institutions.[2][14] However, given the family's bank records only extended back for a third of the period they were operating, and Shaun Greenhalgh's high level of productivity, there are probably many more. On raiding the Greenhalgh home police discovered many raw materials and "scores of sculptures, paintings and artifacts, hidden in wardrobes, under their bed and in the garden shed."[15] In fact, "there can be little doubt that there are a number of forgeries still circulating within the art market."[19]

A description of known forgeries includes:

• 1989. Eadred Reliquary. A small 10th century silver vessel, containing a relic of the true cross of Jerusalem. George Greenhalgh turned up "dripping wet" at Manchester University, claiming he'd found it in a river terrace, at Preston. University determined vessel was a fake; but unsure about the wood. Purchased it for £100.[29] The subject of an academic thesis.[19]
• 1990. Samuel Peploe still life painting, purportedly inherited from Olive's grandfather, sold for £20,000. However, paint began to flake off and the buyer cancelled the cheque. Scotland Yard failed to make an arrest at the time due to "organisational restraints."[30][31]
• 1992. The Risley Park Lanx. A Roman silver plate bought for £100,000 by private buyers and donated to the British Museum, who displayed it as a genuine replica.[31][32]
• 1993–1994. Thomas Moran sketch and watercolour acquired by Bolton Museum. "The former was a gift given by the Greenhalghs; the latter was purchased for £10,000."[33]
• 1994. The Faun. A ceramic sculpture by Paul Gauguin. Authenticated by the Wildenstein Institute, sold at Sothebys auction in 1994 for £20,700 to private London dealers, Howie & Pillar. Bought by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1997 for $125,000. On display until October 2007.[28]
• 1995. Anglo-Saxon ring. Tried to sell it through Phillips Auctioneers; determined by British Museum to be a fake.[31]
• 1995. 24 sketches by Thomas Moran sold in New York. Police believe up to 40, worth up to £10,000, were created by Greenhalgh, six or seven of which are unaccounted for. He claimed each one only took him thirty minutes to forge, and that a former mayor of Bolton had given them to an ancestor of his who worked for the mayor as a cleaner.[5][8][34]
• L.S. Lowry. The Meeting House (a pastel, one of a "clutch of paintings").[2][5][16] The Greenhalghs claimed it was a 21st birthday present by Olive's gallery owner father,[8] and even that some were given by Lowry himself. They had copied letters from the artist, inserting their names in to make it look like they were great friends. For example, this letter dated 16 June 1946:
Dear George, Thank you very much for your recent letter and cheque for the paintings. I have about finished the [illegible] but I will hold onto it untill I am(?) ready. I will slip round to the yard on Wed. L S Lowry. Received 45.0.0 for paintings

One of the Lowrys, perhaps the one mentioned above, sold as a replica, for somewhere between "several hundred pounds"[8] and £5,000. Eventually put up for auction by new owners in Kent as genuine item, for £70,000.[2]
• 1999. Two gold Roman ornaments. George Greenhalgh withdrew them from Christie's when the auction house wanted to do a scientific analysis on them.[31]
• Barbara Hepworth goose sculpture. Only a photograph known to exist, before item lost in the late 1920s. The Greenhalghs claimed it was given to the family "by the curator of a museum in Leeds" in the 1950s. Worth approximately £200,000 it was later sold to the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds for £3,000.[5][8][29]
• Work by Otto Dix. Stolen from Dresden in 1939. Apparently recovered by the Greenhalghs then presented to the Tate Gallery .[12]
• Work by Man Ray.[12]
• Another Paul Gauguin, a vase.[35]
• An ancient Celtic fibula (or brooch)[15]
• Horatio Greenough. Bust of Thomas Jefferson,[5] sold at Sotheby's for £48,000.[31] And/or Thomas Chatterton[34]
• Henry Moore. A carved stone head by Henry Moore, which Greenhalgh Snr tried to convince the Tate Modern, London to buy, claiming to have got it via his grandmother.[5]
• 2003 Amarna Princess, a statuette. In the family for "a hundred years." Authenticated by the British Museum and Sothebys, bought by Bolton Museum for £440,000, it was on display for three years. A police raid on the Greenhalgh home discovered two more copies.[2][5][16][30]
• 2005. Three Assyrian marble reliefs from Nineveh, including one of an eagle-headed genie and another of soldiers and horses. They were dated by the British Museum at around 681BC, supposedly from the Palace of Sennacherib, and thought to be worth around £250,000 to £300,000. But alerted by Bonhams, their discrepancies were revealed, and the forgery exposed.[5][9][16][23]

Career after release

Following Shaun Greenhalgh's release in early 2010, he launched a website selling his artworks. These comprise works the website describes as "examples of my old style of work...'fakes'," signed and sold as works by him, as well as sculptures in his own style. A member of the Metropolitan Police Art and Antique Squad stated "If a work is not copyrighted, it is not illegal to copy that work and sell that copy, as long as it is made very clear the work is not an original."[36]

La Bella Principessa claim

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La Bella Principessa on display at Villa Reale Monza in 2015

In November 2015 as part of the publicity for the upcoming A Forger's Tale, an article in The Sunday Times put forward Greenhalgh's claim that he was the creator of La Bella Principessa attributed to Leonardo da Vinci.[37]

A December 2015 article in The New York Times also promoted Greenhalgh's claimed authorship of the work, which it said he had made in the late 1970s, around the age of 20, using vellum recycled from a 16th-century land deed and the face of a supermarket check-out girl named "Alison" who worked in Bolton.[38]

Greenhalgh repeated his claim to be the creator in a May 2017 interview with Simon Parkin in The Guardian, observing that he had studied the work again when it was exhibited at the Villa Reale di Monza in 2015.[39] The Postscript chapter in Greenhalgh's 2017 autobiography provided further details about his claim, identifying the sitter as "Bossy Sally from the Co-Op" (p. 356).

Art historian Martin Kemp said he found the claim hilarious and ridiculous.[40]

Television programmes

On 4 January 2009, BBC Two broadcast a dramatisation of the Greenhalgh story called The Antiques Rogue Show, a play on the title of the BBC series Antiques Road Show,[41] already used by headline writers. In a letter from prison to the Bolton News, Shaun Greenhalgh complained about the depiction of himself and his family, calling the drama "character assassination".[42]

Shaun Greenhalgh appeared in the 2012 BBC documentary The Dark Ages: An Age of Light and is listed as "Craftsman" in the credits.[43]

In October 2019, he appeared in Handmade in Bolton on BBC2, a short documentary series fronted by Janina Ramirez, directed and narrated by Waldemar Januszczak, in which he remade four objects from the past using traditional materials and methods.[44]

Autobiography

His autobiography A Forger's Tale: Confessions of the Bolton Forger was originally published in a limited edition in 2015 by ZCZ Editions. The first full edition was published on 1 June 2017 with an Introduction by Waldemar Januszczak.[45] It won The Observer's Best Art Book of the Year, 2018.

References

1. The Guardian "How garden shed fakers fooled the art world", 16 November 2007.
2. O’Neill, Sean; Jenkins, Russell (17 November 2007). "The £10m art collection that was forged by a family in their garden shed in Bolton". The Times. Archived from the original on 17 May 2011.
3. "Armana Pricess: "I dismantled art forgers work without realising"". Bolton News. 19 December 2009. Retrieved 21 December 2009.
4. "The Metropolitan Police Service's Investigation of Fakes and Forgeries – V&A future exhibitions". Victoria and Albert Museum. Retrieved 22 December 2009.
5. "The artful codgers: pensioners who conned British museums with £10m forgeries". This is London. 16 November 2007.
6. Smith, Amanda (21 April 2007). "£1m fake statue: family charged". The Bolton News.
7. Stokes, Paul (1 August 2007). "Family sells fake Egyptian statue for £400,000". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 24 August 2007.
8. Chadwick, Edward (17 November 2007). "Antiques Rogues Show: Update 3". The Bolton News.
9. Chadwick, Edward (21 November 2007). "Con artist set to appeal". The Bolton News.
10. Milmo, Cahal (19 November 2007). "Family of forgers fool art world with beautifully crafted fakes". New Zealand Herald.
11. Linton, Deborah. "Family con that fooled the art world", Manchester Evening News, 16 November 2007.
12. Grove, Sophie. "Fake It Till You Make It", Newsweek, 15 December 2007.
13. "Guardian interview for A Forger's Tale". Retrieved 15 November 2020.
14. Chadwick, Edward. "Antiques rogues show update", The Bolton News, 17 November 2007.
15. "Elderly couple, son sentenced for creating knockoff art and antiques for 17 years". International Herald Tribune. 16 November 2007.
16. Kelly, James (17 November 2007). "Fraudsters who resented the art market". BBC News.
17. See also discussion of this in Reactions section.
18. Malvern, Jack. "The ancient Egypt statue from Bolton (circa 2003)", Times Online, 27 March 2006.
19. Ward, David (17 November 2007). "How garden shed fakers fooled the art world". The Guardian.
20. "Authentication in Art List of Unmasked Forgers".
21. Thompson, Clive. "How to make a fake", New York Magazine, 24 May 2004; accessed 26 December 2007.
22. Artner, Alan. "Art Institute of Chicago discloses Gauguin sculpture in fact a forgery", Chicago Tribune, 12 December 2007.
23. Macquisten, Ivan. "It was Bonhams and ATG columnist who first raised alarm over Greenhalgh fakes", Antiques Trade Gazette, 3 December 2007.
24. Hundley, Tom (11 February 2008). "A masterpiece of deception". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved 11 July 2022.
25. Lovell, Jeremy (16 November 2007). "82-year-old art forger sentenced". Reuters. Retrieved 11 July 2022.
26. "British art forger jailed for four years". The Irish Times. PA. 16 November 2007. Retrieved 11 July 2022.
27. Pallister, David; Carter, Helen (29 January 2008). "Curtain falls on antiques rogue show as last of family forgers convicted". The Guardian. Retrieved 11 July 2022.
28. Bailey, Martin (12 December 2007). "Revealed: Art Institute of Chicago Gaugain sculpture is fake". The Art Newspaper.
29. Bunyan, Paul (18 November 2007). "Downfall of council house art fakers". The Daily Telegraph. London. Archived from the original on 17 November 2007.
30. Flynn, Tom. "Faking It" (PDF). Art Quarterly (Summer 2007). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2 October 2011.
31. Pallister, David. "Background:'The antique road show,", Guardian, 28 January 2008.
32. British Museum: The Risley Park Lanx (copy), replica, lanx, Romano-British, Risley Park
33. Bolton Museum, (no byline). "Amarna Princess statement" Archived 20 November 2008 at the Wayback Machine, Bolton Museum, 29 November 2007.
34. Milmo, Cahal (17 November 2007). "Family of forgers fooled art world with array of finely crafted". The Independent. Retrieved 13 December 2007.
35. Lovell, Jeremy (17 November 2007). "Octogenarian British art forger sentenced". The New Zealand Herald. Retrieved 9 November 2011.
36. "Bolton Evening News article". 2 December 2011.
37. Boswell, Josh; Rayment, Tim (29 November 2015). "'It's not a da Vinci, it's Sally from the Co-op'". The Sunday Times. Archived from the original on 1 December 2015. Retrieved 16 October 2019.
38. Reyburn, Scott (4 December 2015). "An Art World Mystery Worthy of Leonardo". The New York Times. Retrieved 6 December 2015.
39. 'I wasn’t cock-a-hoop that I’d fooled the experts': Britain's master forger tells all
40. Kemp, Martin (29 November 2015). "La Bella Principessa is a "forgery"!!!". Martin Kemp's This and That.
41. "BBC programme details".
42. Paul Keavaney (27 January 2009). "I do not believe my family has been portrayed fairly". The Bolton News.
43. The Dark Ages: An Age of Light, episode # 4.
44. BBC: Handmade in Bolton
45. Greenhalgh, Shaun (2017). A Forger's Tale: Confessions of the Bolton Forger (first ed.). London: Allen & Unwin. ISBN 9781760295271.

Sources

• Artner, Alan. "Art Institute of Chicago discloses Gauguin sculpture in fact a forgery", Chicago Tribune, 12 December 2007; accessed 13 December 2007.
• Bolton Museum, (no byline). "Amarna Princess statement", Bolton Museum, 29 November 2007; accessed 15 December 2007.
• Bailey, Martin. "Revealed: Art Institute of Chicago Gaugain sculpture is fake", The Art Newspaper, 12 December 2007; accessed 13 December 2007.
• Bunyan, Nigel. "Downfall of council house art fakers", Telegraph, 18 November 2007; accessed 13 December 2007.
• Chadwick, Edward. "Antiques rogues show update", The Bolton News, 17 November 2007; accessed 18 November 2007.
• Chadwick, Edward. "Antiques rogues show: update 3", The Bolton News, 17 November 2007; accessed 30 November 2007.
• Chadwick, Edward. "Con artist set to appeal", The Bolton News, 21 November 2007; accessed 30 November 2007.
• Fenton, James. "Fakes and counterfeits", The Guardian, 24 November 2007; accessed 30 November 2007.
• Flynn, Tom. "Faking It", Art Quarterly, Summer 2007; accessed 13 December 2007.
• International Herald Tribune (no byline). "Elderly couple, son sentenced for creating knockoff art and antiques for 17 years", International Herald Tribune, 16 November 2007; accessed 18 November 2007.
• Grove, Sophie. "Fake It Till You Make It", Newsweek, 15 December 2007; accessed 17 December 2007.
• Kelly, James. "Fraudsters who resented the art market", BBC News, 16 November 2007; accessed 17 November 2007.
• Linton, Deborah. "Family con that fooled the art world", Manchester Evening News, 16 November 2007; accessed 18 November 2007.
• Lovell, Jeremy. "Octogenarian British art forger sentenced", New Zealand Herald, 17 November 2007; accessed 20 November 2007.
• Macquisten, Ivan. "It was Bonhams and ATG columnist who first raised alarm over Greenhalgh fakes", Antiques Trade Gazette, 3 December 2007; accessed 17 December 2007.
• Milmo, Cahal. "Family of forgers fool art world with beautifully crafted fakes", New Zealand Herald, 19 November 2007; accessed 20 November 2007.
• Milmo, Cahal. "Family of forgers fooled art world with array of finely crafted", Independent, 17 November 2007; accessed 13 December 2007.
• Smith, Amanda. "£1m fake statue: family charged", The Bolton News, 21 April 2007; accessed 30 November 2007.
• Stokes, Paul. " Family sells fake Egyptian statue for £400,000", Telegraph, 1 August 2007. Accessed 30 November 2007.
• This Is London, (no byline). "The artful codgers: pensioners who conned British museums with £10m forgeries", This Is London, 16 November 2007; accessed 18 November 2007.
• Times Online, (no byline). "Octogenarian art-forgers bought to justice", Times Online, 16 November 2007; accessed 22 November 2007.
• Thompson, Clive. "How to make a fake", New York Magazine, 24 May 2004; accessed 26 December 2007.
• Ward, David. "How garden shed fakers fooled the art world", The Guardian, 17 November 2007; accessed 17 November 2007.

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Art Institute of Chicago discloses Gauguin sculpture in fact a forgery: Sculpture sold as a Gauguin is fake
By Alan G. Artner
Tribune art critic
December 12, 2007

Image
Faun Sculpture Chicago Art Institute. The Art Institute of Chicago has discovered that a sculpture alleged to be a 19th Century work by Paul Gauguin is a forgery. (Photo courtesy The Art Institute of Chicago / December 11, 2007)

For about a decade, “The Faun,” a ceramic sculpture, has been at the Art Institute of Chicago, presented as a work of the 19th Century French master Paul Gauguin.

On Tuesday, the museum announced that the work, which it bought in 1997, is a forgery. “The Faun” has been confirmed to be one of a long string of contemporary forgeries by the Greenhalgh family, which Scotland Yard had been investigating for 20 months.

The museum purchased the sculpture from a private dealer in London, who had bought it at a Sotheby’s auction in 1994.

“Everyone who bought and sold [the work] did so in good faith,” said Erin Hogan, director of public affairs at the institute.

“No one could think of any other instance in which anything like this happened here,” Hogan said. “So we don’t have experience in this area. We’re talking to both Sotheby’s and the private dealer about how to proceed” to get compensated for the money it spent to buy the work. As is customary, the institute did not reveal the purchase price.

The piece was the object of art historical research upon acquisition, but there was no reason to believe it was anything other than represented, Hogan said.

The sculpture was on display at the museum until October. Shaun Greenhalgh, who made all the objects forged by the family, confessed to authorities that “The Faun” was his handiwork. The family had consigned it to Sotheby’s.

Buyers at major auctions generally are protected by an indemnification clause that allows the sale to be rescinded if the works turn out to be inauthentic. Sotheby’s might go back to the Greenhalgh family to refund the purchase price.

Shaun Greenhalgh received a prison sentence of 4 years and 8 months last month. His mother, Olive, 83, was given a 12-month suspended sentence. The father, George, 84, salesman of all the forged objects, had a deferred sentence pending medical reports.

For 17 years, the family carried on one of the most sophisticated forgery operations in modern history, faking scores of objects including antiquities, watercolors, paintings and modern sculpture, authorities said. Many of the pieces were copies of ancient objects or artworks thought to be lost.

Their “reappearance” caused great excitement. Family members brought several pieces to experts and museums with elaborate stories of inheritance. Detailed accounts of previous owners also were supplied — and also were invented.

According to the Daily Mail in London, “the conspiracy secured them around 1.2 million [euros],” or about $1.77 million. “Had all the items forged been sold, experts estimated the family could have earned as much as 14 million [euros],” or about $20.6 million.

———–

aartner@tribune.com

***************************

Jailed for Fake Statue: Forgery factory run from council house
Family's 17-year con with forged paintings, documents and artifacts Worth Millions
by The Bolton News
17th November 2007

AN elderly couple and their son who tricked Bolton Council into parting with £440,000 for a fake statue conned the art world with a string of elaborate schemes for nearly two decades.

Shaun Greenhalgh was a talented artist and sculptor who used his skills to create copies of rare and sought-after masterpieces at the family's home in The Crescent, Bromley Cross.

His wheelchair-bound father, George, aged 84, acted as a convincing salesman and provided carefully researched stories about the origins of every fake they passed off as real.

Olive Greenhalgh, aged 83, made phone calls to unwitting buyers to arrange meetings.

The artworks included a copy of the 3,300-year-old Amarna Princess statue bought by Bolton Council in 2003 after being convinced by George Greenhalgh that it was a family heirloom.

Instead, it was the family's most elaborate and audacious con - and even fooled Egyptology experts at the British Museum.


It was revealed at Bolton Crown Court yesterday that Shaun Greenhalgh, aged 47 - a self-taught artist - had carved it himself in a garden shed in just three weeks.

The deceit was exposed only when other stone carvings, purported to date from 900BC, were spotted to be modern copies.

The court heard about 44 other items which the family sold or attempted to sell between 1989 and 2006 - among them copies of work by LS Lowry, Paul Gaugin and Bolton-born painter Thomas Moran.

Detectives say dozens of fakes may still be in circulation.

Shaun Greenhalgh was jailed for four years and eight months after admitting defrauding art institutions between 1989 and 2006 and conspiracy to conceal and transfer £410,392.

His mother was given a 12-month suspended sentence and her husband will be sentenced at a later date pending medical reports.

But Judge William Morris made it clear the pensioner was facing a jail term.

Both admitted the same charges as their son.

The judge told Shaun Greenhalgh: "This was an ambitious conspiracy of long duration based on your undoubted talent and based on the sophistication of the deceptions underpinning the sales and attempted sales.

"I speak of your talent but not in admiration. Your talent was misapplied to the ends of dishonest gain."

Judge Morris said the fraud had cheated private collectors and galleries out of £850,000.

Bolton Museum was approached by George Greenhalgh in 2002. He asked staff if they would like to view the 20-inch statue which he said had been passed down from his great-grandfather.

He told them he knew little of Egyptian antiquities and said the item had been valued at £500 before allowing the member of staff to take it away for examination.

His claims were backed up by a catalogue from the sale of a house and its contents in 1892.

Shaun Greenhalgh used details in the catalogue to manufacture a copy of the statue, said Peter Cadwallader, prosecuting.

The figure was taken to Christie's and the British Museum where experts said it was genuine after comparing it to a similar item at the Louvre in Paris.

After Bolton Council paid £439,767 to the family, the purchase was hailed as a coup as the statue was believed to be worth £1 million.

It was said to represent one of the daughters of Pharaoh Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti, the mother of Tutankhamun.


It remained on show until February, 2006.

Curators at the British Museum called police when they became suspicious about three pieces of stone with raised "reliefs" which were offered to them by George Greenhalgh in October, 2005.

Although they were initially believed to be genuine and worth as much as £250,000, experts at the museum and Bonham's auctioneers realised they were fakes and phoned police.

In February, 2006, Bolton Museum was contacted by the Metropolitan Police's arts and antiques unit which raised doubts about the Amarna Princess.

The purchase was funded by grants as well as a donation of £4,000 from the Friends of Bolton Museum.

Judge Morris said there could be no criticism of anybody within the council or museum for falling for the con.

Andrew Nuttall, defending Shaun Greenhalgh, said: "As an artist, Shaun Greenhalgh does not have a style of his own. What he can do is copy.

"He was completely self-taught. In some respects that may make him unique."

Brian McKenna, defending Mrs Greenhalgh, said she had made phonecalls on behalf of her son because he was shy and did not like to use the telephone.

"In terms of involvement in this conspiracy, she was on the periphery, but it would be wrong of me to suggest that she did not know what was going on," he said.

Outside court, Stephanie Crossley, assistant director of adult services at Bolton council, said the incident had been "regrettable but the council carefully followed established practice.

She added: "We welcome the judge's comments. He said that we were victims of the most clever deception'.

"The museum did not rely on its own judgment. He said that he could see no criticism of Bolton Museum in what it had done and no criticism of any individual."

No council money had been contributed towards the sale, she added.

Two Halifax accounts in the name of Shaun Greenhalgh, one containing £55,173 and the other £303,646, have been frozen and a confiscation hearing will be held at Bolton Crown Court on January 25 next year.
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Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

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Part 1 of 3

Chapter Two: The Oral Tradition, From "Education in Ancient India"
by Hartmut Scharfe
2002
© Copyright 2002 by Koninklije Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands

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On one of the main tributaries of the Ganges, a smaller river known as the Yamuna, sits the city of Delhi. Delhi is one of the oldest cities in the world. It has been continually inhabited for more than 8,000 years. The soil on the banks of the Yamuna is rich, and so, the people here have always flourished. It's in this region of northwestern India, during the period following the collapse of the Indus Valley civilization, that the earliest examples of written texts were laid down in the ancient northern language of Sanskrit. These texts began to be written around three and a half thousand years ago, and they are known as the Vedas. Unfortunately for us, many of these early texts were written on fragile, perishable substances, many of them on paper made of the bark of the Himalayan birch tree, using inks made of ash. Some of these texts, remarkably, have survived from as far back as the third or fourth centuries, but in most cases they have been lost. The oldest of these Sanskrit texts, known as the Rigveda, was probably transmitted orally from at least the second millennium BC, or more than four thousand years ago. In it is contained a poetic vision of how written language developed in this region.
When in giving names, they first set forth the beginning of language. Their most excellent and spotless secret was laid bare through love. When the wise ones formed language with their mind, purifying it like grain with a winnowing fan, then friends knew friendships, an auspicious mark placed on their language.

The publication of these texts had an enormous impact. For about a thousand years after 300 BC, the language of Sanskrit, once spoken only in the north of India, would spread to eclipse all others, becoming the common language of art, science, religion, and poetry, much as Latin once was in Europe. It was in this period that the Vedic religion formed based on the script of the Vedas, and from this, after a number of adaptations and evolutions, would emerge the religion we know today as Hinduism.

-- Vijayanagara: The Last Emperors of South India, by Paul Cooper, Fall of Civilizations

 
CHAPTER TWO: THE ORAL TRADITION
  
The outstanding feature of the oldest Indian education and Indian culture in general, especially in the centuries B.C., is its orality. The Vedic texts make no reference to writing, and there is no reliable indication that writing was known in India except perhaps in the northwestern provinces when these were under Achaemenid rule, since the time of Darius or even Cyrus. Those who write down the Veda go to hell, as the Mahabharata tells us,1

1 Mahabharata XIII 24.70 vedanam lekhakas caiva te vai niraya-gaminah.


and Kumarila [700 A.D.] confirms: "That knowledge of the truth is worthless which has been acquired from the Veda, if the Veda has not been rightly comprehended or if it has been learnt from writing."2

2 Tantra-varttika 13 (p.86); p.123.20 in K.V. Abhyankar's ed., Pune 1970. Al-Biruni (Alberuni's India, trans. E.C. Sachau, London 1910, vol.1 p. 125) reported in the eleventh century: "They do not allow the Veda to be committed to writing."


Kumarila Bhatta (fl. roughly 700) was a Hindu philosopher and a scholar of Mimamsa school of philosophy from early medieval India. He is famous for many of his various theses on Mimamsa, such as Mimamsaslokavarttika. Bhaṭṭa was a staunch believer in the supreme validity of Vedic injunction, a champion of Purva-Mimamsaand a confirmed ritualist. The Varttika is mainly written as a subcommentary of Sabara's commentary on Jaimini's Purva Mimamsa Sutras. His philosophy is classified by some scholars as existential realism...

The birthplace of Kumarila Bhatta is uncertain. According to the 16th-century Buddhist scholar Taranatha, Kumarila was a native of South India. However, Anandagiri's Shankara-Vijaya states that Kumarila came from "the North" (udagdeśāt), and debated the Buddhists and the Jains in the South.

Another theory is that he came from eastern India, specifically Kamarupa (present-day Assam). Sesa's Sarvasiddhanta-rahasya uses the eastern title Bhattacharya for him. His writings indicate that he was familiar with the production of silk, which was common in present-day Assam. Yet another theory is that he comes from Mithila, which has similar culture to Assam, and produced another scholar on the subject Mandana Misra....

According to legend, Kumarila went to study Buddhism at Nalanda (the largest 4th-century university in the world), with the aim of refuting Buddhist doctrine in favour of Vedic religion. He was expelled from the university when he protested against his teacher (Dharmakirti) ridiculing the Vedic rituals. Legend has it that even though he was thrown off of the university's tower, he survived with an eye injury by claiming "if the Vedas are the ultimate then I will be spared from Death". Modern Mimamsa scholars and followers of Vedanta believe that this was because he imposed a condition on the infallibility of the Vedas thus encouraging the Hindu belief that one should not even doubt the infallibility of the Vedas.

The Madhaviya Sankara Digvijayam, a 14th-century hagiographic work on the life of Sankara, claims that Sankara challenged Bhatta to a debate on his deathbed. Kumarila Bhatta could not debate Sankara as he was punishing himself to have disrespected his Buddhist teacher by defeating him in a debate using the Vedas by self-immolation at the banks of Ganga at Prayagraj and instead directed him to argue with his student Mandana Misra in Mahiṣmati.

-- Kumarila Bhatta, by Wikipedia


Sayana [d. 1387] wrote in the introduction to his Rgveda commentary that "the text of the Veda is to be learned by the method of learning it from the lips of the teacher and not from a manuscript."3

3 Rig-Veda Samhita, ed. F.Max Muller, 2nd ed. London 1890 (repr. Varanasi 1966), p. 14 line 15 adhyayana-vidhis ca likhita-pathadi vyavrtydhyayana-samskrtatvam svadhyayasya gamayati.


Sayana (also called Sayanacarya; died 1387) was a Sanskrit Mimamsa scholar from the Vijayanagara Empire of South India, near modern day Bellary. An influential commentator on the Vedas, he flourished under King Bukka Raya I and his successor Harihara II. More than a hundred works are attributed to him, among which are commentaries on nearly all parts of the Vedas. He also wrote on a number of subjects like medicine, morality, music and grammar...

He was the pupil of Vishnu Sarvajna and of Shankarananda. Both Madhavacharya and Sayanacharya were said to have studied under Vidyatirtha of Sringeri, and held offices in the Vijayanagara Empire. Sayanacharya was a minister, and subsequently prime minister in Bukka Raya's court, and wrote much of his commentary, with his brother and other Brahmins during his ministership...

His major work is his commentary on the Vedas, Vedartha Prakasha, literally "the meaning of the Vedas made manifest," written at the request of King Bukka of the Vijayanagara empire "to invest the young kingdom with the prestige it needed." He was probably aided by other scholars, using the interpretations of several authors. The core portion of the commentary was likely written by Sayanacharya himself, but it also includes contributions of his brother Madhavacharya, and additions by his students and later authors who wrote under Sayanacharya's name. "Sayana" (or also Sayanamadhava) by convention refers to the collective authorship of the commentary as a whole without separating such layers.

Galewicz states that Sayana, a Mimamsa scholar, "thinks of the Veda as something to be trained and mastered to be put into practical ritual use," noticing that "it is not the meaning of the mantras that is most essential [...] but rather the perfect mastering of their sound form." According to Galewicz, Sayana saw the purpose (artha) of the Veda as the "artha of carrying out sacrifice," giving precedence to the Yajurveda. For Sayana, whether the mantras had meaning depended on the context of their practical usage. This conception of the Veda, as a repertoire to be mastered and performed, takes precedence over the internal meaning or "autonomous message of the hymns."...

According to Dalal, "his work influenced all later scholars, including many European commentators and translators." Sayana's commentary preserved traditional Indian understandings and explanations of the Rigveda, though it also contains mistakes and contradictions. While some 19th century Indologists were quite dismissive of Sayana's commentary, others were more appreciative. His commentary was used as a reference-guide by Ralph T. H. Griffith (1826-1906), John Muir (1810-1882), Horace Hayman Wilson (1786-1860) and other 19th century European Indologists. According to Wilson, Sayana's interpretation was sometimes questionable, but had "a knowledge of his text far beyond the pretension of any European scholar," reflecting the possession "of all the interpretations which had been perpetuated by traditional teaching from the earliest times." Macdonnell (1854-1930) was critical of Sayana's commentary, noting that many difficult words weren't properly understood by Sayana. While Rudolf Roth (1821-1895) aimed at reading the Vedas as "lyrics" without the "theological" background of the interpretations of Yaska and Sayana, Max Müller (1823-1900) published a translation of the Rigvedic Samhitas together with Sayana's commentary....

Modern scholarship is ambivalent. According to Jan Gonda, the translations of the Rigveda published by Griffith and Wilson were "defective," suffering from their reliance on Sayana. Ram Gopal notes that Sayana's commentary contains irreconcilable contradictions and "half-baked" tentative interpretations which are not further investigated, but also states that Sayana's commentary is the "most exhaustive and comprehensive" of all available commentaries, embodying "the gist of a substantial portion of the Vedic interpretations of his predecessors." Swami Dayananda, the founder of Arya Samaj, did not give much significance to his vedic commentaries.

-- Sayana, by Wikipedia


Several reasons are given for this restriction, among them the fear that the sacred knowledge could fall into the hands of members of the lower castes, or that the student may not be fit for the sacred and supposedly powerful knowledge; the need to recite the Vedic mantras4

4 AsGS III 2,2 informs us of the correct way to recite the Veda for oneself: outside the village, on a clean spot, facing east, "looking at the point where heaven and earth touch each other, or shutting his eyes, in whatever way he may deem himself apt" (dyava-prthivyoh sandhim iksamanah sammilya va yatha va yuktam atmanam manyeta).


with correct accents and intonations, if disaster is to be avoided, reinforced the need for oral instruction.5

5 A.S. Altekar, Education in Ancient India, 6th ed., Benares 1965, p.46.


The original and most powerful—if unspoken—reason probably is the belief that the instruction in Vedic lore had always been conducted in this way, a holdover from the time when script was completely unknown in India. Some later authors6

6 D.D. Kosambi. Ancient India, New York 1966, p. 78: from the fourteenth century on. But the practice must be older, or else the condemnation in Mbh XIII 24.70 (see p. 8 fn. 1; how old this stanza is would be hard to tell) makes little sense. A manuscript of a minor Vedic text, the Naksatra-kalpa (found also in the Atharvaveda-parisista), discovered in Central Asia was dated by its editor A.F. Hoernle (JAS Bengal 62 [1893], pp.11-40) in the fifth century A.D.; H. Falk, Die Schrift im alien Indien, Tubingen 1993, p. 284. Al Biruni reported in the early eleventh century that "recently" Vasukra from Kashmir had written down and explained the Veda: Alberuni's India, vol. I p. 126. L. Renou, Classical India, vol. 3: Vedic India, p. 2 refers to an eleventh century manuscript.


permit the writing down of Vedic texts, but only as a teaching aid, for reviewing previous oral instruction.
 
The antiquity of writing in India is a controversial topic. A script has been discovered in the excavations of the Indus Valley Civilization that flourished in the Indus valley and adjacent areas in the third millennium B.C. The number of different signs suggest a syllabic script, but all attempts at decipherment have been unsuccessful so far. Attempts by some Indian scholars to connect this undeciphered script with the Indian scripts in vogue from the third century B.C. onward are total failures.7

7 B.B. Lai, in Vivekananda Memorial Volume. India's Contribution to the World Thought and Culture, edd. Lokesh Chandra et al., Madras 1970, pp. 189-202; Kamil V. Zvelebil, Dravidian Linguistics: An Introduction, Pondicherry 1990, pp. 84-98; Gregory L. Possehl, Indus Age. The Writing System, Philadelphia 1996, reviews all recent attempts of decipherment.


Aberrations are also attempts to conclude from Rgvedic expressions like aksara8

8 J. van Buitenen, JAOS 79 (1959), pp. 176-187 argues that the meaning "syllable" is the primary meaning of the word, the others secondary, possibly by etymological reanalysis.


"immovable, imperishable, syllable, and (very much later) syllabic letter" that script was known to the authors of the Rgvedic hymns.9

9 Radha Kumud Mookerji, Ancient Indian Education, 3rd ed. Delhi 1960, pp. 227f.

 
For a century the prevailing view, among Western scholars at least, was based on the studies of Albrecht Weber and Georg Buhler, who noticed the strong similarity of several letters of Asokan [Ashokan] Brahmi with letters in Phoenician and old Aramaic inscriptions, notably on the stone of Mesa dated in the eighth century B.C.10

10 Albrecht Weber. ZDMG 31 (1877), pp. 598-612 and Georg Buhler, On the Origin of the Indian Brahma Alphabet, 2nd ed. Strassburg 1898, pp. 55f. and Plate 1.


Buhler assumed therefore that the Brahmi script was borrowed from the old Aramaic script sometime in the eighth century (or at least based on it), probably for commercial purposes; it was only emperor Asoka [Ashoka] who used it for his monumental stone inscriptions and thus left us the earliest proof of Indian writing.11

The most important single error made by almost everyone in Buddhist studies is methodological and theoretical in nature. In all scholarly fields, it is absolutely imperative that theories be based on the data, but in Buddhist studies, as in other fields like it, even dated, "provenanced" archaeological and historical source material that controverts the traditional view of Early Buddhism has been rejected because it does not agree with that traditional view, and even worse, because it does not agree with the traditional view of the entire world of early India, including beliefs about Brahmanism and other sects that are thought to have existed at that time, again based not on hard data but on the same late traditional accounts. Some of these beliefs remain largely or completely unchallenged, notably:

• the belief that Sramanas existed before the Buddha, so he became a Sramana like many other Sramanas

• the belief that there were Sramanas besides Early Buddhists, including Jains and Ajivikas, whose sects were as old or older than Buddhism, and the Buddha even knew some of their founders personally

• that, despite the name Sramana, and despite the work of Marshall, Bareau, and Schopen, the Early Buddhists were "monks" and lived in "monasteries" with a monastic rule, the Vinaya

• that, despite the scholarship of Bronkhorst, the Upanishads and other Brahmanist texts are very ancient, so old that they precede Buddhism, so the Buddha was influenced by their ideas

• that the dated Greek eyewitness reports on religious-philosophical practitioners in late fourth century BC India do not tally with the traditional Indian accounts written a half millennium or more later, so the Greek reports must be wrong and must be ignored

• perhaps most grievously, the belief that all stone inscriptions in the early Brahmi script of the Mauryan period were erected by "Asoka", the traditional grandson of the Mauryan Dynasty's historical[???] founder, Candragupta, and whatever any of those inscriptions say is therefore evidence about what went on during (or before) the time he is thought to have lived

• we "know" what problematic terms (such as Sanskrit duhkha -- Pali dukkha) mean, despite the fact that their meaning is actually contested by scholars, the modern and traditional dictionaries do not agree on their etymologies or what they "really" mean, and the texts do not agree either2 [Some of these problems are discussed in Chapter Three. See Appendix C for further details.]

These and other stubborn unexamined beliefs have adversely affected the work of even the most insightful scholars of Buddhism. Yet no contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous hard evidence of any kind affirms such beliefs. Moreover, it is bad enough that such ideas have caused so much damage for so long within Indology, but the resulting misinformation has inflicted damage in other fields as well, including ancient Greek and Chinese philosophy, where the traditional construct has been used as the basis, once again, for rejecting the hard data, forcing scholars in those fields to attempt to explain away what seems to be obvious Indian Buddhist influence. This then helps maintain the traditional fiction of three totally unrelated peoples and traditions as "cultural islands" that had absolutely no contact of any kind with each other until much later times, as used to be unquestioned belief as recently as Karl Jaspers's famous book on the Axial Age, and continues, by and large, among those who follow in his footsteps....

This brings up the problem of the Buddha's birthplace. Not only are his dates only very generally definable, his specific homeland is unknown as well. Despite widespread popular belief in the story that he came from Lumbini in what is now Nepal, all of the evidence is very late and highly suspect from beginning to end. Bareau has carefully analyzed the Lumbini birth story and shown it to be a late fabrication....
[Bareau (1987) (Andre Bareau, 1987. Lumbini et al naissance du futur Buddha. Bulletin de l'Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient 76: 69-81. (Google translate: Lumbini et al birth of the future Buddha. Bulletin of the French School of the Far East 76: 69-81.)). The lone piece of evidence impelling scholars to accept the Lumbini story has been the Lumbini Inscription, which most scholars believe was erected by Asoka. However, the inscription itself actually reveals that it is not by Asoka, and all indications are that it is a late forgery, possibly even a modern one. See Appendix C.]...

Together it is clear that the pillars were erected first, uninscribed, and that the inscriptions were added later.

The so-called Seventh Pillar Edict on the Delhi-Topra pillar actually mentions the existence of blank pillars. The existence of uninscribed pillars has inexplicably been taken by Hultzsch, and evidently by subsequent scholars, to mean that the Buddhist Inscriptions -- which are overtly Normative Buddhist -- are earlier than the Major Inscriptions. The elaborate theory of Norman (2012) claims, among other things, that the Pillar Edicts were inscribed while horizontal, before erection; he does not mention the uninscribed pillars, nor the fact that such uninscribed pillars are actually mentioned explicitly in the "Seventh Pillar Edict" as still existing when that inscription was added to the Delhi-Topra column, nor that some still exist today. He also claims that the texts of all of the inscriptions were written out on perishable material in the capital, Pataliputra and sent out to the provinces with "cover letters" that were supposedly "not meant to be published",
[This is an ad hoc proposal based on speculation; the differences are surely there in many cases because the texts were recast by the inscribers, while some of them are clear forgeries.]

despite the fact that Megasthenes visited Pataliputra in 305-304 BC and remarked that the Indians in that country did not know writing, and despite the fact that no "Asokan Inscription" has ever been found there; the written texts were then translated into local dialects, or for the Pillar Edicts, copied verbatim....

As for the minor monuments henceforth referred to as the "Buddhist Inscriptions", including the Minor Rock Edicts and Minor Pillar Edicts, a casual inspection of the inscriptional evidence and the scholarship on them might indicate that they were inscribed by Chandragupta's grandson Asoka, since the author of the First Minor Rock Edict is explicitly named "Devanampriya Asoka" in two copies of the text.

Unfortunately, we do not have rich, reliable historical sources for the Mauryas. We have only extremely tenuous information about them -- most of it about "Asoka" -- from very late Buddhist "histories", which are in large part fantasy-filled hagiographies having nothing to do with actual human events in the real world. Moreover, as Max Deeg has argued, not only did the inscriptions remain in public view for centuries, but their script and language remained legible to any literate person through the Kushan period (at least to ca. AD 250). This strongly suggests that the inscriptions influenced the legendary "histories" of Buddhism that began to develop at about that time.

That would explain why the story of Devanampriya Priyadarsi's conquest of Kalinga, his subsequent remorse, and his turning to the Dharma is all repeated in the Buddhist "histories", though they attribute the events to "Asoka", who is said to be the grandson of Chandragupta
....

Despite the deep learning and care many scholars have taken with the texts, some very striking irregularities in some of the inscriptions appear not to have been noticed. Hultzsch, author of the classic monumental edition of the inscriptions, rightly notes that the Seventh Pillar Edict on the Delhi-Topra column is "unique" because unlike all the other Pillar Edicts, which (like the Major Rock Edicts) exist in synoptic copies, it is only found in a single exemplar. Salomon correctly remarks that it is "the longest of all the Asokan edicts. For the most part, it summarizes and restates the contents of the other pillar edicts, and to some extent those of the major rock edicts as well."...

Yet even a cursory inspection of the Lumbini and Nigali: Sagar Pillar Inscriptions -- both of which were discovered by Fuhrer, who was purportedly working on them when he was exposed -- shows that the Lumbini Inscription repeats exactly much of the phraseology of the Nigali: Sagar Pillar's text, but unlike the genuine "synoptic" Major Inscriptions, the phrases are not identical or closely parallel. That fact, plus the idea that an already divinized Buddha having been many times "reborn" could go back as far as the third century BC, or that anyone in the vicinity of Lumbini could have been given a Sanskrit epithet in the same period, centuries before Sanskrit is first attested in Indian inscriptions, ought to have at least aroused suspicion. Instead, scholars insist on the authenticity of all of the inscriptions, and also insist that they must all be ascribed to the ruler known from traditional -- very late, fantasy-filled, pious, hagiographical -- "histories", as well as from the Maski and Nittur Inscriptions, as "Asoka".

[The name Devanampriya Asoka occurs only in the late Buddhist Inscriptions known as the Minor Rock Edicts, specifically the Maski Inscription and the recently discovered Nittur Inscription. According to Sircar (1975), the Gujarra Inscription should be included with them, but it is extremely problematic, and seems to be a crude forgery, as discussed below. The rubbing of the Maski Inscription provided by Hultzsch (1925: 174) is very poor. Hultzsch reads Asok[a]sa 'of Asoka' without comment or explanation of the bracketed "[a]", but in the rubbing the part that includes his Asok[a] is actually written very clearly [[x] [d]eva-na[m]piyasa Asokesa, with the name in an eastern dialect form.]
...

the Maski and Nittur Inscriptions confirm that the texts of the Major Inscriptions (which explicitly and repeatedly say they are by Devanampriya Priyadarsi) on the one hand, and the Buddhist Inscriptions on the other, must have been promulgated by different rulers, and Devanampriya Asoka is of course responsible only for the Buddhist Inscriptions. It is time for Indologists to seriously consider the recent scholarship which suggests that some of the inscriptions are spurious.
[See now Phelps (2010). Some have objected that the Lumbini pillar itself -- the stone and its preparation -- is unquestionably identical to the physical pillars used in the acknowledged Major Inscriptions. This is certainly the case. However, it is well known that there are a number of blank (uninscribed) pillars identical to pillars used in the Major Inscriptions, and the scholars who first saw the inscription on the Lumbini pillar remarked that it was remarkably clear, as if it had just been inscribed (Phelps 2010). Cf. the suspicious remarks of Schopen about the Lumbini Inscription (2004: 76-77). The inscription is also stunningly short. Even if the pillar was not recently inscribed by Fuhrer, the text itself reveals that it belongs not to the authentic Major Inscriptions of Devanampriya Priyadarsi, but to a much later period, no doubt exactly the period in which the legends about the Buddha's supposed birth in Lumbini were being created, as shown by Bareau (1987), who thus unknowingly -- but brilliantly -- demonstrates the lateness of the Lumbini Inscription. If he had even suspected that the Lumbini Inscription is spurious, his article would have made its case even more effectively than it does, and without the necessity of trying to explain what is patently an impossible historical background, as he actually shows very clearly. However, this topic requires much further specialized study.]
...

The only solution to this problem is to study the inscriptions without contaminating the data with material deriving from supposed Buddhist "historical" works such as those cited by Hultzsch....

If we were to believe Hultzsch and many other scholars, the Dipavamsa, a late Buddhist hagiographical "history", is a reliable historical work that can be trusted, so the author of the Major Inscriptions, who describes his remorse over his bloody war with the Kalingas, must be identified with Asoka. That would mean that the other set, the Later Inscriptions, which are sharply distinct in every respect, must be unidentified as to their author or authors, although unlike the Major Inscriptions they share the feature that they explicitly mention, and in most cases openly promote, Normative Buddhism. Moreover, one of the "Minor Rock Edicts" -- preserved in two apparently genuine inscriptional copies -- is clearly, explicitly said to be by Devanampriya Asoka 'His Majesty Asoka'. Accordingly, "Asoka" is the author of at least some of the later Buddhist Inscriptions, while other Buddhist inscriptions (most notably the Lumbini and Calcutta-Bairat Inscriptions) were evidently composed and erected even later. But in any case, the positive identification of Asoka as the author of the Maski and Nittur "Minor Rock Edict" inscriptions, which are radically different from any of the highly distinctive Major Inscriptions, makes it absolutely certain that "Devanampriya Asoka" cannot after all be the author of the Major Inscriptions, which explicitly and repeatedly say they are by Devanampriya Priyadarsi 'His Majesty Priyadarsi'. Considering the fact that we have absolutely no reliable historical information on "Asoka", and the fact noted by Deeg that the Major Inscriptions stood in open view for centuries after their erection and must have influenced the later writers of the Buddhist "histories" in question, it is most likely that "Asoka" was not in fact a Mauryan ruler. We do not really know when or where he ruled, if he existed at all; we do not actually know that Dasaratha was the grandson of a Mauryan ruler named Asoka; and so on....

Who, then, really was Devanampriya Asoka? The evidence suggests at least two possibilities. One is that he was imagined by the Kushan period Normative Buddhists on the basis of their understanding of the monumental Major Inscriptions erected by the Mauryas -- evidently by Amitrochates ~ Bindusara. "Asoka" was then projected back to the glorious Mauryan period as an ideal for good Kushan rulers to follow... At any rate, the inscriptions of this Devanampriya Asoka, the apparent author of some of the Late Inscriptions, simply do not have anything in common with the Major Inscriptions of the Mauryas decreed by Devanampriya Priyadarsi....

According to the traditional analysis, the single most important putative "Asoka" inscription for the history of Buddhism is the unique "Third Minor Rock Edict" found at Bairat, now known as the Calcutta-Bairat Inscription, in which "the king of Magadha, Piyadasa" addresses the "Samgha" (community of Buddhist monks) directly, and gives the names of a number of Buddhist sutras, saying, "I desire, Sirs, that many groups of monks and (many) nuns may repeatedly listen to these expositions of the Dharma, and may reflect (on them)." The problems with the inscription are many. It begins with the otherwise unattested phrase "The Magadha King Piyadasa", not Devanampriya Priyadarsi (or a Prakrit version of that name). The omission of the title Devanampriya is nothing short of shocking. Moreover, it is the only inscription to even mention Magadha. It is also undated, unlike the genuine Major Inscriptions, all of which are dated. In the text, the authorial voice declares "reverence and faith in the Buddha, the Dharma, (and) the Samgha".

This is the only occasion in all of the Mauryan inscriptions where the Triratna 'Three Jewels', the "refuge" formula well known from later devotional Buddhism, is mentioned. Most astonishingly, throughout the text the author repeatedly addresses the Buddhist monks humbly as bhamte, translated by Hultzsch as "reverend sirs".
The text also contains a higher percentage of words that are found solely within it (i.e., not also found in some other inscription) than does any other inscription. From beginning to end, the Calcutta-Bairat Inscription is simply incompatible with the undoubtedly genuine Major Inscriptions. It is also evidently incompatible with the other Buddhist inscriptions possibly attributable to a later ruler named Devanampriya Asoka.

However, because the inscription is also the only putative Asokan inscription that mentions Buddhist texts, and even names seven of them explicitly, scholars are loath to remove it from the corpus.
It therefore calls for a little more comment.


First, even if the Calcutta-Bairat Inscription really is "old", it is certainly much younger than the genuine inscriptions of Devanampriya Priyadarsi. If it dates to approximately the same epoch as the recently discovered Gandhari documents -- the Saka-Kushan period, from about the late first century BC to the mid-third century AD -- the same period when the Pali Canon, according to tradition, was collected, it should then not be surprising to find that the names of the texts mentioned in the inscription seem to accord with the contents of the latter collections of Normative Buddhist works, even though few, if any, of the texts (of which only the titles are given) can be identified with any certainty.
The climate of Theravada countries is not conducive to the survival of manuscripts. Apart from brief quotations in inscriptions and a two-page fragment from the eighth or ninth century found in Nepal, the oldest known manuscripts are from late in the fifteenth century, and there is not very much from before the eighteenth.

-- Tripitaka, by New world Encyclopedia

Second, as noted above, specialists have pointed out that the script and Prakrit language of the Mauryan inscriptions continued to be used practically unchanged down through the Kushan period, and though the style of the script changed somewhat in the following period, it was still legible for any literate person at least as late as the beginning of the Gupta period (fourth century AD),

[At that time the script underwent substantial changes that soon made older forms of it unreadable.]

so the inscriptions undoubtedly influenced the developing legends about the great Buddhist king, Asoka.

Thus at least some of the events described in the Major Inscriptions, such as Devanampriya Priyadarsi's conquest of Kalinga, subsequent remorse, and turning to the Dharma, were perfect candidates for ascription to Asoka in the legends. In the absence of any historical source of any kind on Asoka dating to a period close to the events -- none of the datable Major Inscriptions mention Asoka -- it is impossible to rule out this possibility. The late Buddhist inscriptions, such as the Calcutta-Bairat Inscription, may well have been written under the same influence.

Third, because the Calcutta-Bairat Inscription only mentions the titles of texts that have been identified -- rather uncertainly in most cases -- with the titles of texts in the Pali Canon, the actual texts referred to may have been quite different, or even totally different, from the presently attested ones. Because the earliest, or highest, possible date for the Pali Canon is in fact the Saka-Kushan period, the Calcutta-Bairat Inscription and the texts it names cannot be much earlier....

Among the texts considered to be identified are the Vinaya-samukasa and the Muni-gatha.


The Vinaya-samukasa has been identified with the Vinaya-samukase 'Innate Principles of the Vinaya', a short text in the Mahavagga of the Pali Canon....

Although the Buddha's own speech in this text is structured as a tetralemma, which was fashionable in the fourth and third centuries BC, it must also be noted that the tetralemma is a dominant feature of the earliest Madhyamika texts, those by Nagarjuna, who is traditionally dated to approximately the second century AD. But the problems with the inscription are much deeper than this. The Vinaya per se cannot be dated back to the time of the Buddha (as the text intends), nor to the time of Asoka; it cannot be dated even to the Saka-Kushan period. All fully attested Vinaya texts are actually dated, either explicitly or implicitly, to the Gupta period, specifically to the fifth century AD: "In most cases, we can place the vinayas we have securely in time: the Sarvastivada-vinaya that we know was translated into Chinese at the beginning of the fifth century (404-405 C.E.). So were the Vinayas of the Dharmaguptakas (408), the Mahisasakas (423-424), and the Mahasamghikas (416). The Mulasarvastivada-vinaya was translated into both Chinese and Tibetan still later, and the actual contents of the Pali Vinaya are only knowable from Buddhaghosa's fifth century commentaries."

As Schopen has shown in many magisterial works, the Vinayas are layered texts, so they undoubtedly contain material earlier than the fifth century, but even the earliest layers of the Vinaya texts cannot be earlier than Normative Buddhism, which is datable to the Saka-Kushan period. It thus would require rather more than the usual amount of credulity to project the ancestors of the cited texts back another half millennium or more to the time of the Buddha...

As for other well-known but evidently spurious "Asokan" inscriptions, note that the "Minor Pillar Inscription" at Lumbini not only mentions "Buddha" (as does, otherwise uniquely, the Calcutta-Bairat Inscription), it explicitly calls him Sakyamuni 'the Sage of the Scythians (Sakas)', who it says was born in Lumbini.

The use of the Sanskrit form of his epithet, Sakyamuni, rather than the Prakrit form, Sakamuni, is astounding and otherwise unattested until the late Gandhari documents; that fact alone rules out ascription to such an early period.
But it is doubly astounding because this Sanskritism occurs in a text otherwise written completely in Mauryan Prakrit and Brahmi script. What is a Sanskrit form doing there? Sanskrit is not attested in any inscriptions or manuscripts until the Common Era or at most a few decades before it.

Significantly, the inscription also notes that the village of Lumbini is exempted from tax and has to pay less in kind as well, yet not one of the other Mauryan inscriptions includes such "benefice" information.

It is incredible that an avowedly Buddhist Inscription bestows imperial largesse on a village
(though the village of Lumbini has been shown not to have existed yet in Mauryan times) rather than on a Buddhist institution.

Perhaps most telling of all, the inscription is uniquely written in ordinary third person (not royal third person) and is in the past tense. That means the text is narrated by some unknown person and does not even pretend to have been proclaimed by its putative sponsor Devanampriya Priyadarsi, the king who authored the synoptic Major Inscriptions (nor of course by Devanampriya Asoka, who may have authored the synoptic Buddhist Inscriptions). It says that it records events that supposedly happened at some time in the past, but those events have been shown to be fictitious.

The inscription is strikingly unlike the unquestionably authentic Major Inscriptions in general, and based on its contents is much later in date than it evidently pretends to be. It is a spurious inscription.

Finally, the Delhi-Topra pillar includes a good version of the six synoptic Pillar Edicts, which are genuine Major Inscriptions, but it is followed by what is known as the "Seventh Pillar Edict". This is a section that occurs only on this particular monument -- not on any of the six other synoptic Pillar Edict monuments. It is "the longest of all the Asokan edicts. For the most part, it summarizes and restates the contents of the other pillar edicts, and to some extent those of the major rock edicts as well."

In fact, as Salomon suggests, it is a hodgepodge of the authentic inscriptions. It seems not to have been observed that such a melange could not have been compiled without someone going from stone to stone to collect passages from different inscriptions, and this presumably must have involved transmission in writing, unlike with the Major Rock Edict inscriptions, which were clearly dictated orally to scribes from each region of India, who then wrote down the texts in their own local dialects -- and in some cases, their own local script or language; knowledge of writing would seem to be required for that, but not actual written texts.

For the Delhi-Topra pillar addition, someone made copies of the texts and produced the unique "Seventh Pillar Edict".
[The bilingual Aramaic and Prakrit (both in Aramaic script) fragment from Kandahar known as Kandahar II or Kandahar III, which is written in an extremely odd fashion (Falk 2006: 246), has been identified as representing a portion of the "Seventh Pillar Edict" (Norman 2012: 43), but strong doubts remain about the reading of the text (Falk 2006: 246). It is also by no means exactly like the "Seventh Pillar Edict", not to speak of the peculiar presentation of text and translation. In fact, it looks like a student exercise. It is very similar to the content of the Taxila Inscription and the two Laghman Inscriptions, both of which are also highly problematic, q.v. Falk's (2006: 253) conclusion: "There is no clear evidence for an Asokan influence on this text [the Taxila Inscription]. Like the two Laghman 'edicts' this text as well could be of a rather profane nature, mentioning Asoka as king just in passing." However, Falk (2006: 241) also says of Kandahar II/III that "Asoka must have ordered to bring his words to the public unchanged regarding their sound and content. Presenting this text in two languages using one script for both is a remarkable thought, aimed at avoiding flaws in the translation." This is an unlikely speculation. Finally, the "Seventh Pillar Edict" shares some of the peculiarities of the other minor inscriptions from Afghanistan. (I.e., they are to be distinguished from the genuine fragments of a Greek translation of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Rock Edicts, found at Kandahar, q.v. Halkias 2014.) C. f. Ito (1996), a study of the Greek and Aramaic bilingual inscription from Kandahar. These texts all await detailed, serious study.]

Why would anyone go to so much trouble? The answer is to be found in the salient new information found in the text itself. It mentions a category of mahamatra officers unmentioned anywhere else, saying that they are in charge of the different sects: it names the Samgha 'Buddhists' and the Brahmanas 'Brahmanists', but also (uniquely) the Ajivikas and Nirgranthas (Jains), and "various other sects" who are unnamed.

Most incredibly, the Buddhists are called the "Samgha" in this section alone, but it is a Normative Buddhist term; the Early Buddhist term is Sramana, attested in the genuine Major Inscriptions. Throughout the rest of the "Seventh Pillar Edict" Buddhists are called Sramanas, as expected in texts copied from genuine Mauryan inscriptions....


Yet it is not only the contents of the text that are a problem. It has been accepted as an authentic Mauryan inscription, but no one has even noted that there is anything formally different about it from the other six edicts on the same pillar. At least a few words must therefore be said about this problem.

The "Seventh Pillar Edict" is palaeographically distinct from the text it has been appended to. It is obvious at first glance. The physical differences between the text of the "Seventh Pillar Edict", as compared even to the immediately preceding text of the Sixth Pillar Edict on the East Face, virtually leap out at one. The style of the script, the size and spacing of the letters, the poor control over consistency of style from one letter to the next, and the many hastily written, even scribbled, letters are all remarkable. These characteristics seem not to have been mentioned by the many scholars who have worked on the Mauryan inscriptions.

The text begins as an addition to the synoptic Sixth Pillar Edict, which occupies only part of the East Face "panel". After filling out the available space for text on the East Face, the new text incredibly continues around the pillar, that is, ignoring the four different "faces" already established by the earlier, genuine edicts. This circum-pillar format is unique among all the genuine Mauryan pillar inscriptions.

Another remarkable difference with respect to the genuine Major Inscriptions on pillars is that the latter are concerned almost exclusively with Devanampriya Priyadarsi's Dharma, but do not mention either the Sramanas ''Buddhists' or the Brahmanas 'Brahmanists' by name. This is strikingly unlike the Major Inscriptions on rocks, which mention them repeatedly in many of the edicts. In other words, though the Pillar Edicts are all dated later than the Rock Edicts, for some reason (perhaps their brevity), Devanampriya Priyadarsi does not mention the Sramanas or the Brahmanas in them. The "Seventh Pillar Edict" is thus unique in that it does mention the Buddhists (Sramanas) and Brahmanists (Brahmanas) by name, but the reoccurrence of the names in what claims to be the last of Devanampriya Priyadarsi's edicts suggests that the text is not just spurious, it is probably a deliberate forgery. This conclusion is further supported by the above-noted unique passage in the inscription in which the Buddhists are referred to as the "Samgha". This term occurs in the later Buddhist Inscriptions too; but it is problematic because it is otherwise unknown before well into the Saka-Kushan period.

[This is one of the many reasons for dating all of the Buddhist Inscriptions to the Saka-Kushan period at the earliest.]

The one really significant thing the text does is to add the claim that Devanampriya Priyadarsi supported not only the Buddhists and the Brahmanists but also the Ajivikas and Jains. However, all of the Jain holy texts are uncontestedly very late (long after the Mauryan period). The very mention of the sect in the same breath as the others is alone sufficient to cast severe doubt on the text's authenticity.

The "Seventh Pillar Edict" claims that it was inscribed when Devanampriya Priyadarsi had been enthroned for twenty-seven years; that is, only one year after the preceding text (the sixth of the synoptic Pillar Edicts), which says it was inscribed when Devanampriya Priyadarsi had been enthroned for twenty-six years. The "Seventh Pillar Edict" text consists of passages taken from many of the Major Inscriptions, both Rock and Pillar Edicts, in which the points mentioned are typically dated to one or another year after the ruler's coronation, but in the "Seventh Pillar Edict" the events are effectively dated to the same year. Most puzzling of all, why would the king add such an evidently important edict to only a single one of the otherwise completely synoptic pillar inscriptions?

Perhaps even more damning is the fact that in the text itself the very same passages are often repeated verbatim, sometimes (as near the beginning) immediately after they have just been stated, like mechanical dittoisms. Repetition is a known feature of Indian literary texts, but the way it occurs in the "Seventh Pillar Edict" is not attested in the authentic Major Inscriptions. Moreover, as Olivelle has noted, the text repeats the standard opening formula or "introductory refrain" many times; that is, "King Priyadarsin, Beloved of the Gods, says" is repeated verbatim nine times, with an additional shorter tenth repetition. "In all of the other edicts this refrain occurs only once and at the beginning. Such repetitions of the refrain which state that these are the words of the king are found in Persian inscriptions. However, this is quite unusual for Asoka."

In fact, this arrangement betrays the actual author's misunderstanding of the division of the authentic Major Inscriptions into "Edicts", and his or her consequent false imitation of them using repetitions of the Edict -- initial formula throughout the text in an attempt to duplicate the appearance of the authentic full, multi-"Edict" inscriptions on rocks and pillars.

In short, based on its arrangement, palaeography, style, and contents, the "Seventh Pillar Edict" cannot be accepted as a genuine inscription of Devanampriya Priyadarsi. The text was added to the pillar much later than it claims and is an obvious forgery from a later historical period. These factors require that the "Seventh Pillar Edict" be removed from the corpus of authentic inscriptions of Devanampriya Priyadarsi.

The Calcutta-Bairat Inscription, the Lumbini Inscription, and the "Seventh Pillar Edict" of the Delhi-Topra pillar thus do not belong with either the authentic Major Inscriptions of Devanampriya Priyadarsi or the possibly authentic inscriptions of Devanampriya Asoka.

[The next task is for scholars to study the spurious inscriptions to see when exactly each was inscribed, and in some cases why, so as to be able to attribute the information in them to approximately correct historical periods.]

-- Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter With Early Buddhism in Central Asia, by Christopher I. Beckwith


11 There is also a coin from Eran containing four letters and often dated at 350 B.C.; but the date is not at all certain.


The fatal flaw12

12 Another flaw is the fact that there is a credible likeness only between a few of the Aramaic and Brahmi letters, and that Buhler resorts for the remainder to rather fanciful distortions. But most of those who cannot accept that the Vedic tradition was oral continue to rely on his theories -- or on the even more fanciful derivation of the Brahmi script from the script of the Indus Valley Civilization.


of this theory is the exact phonemic character of the Brahmi script which assigns one and only one letter to each phoneme of the Sanskrit language (or Middle Indic, in the case of Asoka [Ashoka]). This would be a dramatic improvement over the Aramaic script that leaves vowels usually unmarked and has no devices to mark the Indian aspirate stops, whereas the Brahmi script matches the phonemic analysis which had been perfected in the Vedic schools in their effort to preserve the exact pronunciation of the Vedic hymns -- but these Vedic schools had no use for a script! Why would then, as the theory goes, Indian merchants modify the Aramaic script so as to conform to the phonetic theory of the Veda reciters?
 
In a daring approach, J. Bronkhorst13

13 J. Bronkhorst, IIJ24 (1982), pp. 181-189.


has recently argued that the padapatha of the Rgveda (a form of recitation in which each stanza is broken up into its individual words) was perhaps a clumsy attempt (in the eighth or seventh century B.C.) to write the Rgveda text down. But he has to assume that Indians soon afterwards changed their mind about such use of writing, while they added several more distorted forms of recitation: e.g., the kramapatha14

14 G.V. Devasthali, ABORI 58/59, Diamond Jubilee Volume (1978), pp. 573-582.


that "steps" as it were haltingly through a stanza -- all mnemotechnic devices to insure the integrity of the original text. It appears also that the Brahmi script was created for a language that had lost the old vocalic r and l sounds, since the post-Asokan [Ashokan] letters for these sounds are derivatives of the letter a with attached hooks; the same may be true for the letters for ai and au that are derived from the letters for e and o with additional strokes.15



If the Brahmi alphabet had been created for writing Vedic texts (for whom these additional letters are needed), we would have to assume a break in tradition, causing the loss of the original letters for r, l, ai, and au and a later reinventing of these letters.16

16 The incidence of these vowels in initial position is not high, and thus the first attestations in Sanskrit inscriptions and manuscripts are rather late: G. Buhler, Indische Palaeographie, Strassburg 1896, Tafeln 4-6 and On the Origin of the Indian Brahma Alphabet, Strassburg 1898, pp. 34f.; R. Salomon, Indian Epigraphy, pp. 30, 34.


Sanskrit is not attested in any inscriptions or manuscripts until the Common Era or at most a few decades before it.66 [66 Bronkhorst (2011: 46, 50), who cites Salomon (1998:86) on the existence of four inscriptions ascribed by some, including Salomon, to the first century BC; otherwise the earliest inscriptions in Sanskrit are from Mathura in the first and second centuries AD (Salomon 1998: 87).]

-- Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter With Early Buddhism in Central Asia, by Christopher I. Beckwith

 
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Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

Postby admin » Sun Jan 01, 2023 3:34 am

Part 2 of 3

Some recent publications,17

17 Gerard Fussman, Annuaire du College de France 1988-89: Resume des cours et travaux, pp.507-514; Oskar von Hinuber, Der Beginn der Schrift und fruhe Schriftlichkeit in Indien, AAWL, Mainz 1989 nr.1 1; Harry Falk, Die Schrift im alien Indien; R. Salomon, JAOS 115 (1995), pp. 271-279 and Indian Epigraphy.] on the other hand, stress that Megasthenes, Seleucus' envoy to the court of Candragupta in Pataliputra [LC: rather, Sandrocottus in Palibothra]


around 300 B.C. claims that writing was unknown in India and that, e.g., all legal business was dealt with on the basis of oral evidence and orally preserved rules. Megasthenes was an educated Greek who should have been able to recognize Indian writing if he saw it. According to this view, the Brahmi script was an Indian invention, probably commissioned by King Asoka [Ashoka],18

18 S.R. Goyal, in The Origin of Brahmi Script (edd. S.P. Gupta and K.S. Ramachandran), Delhi 1979, pp. 1-53. Similarly, the Persian cuneiform script is now widely considered an invention made at the behest of Cyrus or, more probably, Darius: M. Mayrhofer, BSOAS 42 (1979), pp. 290-296 and KZ 102 (1989), pp. 174-186.


and carried out by brahmin scholars brought up in the tradition of Vedic phonetics who applied their knowledge to creating a script for a Middle Indic idiom. Of course the idea of writing was known through long established contacts with the empire of the Achaemenids and later the Greek successors of Alexander the Great. A word for script was probably already known to Panini (sixth century B.C.?), but it was borrowed from Iranian (lipi/libi from Iranian dipi, in turn derived from Sumerian dup).19

19 Panini III 2 21 teaches the formation of the words lipikara/libikara "scribe (?)" which could be an Iranian rather than an Indian formation originally; von Hinuber, ibid., p. 58 considers the possibility that lipi could refer to something like painting rather than writing. AitA V 3,3 prohibits the study of the mahavrata after several polluting activities, including ullikhya and avalikhya which A.B. Keith, The Aitareya Aranyaka, Oxford 1909 repr. 1969, pp. 301f. translated as "had...written, or obliterated writing." The date of that text is not certain, nor is the reference to writing.


The Kharosti script, closely linked to the later Aramaic script, was widely used in the provinces of the Indian Northwest, presumably under the influence of the Achaemenid overlords who used Aramaic as the administrative lingua franca for their empire. Oddly enough, no Aramaic inscriptions or any other written documents have been found so far from the whole easternmost part of their empire -- except after the demise of the empire. The first Kharosti inscriptions we have are those of Asoka [Ashoka], and the tradition of this script continued in the extreme Northwest into the fourth century A.D.
 
Buhler's theory must assume that the more adequate Brahmi script (which differentiated between short and long vowels) was superseded in the Northwest by the less adequate Kharosti script (which did not differentiate between short and long vowels) under the influence of the Iranian overlords and their Aramaic writing20

20 But that has not happened in other provinces of the Persian empire where Egyptian hieroglyphics, Babylonian cuneiform script, and Greek alphabetic scripts were in use -- and continued to be used. We must also consider that the scribes in the service of the empire were probably ethnic Arameans who protected their art and privilege as long as the empire lasted; Falk, Die Schrift, pp. 103f. assumes therefore that locals with a superficial knowledge of the Aramaic system developed the Kharosti after the empire collapsed (doubted by R. Salomon, JAOS 115 [1995], p. 276).


-- and that this imposed script remained in use long after their departure. It is more likely that the Kharosti script was the earlier attempt to write an Indian dialect and was in time replaced by the superior Brahmi developed in Magadha. The Brahmi script is a phonemically correct representation of Prakrit21

21 That includes the letter for /n/ which is an oddity in a description of Sanskrit, because it is a predictable allophone of /n/.


that abandoned the graphic reliance of the vowel onset (aleph) in its notation of initial vowels, a major improvement on the Kharosti alphabet.22

22 H. Scharfe, forthcoming in JAOS.


This analysis precludes, however, any attempt, such as Buhler's, to directly derive the Brahmi from a much older North Semitic alphabet.

The best evidence today is that no script was used or even known in India before 300 B.C., except in the extreme Northwest that was under Persian domination. That is in complete accord with the Indian tradition which at every occasion stresses the orality of the cultural and literary heritage. Whereas the biblical tradition has statements like this: "as it is written in the book of prophecies of Isaiah,"23

23 Gospel of St. Luke 3:4 with reference to Isaiah 40:3-5; also Matthew 19:4f. "Have you read 'that in the beginning the Creator made them male and female' and he added, That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife and the two become one flesh'" referring to Genesis 1:27 and 2:24.


Indian texts stress that "Thus it is heard in the Svetasvatara-upanisad:..."24

24 Sarva-darsana-sangraha ed. Vasudev Shastri Abhyankar, 3rd ed., Poona 1978, chapter XIV p. 327: tatha ca Svetasvataropanisadi sruyate:...


There were no books; the common Indian word for "book" (pusta[ka]) is found not before the early centuries A.D. and is probably a loanword from Persian (post),25

25 H. Falk, Schrift, pp. 305f.


and grantha denoted originally only "knot, nexus, text" acquiring the meaning "manuscript" much later.
 
The older Indian literature (including some texts as late as the early centuries A.D.) belongs to one of two classes: sruti "hearing" and smrti "remembering." It behooves us to pay attention to this distinction made by the Indians themselves early on.
This use of sruti is first found in AitB VII 9, and ManavaSS 182.4, that of smrti in LatySS VI 1.6,13 and TaitAr I 2,1 in a late period of canon formation in the eastern Ganges valley.26

26 M. Witzel, in: Inside the Texts, Beyond the Texts, ed. M. Witzel, Cambridge / Mass., 1997, pp. 328f.

 
It is condescending and dangerous to deny Indians their own vision and immediately apply our own schemes, something that historians are fond of doing: note the now debunked "village community" of Sir Henry Maine27

27 Louis Dumont, Contributions to Indian Sociology 9 (1966), pp. 82-89.


or Burton Stein's "segmental state." It is preferable to move in two stages: first describe the Indian point of view (be it of the state, ayurveda, or textual traditions), then view the material and the Indian concept from our viewpoint or from a more comprehensive, universalistic position.
 
Sruti, the more authoritative (and, on the whole, older and more carefully preserved)28

28 "Vedic schools did not regard as unalterable the texts of formulas which were foreign to their own samhita": J. Gonda, The Ritual Sutras, Wiesbaden 1977, p. 565 with references to V.M. Apte, NIA 3 (1940/41), p. 49 and P.K. Narayana Pillai, Non-rgvedic Mantras in the Marriage Ceremonies, Trivandrum 1958, pp. 44, 202.


class consists of the Vedic hymns29

29 It is a curious feature of A. Lord's definition of "oral poetry" that the tightly structured Vedic hymns are excluded because there are no improvised variations by the performers: Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales, Cambridge/Mass. 2nd ed. 1964, p. 280: "could not be oral in any except the most literal sense."


and mantras as well as the theological and philosophical speculations of the Brahmanas and Upanisads which are considered timeless revealed truths, something ordinary men can never hope to perceive themselves but can "hear" through the endless chain of oral tradition.30

30 VasDhS VI 43 speaks of the paramparya-gato vedah "The Veda that has come down in a chain of tradition." The Greek historian Thucydides writes in his History of the Peloponnesian War I 4 [x] "Minos, the oldest of those we know from tradition (lit. hearing)."


The original revelation of sruti, though, is often said to be by "seeing,"31

31 I would disagree, therefore, with M. Witzel, Inside the Texts, p. 329 "heard by Rsis (sruti)." In Buddhism, sravaka "hearer" may, at least according to some sources, have denoted those followers (monks and lay people alike) who had heard Buddha's message in person: Peter Masefield, Divine Revelation in Pali Buddhism, Colombo/ London 1986, esp. pp. 142f.


but there was also a subtle distinction: in RV VIII 59, 6 the seer "saw" through tapas the origins (tapasdbhyapasyam), in TS V 3, 5, 4 the seers "saw" the meters with tapas (tani tapasdpasyari)32

32 AitB VI 34; VII 17; SB I 5,3,3; XIII 2,2,14 (Brhaduktha "saw" not the verses but their application as apri-verses): Hermann Oldenberg, Vorwissenschaftliche Wissenschaft -- Die Weltanschauung der Brahmana-Texte, Gottingen 1919. pp. 222f.


 -- but the claim that they "saw" the hymns came only later.33

33 Nirukta II 11 stotran dadarsa; VII 3 evam...rsinam mantra-drstayo bhavanti. Panini IV 2 7 drstam sama teaches the formation of names for melodies named after the men who "saw" them.


The contrast in the Sunahsepa story is striking: after Sunahsepa praised several gods with hymns,34

34 These hymns are found in the Rgveda and were presumably composed by Sunahsepa on the spot (AB VII 16).


he "saw" an abbreviated pressing ritual35

35 AitB VII 17.


that took care of the changed situation when the sacrificial animal, i.e., Sunahsepa himself, was no longer available. The Vedic rsis (whom we call "seers"), in the standard doctrine championed by the Mimamsa, "saw" the eternally existing Vedic hymns and ritual procedures36

36 Mahabharata XVIII 5,33 claims that Vyasa "saw" the epic with his divine eye (divyena caksusa), apparently a later development that claimed the Mahabharata as the fifth Veda -- just as later also the Bharatiya Natyasastra claimed to be the fifth Veda: Natyasastra ed. Manomohan Ghosh, Calcutta 1967, I 15ff. These developments are necessarily later than the recognition of the Atharvaveda as the fourth Veda.


-- not with their physical eyes it seems but with a special vision. This view which has become the established dogma of orthodox Hinduism37

37 This assertion—that the Veda is apauruseya "not based on humans"—may have been a response to Buddhist arguments that no work involving human agency can give us the assurance of absolute truth: K.N. Jayatilleke, Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge, London 1963, pp. 191f. and Francis Clooney, Thinking Ritually, Wien 1990, p. 215.


is at variance with the statements of the Vedic poets themselves who say in their hymns that they skillfully created these new songs just as a carpenter builds a chariot,38

38 RV V 2,11 tam te stomam...ratham na dhirah...ataksam.


with the help of divine inspiration.39

39 dhi RV I 129, 2; IX 100,3 and often; cf. R.N. Dandekar, Der vedische Mensch, Heidelberg 1938, pp. 65f. and Jan Gonda, The Vision of the Vedic Poets, The Hague 1963.


It was perhaps this divinely inspired creativity that elevated the rsi, the brahman (or in the Skandinavian tradition a gifted skald) to such height that he was considered inviolate.40

40 Cf. the Vedic stories of Sunahsepa (AitB VII 13-18 and SSS XV 17-20) and Nrmedha (JB 1171) and the Islandic Egils saga Skallagrimssonar, ed. F. Jonsson, 2nd ed., Halle 1924, ch.59-61 and App. A.; H. Scharfe, The State in Indian Tradition, pp. 106f.


The contrast to sruti is not a book but the equally oral tradition of smrti; Monier-Williams is wrong to refer to smrti as "what is only remembered and handed down in writing";41

41 A Sanskrit-English Dictionary, Oxford 1899, p. 1101 under sruti.


there is indeed no prohibition of writing smrti-texts down and manuscripts of them abound, but they are no less products of an oral tradition.
 
Smrti comprises the epics and various manuals of correct behavior (grhya-sutra-s and dharma-sutra-s), also many later legal texts and the Puranas, attributed to revered but nevertheless human authors; they are often said to be based on sruti,42

42 This is implied in Mimamsa-sutra I 3, 3 and made explicit in Sabara-bhasya ed. K. V. Abhyankar, Pune 1970, p. 77. ApDhS I 4 8 srutir hi ballyasy anumanikad acarat "For heard revelation is stronger than an inferential custom" and 112,10 brahmanokta vidhayas; tesam utsannah pathah proyogad anumlyante "The precepts were taught in the Brahmanas; the lost recitations are inferred from usage" show a similar attitude, though the word smrti is not used.


but lack the rigidity and textual faithfulness of that tradition. The reciter of a revealed Vedic text that he had "heard" had no right to make even the slightest changes, but those who recite old "remembrances" were more free to follow their individual style. In the classical Mimamsa doctrine the sruti is "heard" and thus directly perceived during instruction (pratyaksa),43

43 Learned brahmins who have memorized the Veda and pass their knowledge on to students are therefore called sruti-pratyaksa-hetavah "causes for the direct perception of sruti" in Manu XII 109 and VasDhS VI 43. Cf. S. Pollock, in: S. Lienhard and I. Piovano (edd.), Lex et Litterae (Fs.O.Botto), Torino 1997, pp. 395-417.


whereas the smrti is based on men's remembrance or inference of doctrines "heard," but not preserved in their exact wording. Both are part of the oral tradition, both are ultimately based on revelation, and there was later a tendency to downplay their distinction,44

44 For Kumarila smrti was no less authoritative than sruti: S.Pollock, ibid., pp.413f.; but the secular sciences are man-made according to Kumarila, Tantravarttika pp. 111 f. and 122. Pollock, JAOS (1985), pp. 501 f., refers also to Tantravarttika vol. I p. 167 top and pp. 79.8f.; 81.18f. and Rajasekhara, Kavyamimamsa p. 33, 1.12 for the non-Vedic nature of the secular sciences.


even though human agency in the case of smrti had increased the possibilities of corruption.45

45 Cf. Vakyapadiya ed. W. Rau, Wiesbaden 1977, I 172f.
anadim avyavacchinnam srutim ahur akartrkam /
sistair nibadhyamana tu na vyavacchidyete smrtih / 172/
avibhagad vivrttanam abhikhya svapnavac chrutau /
bhava-tattvam tu vijnaya lingebhyo vihita smrtih / 173/

"Revelation is said to be beginningless, uninterrupted and authorless; Remembrance is composed by the learned and is not interrupted. In those who are evolved out of the non-differentiation there is a perception of Revelation as in a dream; Remembrance, on the other hand, is composed after understanding the nature of things and following indications."


The pairing of sruti and smrti appears only in a late stratum of Vedic texts, and S. Pollock46

46 S. Pollock, in Lex et Litterae, p. 408.


believes that it may have been created by the Mimamsa. But smrti does appear in TA I 2,1,47

47 TA I 2, 1 smrtih pratyaksam aitihyam anumanas catustayam "The quartet remembrance, perception, legend, inference" is picked up in I 2, 3 tasyah [mariceh] pakavisesena smrtam kala-visesanam "With the maturing of this [ray] the specifics of time are remembered" and I 3, 2 [vasanto] praisakrt prathamas smrtah "Spring, doing the summons, is remembered as the first [season]." In these passages the derivation from revelation is at best dubious. Another early occurrence is in LatSS VI 1.6, 13.


and smaryate48

48 TA I 12,1 [Rudrah] smaryate na ca drsyate "[Rudra] is remembered but not seen." Rudra is explicitly mentioned in the Vedic hymns preserved even today! In ApDhS II 2,24 brahmana acaryah smaryate "A brahmin is remembered (i.e., prescribed) as the [proper] teacher."


in TA I 12,1. It is not evident that the term "remembrance" should originally have been limited to lost but remembered sruti texts; it may as well refer to remembered realities.49

49 A. Wezler, in Raum-zeitliche Vermittlung der Transzendenz, edd. G. Oberhammer and M.Schmucker, Wien 1999, p. 79.


The Mimamsa concept may have been just a theological scheme to buttress the social rules and restriction of the dharma texts by giving them the full backing of Vedic authority when the traditional order was challenged by heterodox beliefs. But there can be no doubt that it had a lasting impact on how Indians perceived their traditions, even if not everybody shared their rigid attitude: Bhartrhari, e.g., did not restrict smrti to a remembrance of sruti, as we saw.
 
Mīmāṁsā is a Sanskrit word that means "reflection" or "critical investigation" and thus refers to a tradition of contemplation which reflected on the meanings of certain Vedic texts... This particular school is known for its philosophical theories on the nature of dharma, based on hermeneutics of the Vedas, especially the Brāḥmanas and Saṃhitas. The Mīmāṃsā school was foundational and influential for the vedāntic schools...
 
Mīmāṁsā has several sub-schools, each defined by its epistemology. The Prābhākara sub-school, which takes its name from the seventh-century philosopher Prabhākara, described the five epistemically reliable means to gaining knowledge: pratyakṣa or perception; anumāna or inference; upamāṇa, by comparison and analogy; arthāpatti, the use of postulation and derivation from circumstances; and śabda, the word or testimony of past or present reliable experts. The Bhāṭṭa sub-school, from philosopher Kumārila Bhaṭṭa, added a sixth means to its canon; anupalabdhi meant non-perception, or proof by the absence of cognition ...
 
[T]he school showed little interest in systematic examination of the existence of Gods. Rather, it held that the soul is an eternal, omnipresent, inherently active spiritual essence, and focused on the epistemology and metaphysics of dharma. For the Mīmāṃsā school, dharma meant rituals and social duties, not devas, or gods, because gods existed only in name. The Mīmāṃsakas also held that Vedas are "eternal, author-less, [and] infallible", that Vedic vidhi, or injunctions and mantras in rituals are prescriptive kārya or actions, and the rituals are of primary importance and merit....
 
[T]heir deep analysis of language and linguistics influenced other schools of Hinduism...Mīmāṃsakas considered the purpose and power of language was to clearly prescribe the proper, correct and right. In contrast, Vedāntins extended the scope and value of language as a tool to also describe, develop and derive. Mīmāṁsakās considered orderly, law driven, procedural life as central purpose and noblest necessity of dharma and society, and divine (theistic) sustenance means to that end.
 
The Mīmāṁsā school is a form of philosophical realism....
 
The word comes from the desiderative stem of √man (Macdonell, A. A, 1883, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary), from Proto-Indo-European *men- (“to think”). Donald Davis translates Mīmāṃsā as the "desire to think", and in colloquial historical context as "how to think and interpret things". ...
 
Ancient Mīmānsā's central concern was epistemology (pramana), that is what are the reliable means to knowledge. It debated not only "how does man ever learn or know, whatever he knows", but also whether the nature of all knowledge is inherently circular, whether those such as foundationalists who critique the validity of any "justified beliefs" and knowledge system make flawed presumptions of the very premises they critique, and how to correctly interpret and avoid incorrectly interpreting dharma texts such as the Vedas. It asked questions such as "what is devata (god)?", "are rituals dedicated to devatas efficacious?", "what makes anything efficacious?", and "can it be proved that the Vedas, or any canonical text in any system of thought, fallible or infallible (svatah pramanya, intrinsically valid)?, if so, how?" and others. To Mīmānsā scholars, the nature of non-empirical knowledge and human means to it are such that one can never demonstrate certainty, one can only falsify knowledge claims, in some cases. ...
 
The central text of the Mīmānsā school is Jamini's Mīmānsā Sutras [Jaimini was an ancient Indian scholar who founded the Mīmāṃsā school of Hindu philosophy. He was a disciple of sage Veda Vyasa.], along with the historically influential commentaries on this sutra by Sabara and by Kumarila Bhatta. Together, these texts develop and apply the rules of language analysis (such as the rules of contradiction), asserting that one must not only examine injunctive propositions in any scripture, but also examine the alternate related or reverse propositions for better understanding. They suggested that to reach correct and valid knowledge it is not only sufficient to demand proof of a proposition, it is important to give proof of a proposition's negative as well as declare and prove one's own preferred propositions. Further, they asserted that whenever perception is not the means of direct proof and knowledge, one cannot prove such non-empirical propositions to be "true or not true", rather one can only prove a non-empirical proposition is "false, not false, or uncertain".
 
For example, Mīmānsākas welcome not only the demand for proof of an injunctive proposition such as "agnihotra ritual leads one to heaven", but suggest that one must examine and prove alternate propositions such as "ritual does not lead one to heaven", "something else leads one to heaven", "there is heaven", "there is no heaven" and so on. Mīmānsā literature states that if satisfactory, verifiable proof for all of such propositions cannot be found by its proponents and its opponents, then the proposition needs to be accepted as a part of a "belief system". Beliefs, such as those in the scriptures (Vedas), must be accepted to be true unless its opponents can demonstrate the proof of validity of their own texts or teacher(s) these opponents presume to be prima facie justified, and until these opponents can demonstrate that the scriptures they challenge are false. If they do not try to do so, it is hypocrisy; if they try to do so, it can only lead to infinite regress, according to Mīmānsākas. Any historic scripture with widespread social acceptance, according to Mīmānsāka, is an activity of communication (vyavaharapravrtti) and is accepted as authoritative because it is socially validated practice, unless perceptually verifiable evidence emerges that proves parts or all of it as false or harmful.
 
Mīmānsākas were predominantly concerned with the central motivation of human beings, the highest good, and actions that make this possible. They stated that human beings seek niratisaya priti (unending ecstatic pleasure, joy, happiness) in this life and the next. They argued that this highest good is the result of one's own ethical actions (dharma), that such actions are what the Vedic sentences contain and communicate, and therefore it important to properly interpret and understand Vedic sentences, words and meaning. Mīmānsā scholarship was centrally concerned with the philosophy of language, how human beings learn and communicate with each other and across generations with language in order to act in a manner that enables them to achieve that which motivates them. The Mīmānsā school focussed on dharma, deriving ethics and activity from the karma-kanda (rituals) part of the Vedas, with the argument that ethics for this life and efficacious action for svarga (heaven) cannot be derived from sense-perception, and can only be derived from experience, reflection and understanding of past teachings.
  
-- Mīmāṃsā, by Wikipedia


Many tales "remembered" refer to observed historical or semi-historical events that serve to entertain and educate the audience.50

50 Whatever position we may take on the origin of the pair sruti/smrti, there can be no doubt that there was a tradition of epic story telling that was sociologically and artistically different from the brahmanic Vedic tradition.

 
Even the great epic, the Mahabharata, is frequently called a dharma-sastra, "an instruction in righteousness or functional identity." On a first, most obvious level, it presents itself as the story of family rivalry between princely cousins (with hints at mythological and cosmic levels in the background),51

51 V.S. Sukthankar, On the Meaning of the Mahabharata, Bombay 1957.

 
and attempts have been made to strip away, as later insertions, all episodes and didactic passages that do not move the basic action forward. These efforts remind the philologist of earlier attempts to purge Homer's Iliad of such seemingly unattractive and lengthy interpolations as the catalogue of ships in the second book that lists in almost 300 hexameters all contingents of the Greek expeditionary force, their hometowns, number of ships and soldiers. Only in the 1920s scholars began to realize that this list (which may date back to the Mycenean state of pre-Homeric time!)52

52 Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato, Cambridge/Mass., 1963, p.132.

 
would have held great interest to contemporary Greek listeners and that oral poetry follows different rules from literate poetry and even has different goals.53

53 Ibid., pp.176-179.


Plato claimed that Homer had been the main educator of Greece (with Archilochos not far behind in second place), when he denounced in his Republic the harmful role of poetry. Many scholars were baffled by Plato's seemingly unfair critique of poetry, until Eric Havelock pointed out that the critique was not aimed so much at poetry itself as at the educational function of oral epic poetry. 54

54 Ibid., pp.3f., 12-15.

 
Homer's epics were not just the stories of dramatic adventures but compendia of traditional lore in a general and simplified fashion: they taught about sailing -- but not enough to make a difficult passage; about metalworking -- but not sufficiently detailed for making a good sword; those advanced skills were taught to apprentices of their respective trades in practical training. There is a strong emphasis on social ethics. "The paradigm of what is accepted practice ... is continually offered; more ... when his characters depart" [i.e., from accepted practice].55

55 Ibid., p. 87.


The heroic deeds and the glory of Achilleus, the cunning and perseverence of Odysseus, the despised actions of Thersites depicted in these epics shaped the ideals of early Greek (male) society. Plato's aim was to replace the poets with experts, oral wisdom with the literate expertise of an academy. It is exactly this goal of Plato's that points out the basic function of the oral epic as a repository of society's culture, values, customs and general know-how. Oral society had no other means of record keeping. Havelock offers three similes to explain the role of the oral epic: it can be likened to a stream (i.e., the narrative) that carries various deposits along, or to a house whose walls are made up of a great variety of bricks, or lastly and most appropriately, to a walk through a furnished house where the narrator (or the action) takes the listener to various rooms and furniture items that are described on the way. At an extreme, the narration would be a mere frame designed to present the educational contents. The poet's inspiration comes from the Muses, daughters of Mnemosyne "memory, remembering, recall"; he forms his stanzas based on what he has seen and remembers, akin to the Indian epic which is smrti "remembrance." The ancient hymns and the rituals of the old secret societies (e.g., the Eleusinian Mysteries) about whom we know little would correspond to the Indian sruti. A comparison of Vedic, Avestan, Homeric and Old Germanic poetry shows that their ancestors had religious as well as heroic poetry,56

56 Rudiger Schmitt, Dichtung und Dichtersprache in indogermanischer Zeit, Wiesbaden 1967; Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon, New York 1995.

 
but we have no indication if they formed at that time distinct categories.

The Mahabharata, and to a lesser extent the Ramayana, are likewise compendia of society's culture57

57 Nilakantha on Mahabharata I 1, 1. Cf. Bimal Krishna Matilal (ed.), Moral Dilemmas in the Mahabharata, Delhi 1989.

 
besides being great poems, both dharma-sastra (Mbh I 56.21) and kavya (Ram I 2.34),58

58 Though both terms are applied occasionally to both epics, the former is more commonly referred to as a dharma-sastra "instruction in righteousness," the latter as the adi-kavya "first poem."

 
a source of education as well as entertainment. "What is in it is [found] elsewhere, what is not in it is not [to be found] anywhere."59

59 Mbh I 56,33 yad ihasti tad anyatra, yan nehasti na kutracit.

 
Sylvain Levi60

60 S. Levi, in Commemorative Essays ... Sir Ramkrishna Gopal Bhandarkar, Poona 1917, pp. 99-106 = Memorial Sylvain Levi, Paris 1937, pp. 293-298 (un Vinaya, le code de la discipline ksatriya a l'usage des Bhagavatas).


has actually compared the Mahabharata to the Vinaya of the Mula-Sarvastivadins and called it "a code of Ksatriya discipline as practiced by the Bhagavatas." His suggestion and Winternitz' protest61

61 Geschichte der indischen Litteratur, vol. III p.627; engl. trans. History of Indian Literature by V. Srinivasa Sarma, vol. I p. 441.

 
in favor of an heroic tale overgrown with didactic interpolations really replays the Homeric question on Indian soil. In oral literature, narratives "store, organize and communicate much of what they know."62

62 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, London 1982 repr.1988, pp. 140f.

 
The size of the epics, in India as well as in Greece (where the various aristeiai, i.e. the duels of famous heroes, were presented in isolation), made a total presentation difficult, and often the episodes that had been amalgamated into one large epic, were again taken out and presented in piecemeal fashion. Indians were weaned on the stories of Yudhisthira, Arjuna, and Krsna, Rama and Ravana and on the innumerable ethical and legal dilemmas that are part of the story line itself or are brought up along with it. It was largely an education by example, as is typical for an archaic and aristocratic society. Endowments are recorded in North-Indian inscriptions for their popular recital,63

63 R.G. Bhandarkar, Summary of Inscriptions of North India. Appendix to El 19-23, repr. New Delhi 1983, nos. 623; 1639.

 
as well as in South India.64

64 E. Hultzsch, SII 1 (1890), pp. 150-155; ARE 1922 (no. 546 of 1922); ARE 1910 (no. 467 of 1909).


Formal similarities with the mini-epics contained in the Jataka-collection and perhaps even the formulized, sometimes rhythmic, prose of the Buddhist and Jaina canons suggest an old epic and narrative tradition that ran parallel to the Vedic tradition.65

65 O. von Hinuber, Untersuchungen zur Mundlichkeit fruher mittelindischer Texte der Buddhisten, AAWL, Mainz 1994 nr. 5, pp. 24, 31-33.

 
Writing was known in India shortly after 300 B.C. (a few centuries earlier in the extreme Northwest where the Achaemenid rulers of Persia held sway), but literacy was not widespread for some centuries.66

66 O. von Hinuber, Der Beginn der Schrift undfruhe Schriftlichkeit in Indien, AAWL 1989 no. 11, and Harry Falk, Die Schrift im alten Indien, Tubingen 1993.

 
The dogmatic portions of the Buddhist canon show the style of orality; there are formulaic expressions in prose (reminding us of the epic style!) -- some of them are later replaced in written Pali and Sanskrit Buddhist texts. 67

67 Oskar von Hinuber, Mundlichkeit, pp. 34-40.


Short dogmatic treatises are also found in other than Buddhist traditions.68

68 P. Hacker, Prahlada, AAWL, Mainz 1959 nr. 9, p. 126 and H. Scharfe, Investigations in Kautalya's [Chanakya's] Manual of Political Science, Wiesbaden 1993, p. 63 (with further references!); Hinuber, Mundlichkeit, pp. 34, 37 fn.70, 38f. with reference to K. Bhattacharya in: Buddhist Studies in Honor of Walpola Rahula, London 1980, pp. 10-15 and M.L. Gethin, The Buddhist Path to Awakening, Leiden 1992, pp. 30, 47, 59 (on short dogmatic pieces in oral tradition).

 
Comparable are also the manuals of the six classical philosophical systems in their short aphoristic form. It is only a few centuries later (fifth century A.D.?), that elaborate prose commentaries in literary style were composed in these schools. It is generally true that "literacy ... consumes its own oral antecedents and, unless it is carefully monitored, even destroys their memory."69

69 Ong, Orality, p. 15. He echoes Plato who claimed that writing not only destroys memory but, in the absence of personal instruction and dialogue, leads to shallow knowledge rather than wisdom; he called writing "an elixir not of memory, but of reminding": Phaedrus 275 and Seventh Letter 344.

 
Thus the priestly hymns of ancient Greece are all but lost; but in India, the established texts of the oral traditions survived: foremost, the Vedic hymns and ritual chants, also many of the Vedic prose works; the twin epics, various purana-s and the sutra-texts of Panini and the six main philosophical systems as also the Buddhist and Jain canons.70

70 The Buddhist canon consists of three sections called pitaka "baskets" -- not as static storage receptacles of palm-leaf manuscripts (A.L. Basham; The Wonder that was India, New York 1959, pp. 266f.), but as "means of handing on" (as an Indian laborer would carry soil in a basket from one place to another): V. Trenckner, Pali Miscellanies, pp.67-69 and T.W. Rhys Davis, The Questions of Milinda (SBE vol. XXXV), p. 28 (on Milindapanha I 35). The first inscriptional evidence is found in an inscription from the third regnal year of Kaniska [2nd century A.D.] in the Sarnath Museum (trepitakasya): B.N. Misra, Nalanda, Delhi 1998, vol. I p. 269 fn. 166.


Some of the preserved texts were protected by the existence of important commentaries that had gained importance in their own right.

Still there were great losses -- not so much in the transition from orality to literacy as may have happened elsewhere, but within the oral tradition. Often basic instructional texts were merely updated by insertions or by reworking, but others were simply replaced by newer ones, leading to total disappearance of the older texts; oral tradition has no pity for outdated material, since it would be a waste of effort and memory for students to memorize obsolete instructions. Panini's grammar made all previous grammatical analyses of Sanskrit obsolete, and not much more than some names remain of his predecessors. The oldest summaries of the Samkhya philosophy disappeared with the exception of a few fragments preserved in the Mahabharata, making Isvarakrsna's [350 C.E.] Samkhya-karika the oldest preserved major text of that school, though it clearly represents a late phase in its development. Older compendia of ayurvedic medicine either disappeared or were preserved in severely revised versions attributed to Caraka, Bhela, and Susruta. Similarly the origins of the Vaisesika and Nyaya systems of philosophy are obscured by the loss of the works predating our Vaisesika- and Nyaya-sutra-s. This loss contrasts with the at least partial preservation of the works of pre-Socratic philosophers in Greece as quotations in the written works of their successors, which allows us to trace the development of Greek thought up to Plato and Aristotle. In India, perfected systems seem to appear ex nihilo, which led in time to the assumption of supernatural revelation. Panini was alleged to have been an ignorant cowherd, before Siva revealed the grammar to him,71

71 On the development of this legend see now Madhav Deshpande, JAOS 117 ( 1997), pp. 444-465. A similar development occurred in Buddhist philosophy: Asanga (fourth century A.D.) had accepted and developed the thought of his teacher Maitreyanatha -- but after the memory of the latter had faded, Asanga's insights were attributed to revelations he received miraculously from the future Buddha Maitreya in the Tusita heaven: E. Frauwallner, Die Philosophie des Buddhismus, Berlin 1956, p. 327.


and the Indian system of medicine called ayurveda is credited to divine revelation72

72 Caraka, Sutra-sthana 30, 27 so 'yam ayurvedah sasvato nirdisyate anaditvat, svabhava-samsiddha-[laksana]tvat, bhava-svabhava-nityatvat "This science of life is declared to be eternal, because it has no beginning, because it deals with [characteristics] that are established from nature, [and] because the nature of matter is permanent." ayurveda is often seen as related to the Atharvaveda which contains much of what we know of Vedic medicine; cf. Kenneth Zysk, Religious Healing in the Veda, TAPS75 part 7, Philadelphia 1985.

 
that trickled down to sages and finally ordinary mortals. This development is particularly strange in the case of ayurveda which had its beginning in the innumerable observations of ordinary people about the medicinal value of certain herbs and procedures 73

73 These did not, in the beginning, form a coherent whole: G. Jan Meulenbeld, in Studies on Indian Medical History, ed. G. Jan Meulenbeld and Dominik Wujastyk, Groningen 1987, pp. 3f.


and ended up being canonized to such a degree that it was considered sacrilegious to even test the validity of the medications taught, since such tests implied a doubt in the truth of divine revelation.74

74 See below p. 62.

 
The logician Jayanta in his Nyayamanjari 226ff. "argues against the attempt to establish the authority of the medical tradition (ayurveda) in a purely empirical manner, i.e., based upon the 'concurrent testimony of sense-perception etc.' (pratyaksadisamvada) and to ascertain the causes and cures of diseases by means of 'positive and negative concomitance' (anvayavyatireka) alone."75

75 Wilhelm Halbfass, Tradition, p. 200 fn. 173.


Note on the other hand, how Caraka Su 1.120

osadhir nama-rapabhyam janate hy ajapa vane /
avipas caiva go-pas ca ye canye vana-vasinah //


The goat-herds, shepherds and cowherds in the forest and who else lives in the forest know the herbs by name and form and Susruta 36.76

76 Susruta Samhita ed. Jadavji Trikamji, repr. Benares 1998.

 
36.10

gopalas tapasa vyadha ye canye vana-carinah /
mulaharas ca tebhyo bhesaja-vyaktir isyate //


Cowherds, ascetics, hunters and who else roams in the forest, those living on root -- from these one wants the manifestation of herbs show the popular basis of herbology, with Susruta expectedly adding a religious dimension (which may have encouraged K. Zysk77

77 K. Zysk, Asceticism and Healing in Ancient India, New York 1991; cf. the critical remarks of A. Wezler, JEAS 4 (1995), pp.169-172.

 
to see ascetic medical knowledge as a major wellspring of ayurveda).

Walter Ong has devoted an interesting book to the problems of orality and literacy.78

78 W. Ong, Orality and Literacy, London 1982 repr. 1988.


In it he puts forth several theses that relate to the problems outlined above, and there is a good amount of conflict. Ong, also with reference to publications by J. Goody and I. Watt79

79 J. Goody and I.Watt, in Jack Goody (ed.), Literacy in Traditional Societies, Cambridge 1968, pp. 27-68; J. Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind, Cambridge 1977, p. 8f. ("not...an overall opposition"); cf. also J. Goody in B. Gentili and G. Paioni (edd.), Oralita, Roma 1985, pp. 7-17.

 
claims that many contrasts between "western" and other views are reducible to deeply interiorized literacy on the one hand and oral states of consciousness on the other, and that shifts from magic to science show the shift from orality to literacy. He writes: "In an oral culture, to think through something in non-formulaic, non-patterned, non-mnemonic terms, even if it were possible, would be a waste of time, for such thought, once worked through, could never be recovered with any effectiveness, as it could be with the aid of writing."80

80 Ong, Orality, p. 35.


The fact that theological and philosophical speculations are found in the Brahmanas and Upanisads in approximately the middle of the first millennium B.C., with Panini's grammar belonging to the same period ...

It is generally well known also that the Hindu science, after a however long history of elaboration, became fixed for all future time in the system of a single grammarian, named Panini (believed, though on grounds far from convincing, to have lived two or three centuries before the Christian era). Panini's work has been commented without end, corrected in minor points, condensed, re-cast in arrangement, but never rebelled against or superseded; and it is still the authoritative standard of good Sanskrit. Its form of presentation is of the strangest: a miracle of ingenuity, but of perverse and wasted ingenuity. The only object aimed at in it is brevity, at the sacrifice of everything else — of order, of clearness, of even intelligibility except by the aid of keys and commentaries and lists of words, which then are furnished in profusion. To determine a grammatical point out of it is something like constructing a passage of text out of an index verborum [An index of words.]: if you are sure that you have gathered up every word that belongs in the passage, and have put them all in the right order, you have got the right reading; but only then. If you have mastered Panini sufficiently to bring to bear upon the given point every rule that relates to it, and in due succession, you have settled the case; but that is no easy task. For example, it takes nine mutually limitative rules, from all parts of the text-book, to determine whether a certain aorist shall be ajgarisam or ajagarisam (the case is reported in the preface to Muller's grammar): there is lacking only a tenth rule, to tell us that the whole word is a false and never-used formation. Since there is nothing to show how far the application of a rule reaches, there are provided treatises of laws of interpretation to be applied to them; but there is a residual rule underlying and determining the whole: that both the grammar and the laws of interpretation must be so construed as to yield good and acceptable forms, and not otherwise — and this implies (if that were needed) a condemnation of the whole mode of presentation of the system as a failure.

-- The Study of Hindu Grammar and the Study of Sanskrit, by William Dwight Whitney


and the philosophies of Samkhya and Buddhism following soon after, led Ong to question the orality of the early Indian tradition. But his argumentation is based on an induction from extremely limited material. It is essentially the early Greek development from Homer's oral poetry, the pre-Socratic philosophers of Milet and other coastal cities of Asia Minor where writing was known but perhaps not yet fully internalized, to Plato and Aristotle living in a literate society. Philosophy is presumed to be not found in societies where writing was not known (as among the Incas and Aztecs) or perhaps not fully internalized (as among the people of the ancient Near East, the Mayas or archaic Chinese). Ong thus committed the same error as Karl Marx who based his theory of social development from Urgesellschaft, through slave holding society, feudalism to capitalism on his interpretation of classical and Western European history; subsequent attempts to apply this scheme to Indian and Chinese society have been extremely tortured. 81

81 Note that Goody and Watt are much more cautious in suggesting generalization from the developments in Greece -- especially in response to the critique by Kathleen Gough in J. Goody (ed.), Literacy, pp. 43, 55 and 69.


Ong's and Goody's denial of the orality of much of the Indian tradition contradicts evidence from a multitude of sources.

In Mahavagga II 17,3f. (PTS p. 116) the Buddha responds to the question what a community of monks is to do when none of them are competent to recite the patimokkha at their uposatha-ceremony at the evenings of the full and new moon. "These monks, O monks, are instantly to send one monk to the neighboring residence [of monks] (with the words): 'Go, friend, and come back when you have learned the patimokkha abridged or in full extent.'" In Mahavagga III 5, 9 (PTS pp. 140f.) the Buddha allowed monks to leave their monsoon residence on certain urgent business with lay followers (upasaka). "In case, O monks, an upasaka ... knows how to recite a celebrated suttanta. If he sends a messenger to the monks [saying]: 'Might their reverences come and learn this suttanta; otherwise this suttanta will fall into oblivion' ... then you ought to go." In Anguttara-nikaya (PTS) II p. 147 (section 160.5) the Buddha declares it a fault when knowledgeable monks fail to pass their command of the oral tradition on to other monks if this leads to a loss of suttanta-s.82

82 AN II 147 (PTS) puna ca param, bhikkhave, ye te bhikku bahussuta agatagama dhammapara vinayadhara matikadhara, te na sakkaccam suttantam param vacenti. tesam accayena chinnamulako suttanto hoti appatisarano.

 
The Chinese pilgrim Fa-hsien, early in the fifth century A.D., had come to India in search of vinaya-texts: "Formerly, when Fa-hsien was at Ch'ang-an, he was distressed by the imperfect state of the Buddhist 'Disciplines'; and accordingly, in the second year of the period Hungshih, ... he entered into an agreement with Hui-ching, Tao-cheng, Hui-ying, Hui-wei and others to go together to India and try to obtain these 'Rules.'"83

83 The Travels of Fa-hsien (399-414 A.D.), or Record of the Buddhist Kingdoms, trans. H.A. Giles, Cambridge 1923, p.1; cf. also the translation by Li Yung-hsi, Peking 1957.

 
But his task proved to be more difficult than he had imagined: "Fa-hsien' s object was to get copies of the Disciplines; but in the various countries of Northern India these were handed down orally from one Patriarch to another, there being no written volume which he could copy."84

84 Rhys Davids and H. Oldenberg, SBE XIII, pp. XXXIII f. point out that elaborate lists of domestic utensils in the vinaya-texts contain no references to manuscripts, ink, leaves or writing instruments.

 
In fact, it has been noted that Vinaya-texts, though a part of the Buddhist canon, are strikingly absent among the Sanskrit manuscripts found in Central Asia85

85 Lore Sander, in Corolla Iranica (Fs. D.N. MacKenzie), Frankfurt 1991, pp. 141 f.

 
and Afghanistan.86

86 R. Salomon, JAOS 117 (1997), p. 355.


"Therefore he extended his journey as far as Central India, and here in a monastery of the Greater Vehicle87

87 Mahayana may have embraced the script earlier than the Hinayana schools; there was even a cult of books: G. Schopen, IIJ 17 (1975), pp. 147-181; cf. also below p. 36.


he obtained a copy according to the text accepted at the first Great Assembly ... This is the text which was handed down [orally] at the Shrine of the Garden of Gold [near Sravasti]."88

88 The Travels, p. 64 with p. 32.


Fa-hsien found additional manuscripts in monasteries at the mouth of the Hoogly89

89 Ibid., pp. 65f.

 
and in Ceylon.90

90 Ibid., p. 76.


Two centuries later, I-tsing [635–713 CE] reported: "The scriptures they revere are the four Vedas, containing about 100,000 verses ... The Vedas have been handed down from mouth to mouth, not transcribed on paper or leaves. In every generation there exist some intelligent Brahmans who can recite the 100,000 verses ... In India there are two traditional ways by which one can attain to great intellectual power. Firstly, by repeatedly committing to memory, the intellect is developed; secondly, the alphabet fixes one's ideas.91

91 A better translation may be: "by the other [method] it is a matter of calming the nerves," following H.-Y. Hu-von Hinuber quoted by H. Falk, Die Schrift im alten Indien, p. 289.


By this way, after a practice often days or a month, a student feels his thoughts rise like a fountain, and can commit to memory whatever he has once heard. This is far from being a myth, for I myself have met such men."92

92 A Record of the Buddhist Religion ... by I-tsing trans. J. Takakusu, London 1896 (repr. New Delhi 1982), pp. 182f. The Greeks and Romans developed a mnemonic technique whereby one imagined a street or a large house and then placed symbols of notions or words in a fixed sequence throughout that place; such techniques were in vogue until the rise of printing: Herwig Blum, Die antike Mnemotechnik, Hildesheim 1969 und Friedheim L. Muller, Kritische Gedanken zur antiken Mnemotechnik und zum Auctor ad Herennium, Stuttgart 1996. Seelenmaschinen, ed. Jarg Jochen Berns und Wolfgang Neuber, Wien 2000, pays no attention to Indian memory technique and deals only with the European tradition. Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, Chicago 1966, traces the development of "artificial memory" from classical antiquity to the seventeenth century in Europe; see also below p. 241.


There are reports that a Buddhist monk recited large parts of the Buddhist canon from memory, e.g. Buddhaya- yasas from Kashmir the Vinaya of the Dharmagupta sect. To test him, the Chinese emperor Yao Hing of the T'sin dynasty in A.D. 410 gave the monk (who knew Chinese) three days to memorize two scrolls of medical and census texts with 50,000 Chinese characters, and the monk was able afterwards to recite the material flawlessly.93

93 P. Demieville, T'oung Pao 40 (1951 ), p. 245 fn. 1. The commentator Dhammapala (late fifth cent. A.D.) stated in the introductory remarks of his Paramatthadipani on the Petavatthu that the text was comprised of four recitation sections: bhanavarato catubhanavaramattam (PvA 2): P. Masefield, Divine Revelation, p. 54. Not all monks were that capable. If one could not remember where or to whom the Buddha had taught a certain lesson, he was to insert the name of one of the great cities or a place where the Buddha stayed many times; the king would be Prasenajit, the householder Anathapindada, etc.: G. Schopen, in Bauddhavidyasudhakarah (Studies in Honour of Heinz Bechert), Swisttal-Odendorf 1997, pp. 571-582 and Suryacandraya (Essays in Honour of Akira Yuyama), p. 174 fn. 59. It is worth noting, that no such "creativeness" was allowed where the content of the lesson is concerned: a monk uncertain of his memory should write the lesson down.


Modern scholars, both Indian and Western, have testified to the enormous amounts of Vedic texts carried in the heads of "our walking Rig-Veda MSS," as Shankar Pandit called these scholars.94

94 Letter to F. Max Muller, dated March 2, 1877 (F. Max Muller, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, New York 1879, p.152). Earlier, R.G. Bhandarkar, IA 3 ( 1874), p. 133 called such a vaidika "a living Vedic library." It is ironic that Friedrich Nietzsche, Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen; Zweites Stuck: Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie fur das Leben (Werke in drei Banden, Munchen 1954, vol. II pp. 232f.) derisively claims that "Wir Modernen" with our shallow knowledge acquired by expansive reading have become "wandernde Enzyclopaedien," obsessed by a historical sense and unable to act in the present!


The Rigveda hymns were composed and preserved by oral tradition. They were memorized and verbally transmitted with "unparalleled fidelity" across generations for many centuries. According to Barbara West, it was probably first written down about the 3rd-century BCE. The manuscripts were made from birch bark or palm leaves, which decompose and therefore were routinely copied over the generations to help preserve the text.

There are, for example, 30 manuscripts of Rigveda at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, collected in the 19th century by Georg Bühler, Franz Kielhorn and others, originating from different parts of India, including Kashmir, Gujarat, the then Rajaputana, Central Provinces etc. They were transferred to Deccan College, Pune, in the late 19th century. They are in the Sharada and Devanagari scripts, written on birch bark and paper. The oldest of the Pune collection is dated to 1464.

-- Rigveda, by Wikipedia

 
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Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

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Part 3 of 3

G. Buhler observed that "A perfect Vaidic of the Asvalayana school knows the Rig-veda according to the Samhita, Pada, Krama, Jata and Ghana Pathas, the Aitareya Brahmana and Aranyaka, the ritualistic Sutras of Asvalayana, Saunaka's Pratisakhya and the Siksa, Yaska's Nirukta, the grammar of Panini, the Vedic calendar or Jyotisa, the metrical treatise called the Chandas, Yajnavalkya's Dharmasastra, portions of the Mahabharata, and the philosophical Sutras of Kanada, Jaimini, and Badarayana ... But it would be in vain to expect from such men an explanation of the literary treasures which they possess."95

95 Georg Buhler, The Laws of Manu (SBE XXV), Oxford 1886, p. xlviii, repeating essentially a statement by R.G. Bhandarkar, IA 3 (1874), pp. 132-135 = Collected Works, Poona 1933, vol. I pp. 225f.; cf. K. Parameshwara Aithal, Veda-laksana. Vedic Ancillary Literature, Stuttgart 1991 (Indian ed. Delhi 1993), pp. 6-12 with references to V. Raghavan, Bulletin of the Institute of Traditional Cultures, Madras 1957 and Present Position of Vedic Recitation and Vedic Sakhas, Kumbakonam 1959.

 
In the 1950's V. Raghavan observed at Rajahmundry (Andhra Pradesh) a Vedic specialist "who performed the feat of reciting the Krsna Yajurveda in the reverse order, and who could utter the exact letter from his memory when, as a test, one gave him just the reference to the chapter and number of any particular letter in the Krsna Yajus text. It was to be noted that this was a very difficult exercise as it was more difficult to have this kind of control over a prose-text such as the Krsna Yajur Veda."96

96 V. Raghavan, Bulletin of the Institute of Traditional Cultures, Madras 1957, p.52; cf. also Wayne Howard, Samavedic Chant, New Haven 1977, p.4, and Veda Recitation in Varanasi, Delhi 1986, p. 213.


A helpful device is to recite in pairs. Indeed, "Vedic brahmins prefer to recite in pairs; for two do not only know more than one; two that recite together know more than the same two reciting separately." If one should falter, the other will likely carry on, and each supports the other's memory.97

97 F. Staal, The Fidelity of Oral Tradition and the Origins of Science, Amsterdam 1986, pp. 37f. Cf. also J. Ballantyne, Benares Magazine, October 1849 and December 1850; reprinted in The Pandit I (1867) - 3 (1868) and again in Pandit Revisited (ed. B.N. Misra), Varanasi 1991, pp. 44-82, and more recently, F. Staal, Nambudiri Veda Recitation, 'S-Gravenhage 1961, pp.4 8 and 59f. W. Ong, Orality and Literacy, pp. 62-64 reports on field work in Panama and Japan, where oral traditions were passed on with absolute fidelity.

 

The alleged dim-wittedness of the Veda reciters (veda-pathaka) is often referred to, even as early as the Mahabharata V 130, 6 = XII 10, 1 when king Yudhisthira is scolded for dereliction of political duties:

srotriyasyeva te rajan mandakasyavipascitah /
anuvaka-hata buddhir dharmam evaikam iksate //
O king, like the mind-dulled by the [constant recital of] Veda sections -- of a dim-witted unintelligent Vedic scholar, your [mind] focuses only on morality.

 
Often such reports are met with incredulity by uninformed Westemers, since they defy our personal experience or our own capabilities. And yet there are people even in our culture that can recall a page of the telephone book after seeing it only for a short time,98

98 E.g., the mathematician John von Neumann according to P.R. Halmos, The American Mathematical Monthly, 80 (1973), p. 383.

 
that can multiply sets of very large numbers in their head,99

99 Paul Meumann, Okonomie und Technik des Gedachtnisses, trans. J.B. Baird as The Psychology of Learning, New York 1913, pp. 215-222 records the feats of Inaudi, Diamandi, and Dr. Ruckle.


or that play chess blindfolded against dozens of opponents simultaneously -- and win!100

100 K.R. Norman, JRAS ser. 3 vol. 3, (1993), pp. 279f. and R. Salomon, JAOS 115 (1995), p. 278 have raised the question how the Magadha empire before the Mauryas could have been administered without a script or at least a notation system (as under the Incas in ancient Peru). I recall, on the other hand, my first visit to the library of the University of Kerala in Trivandrum in 1960 when I asked to look up the catalogue to locate a certain text and was referred instead to an 80 year old librarian who knew where each book was kept.

 
The Vedic schools systematically developed the memory of their students101

101 ChU VII 13,1 demands: "respect memory" (smaram upassva), though hope (asa) and the vital breath (prana) are rated still higher in the following paragraphs.


and created skeletal text forms that permitted them to survey large masses of data by scanning their memory.102

102 G. Possehl (JAOS 118 [1998], p. 121) wonders how we can be so sure that our text of the RV is virtually identical with that of 1000 B.C. "because there are no examples from the first millennium." But we have quotations in the traditions of other Vedic schools: the Samaveda, the Brahmanas, etc. with minimal deviations -- and most of these deviations can be shown to be secondary.


This man comes to me one day, he's an antiquities dealer. And this guy tells me he's got this find. His story was that he got it from a Palestinian antiquities dealer in East Jerusalem. He tells me, "It's one of the most important finds for the State of Israel." It's a stone, inscribed with specifications for renovating the Holy Temple. And if that's true, if it's authentic, it could be one of the greatest archaeological finds ever. He asked me to take the stone, and my mission was to go around and show it to whoever it needed to be shown to, and then disappear with it immediately so no one would know it existed until it got some sort of seal of authenticity....

It had an inscription that mentions historical figures that every child knows from reading the Bible...

Not only does it mention King Jehoash from the Bible, it also details constructions and renovations in the Holy Temple. If true, it's the only physical proof for the existence of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem
, and supports the Jewish claim for the most contested hilltop in the Middle East....

The ossuary, a small stone bone box with an inscription that reads, "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus," attracted top experts from all over the world who came to observe the item up close in disbelief. Some experts were excited, even suggesting that the ossuary may hold specks of Jesus's DNA....

It's done beautifully. If it's forged, it's by a genius....


-- Into the Land: The Forgery Scandal, Created by Eiv Kristal and Natan Odenheier


True, it is difficult to compose something as simple as a poem without writing it down stanza by stanza as it emerges; but even such problems can be dealt with. The Vedic poet may have taught a verse to his son or student before he began to formulate the next as RV VII 103, 3 suggests (or perhaps the whole poem after it was completed), and the Icelandic literature tells us about the composition of Egil's Hofuolausen where the incarcerated Skald Egil composed this extremely difficult poem without the aid of writing.103

103 We must acknowledge an element of uncertainty, in that the Egilssaga -- which narrates events of the tenth century -- was written down and possibly redacted [edited/censored] only in the thirteenth century. Even then, it would express the vision people had of the past.[???]


A stunning example of how this can be achieved is found in the description of a Bardic School in early seventeenth century Ireland by a participant:104

104 Osborn Bergin, Journal of the Ivernian Society 5 (1913), p. 156 and Irish Bardic Poetry, Dublin 1970, p. 3.


[T]he poetical Seminary or School ... was open only to such as were descended from Poets and reputed within their Tribes ... The Structure was a snug, low Hut, and beds in it at convenient Distances ... No Windows to let in the Day, nor any Light at all us'd but that of Candles, and these brought in at a proper Season only ... The Professors (one or more as there was occasion) gave a Subject suitable to the Capacity of each Class, determining the number of Rhimes, and clearing what was to be chiefly observed therein ... The said Subject (either one or more as aforesaid) having been given over Night, they work'd it apart each by himself upon his own Bed, the whole next Day in the Dark, till at a certain Hour in the Night, Lights being brought in, they committed it to writing. Being afterwards dress'd and come together into a large Room, where the Masters waited, each Scholar gave in his Performance ...


We cannot but accept as a fact that the birth of philosophy and spiritual reflection as well as grammar and medicine were achieved without the help of writing, and that even much of the subsequent developments in these fields took place in an oral tradition. Even after the introduction of writing it long remained the domain of a few.Asoka's [Ashoka's] inscriptions , essentially sermons addressed to the masses, were not aimed at the traveler or the passing peasant,105

105 As Vincent A. Smith, Asoka [Ashoka], Oxford 1903 (2nd ed. 1909), pp. 138f. had suggested almost a century ago: " ... many people must have been able to read the documents ... I think it likely that the percentage of literacy among the Buddhist population in Asoka's [Ashoka's] time was higher than it is now in many provinces of British India."

 
but were meant to be read to the people on special holidays by professionals.106

106 RE XIV and XV; others were addressed to the gods, as it were, inscribed on a high unaccessible mountainside at Mansehra -- like the Old Persian inscriptions at Bisutan.


It took centuries to make the use of writing more widely spread. Staal107

107 Frits Staal, The Fidelity of Oral Tradition, pp. 24-27 and European Journal of Sociology 30 ( 1989), pp. 301-310. Already K. Gough, in J. Goody (ed.), Literacy, pp. 83f. and 153 found "literacy for the most part an enabling rather than a causal factor."

 
rightly questions the absolute validity of the Goody-Watt thesis that literacy alone led to a scientific spirit. Even more dubious is Goody's suggestion108

108 Oralita, pp. 12f. In this article (pp. 13f.) Ong displays an abysmal ignorance of ancient India, when he calls the brahmans a "literate caste" and claims: "At certain periods of Indian history, only brahmans were taught to read at all. Later, and this is true today, only brahmans are allowed to read the Vedas." It is just the point that the brahmins did not read the Vedas but memorized and recited them (which does not make them literate -- they even professed a distaste for writing), and ksattriyas and vaisyas were equally entitled to study the Vedas (but not to teach them). There was no injunction against learning to read and write for any caste.


that even the Vedic hymns should be the product of a literate culture. The identity of the Vedic tristubh meter with the meter used by Sappho and Alkaios109

109 A. Meillet, Les origines indoeuropeennes des metres Grecs, Paris 1923; Rudiger Schmitt, Dichtung und Dichtersprache in indogermanischer Zeit, pp. 307-313; Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon, pp. 19f.


pushes the date for sophisticated poetry back into the prehistoric period of Common Indo-European when writing was certainly not known.

In a related claim, Ong110

110 W. Ong, Orality, pp. 54f.


asserts that there is no self-analysis in oral society; but the Indian traditions of yoga, samadhi and the atman-doctrines have ancient roots and experience a special development in Buddhism with no visible relation to writing and are, as has been pointed out, almost certainly anterior to the emergence of writing. And even if we would stay with Buhler's dating of the introduction of script, we would have to consider Ong's well-founded observation that a "passing acquaintance with literate organization of knowledge has ... no discernible effect on illiterates."111

111 Ibid., p. 56.


Since there is no trace of writing in pre-Asokan [Ashokan] India whatsoever, it is impossible that literacy could have been fully internalized, even if we would assume the existence of some writing before Asoka [Ashoka].

With the help of a distinguished pandit he immediately set about the long pillar inscriptions. It was June, the most unbearable month of the Calcutta year; to concentrate the mind even for a minute is a major achievement. By now the Governor-General and the rest of Calcutta society were in the habit of taking themselves off to the cool heights of Simla at such a time. Prinsep stayed at his desk. The deciphering was going well but he had at last acknowledged the unexpected difficulty of the language not being Sanskrit.[???] As Hodgson had suggested, it was closer to Pali, the sacred language of Tibet, or in other words it was one of the Prakrit languages, vernacular derivations of the classical Sanskrit. This made it difficult to pin down the precise meaning of many phrases. Prinsep also had, himself, to engrave all the plates for the script that would illustrate his account. Nevertheless, in the incredibly short space of six weeks, his translation was ready and he announced it to the Society. As usual he treated them to a long preamble on the discoveries that had led up to it and on the difficulties it still presented. But, unlike other inscriptions, these had one remarkable feature in their favour. There was an almost un-Indian frankness about the language, no exaggeration, no hyperbole, no long lists of royal qualities. Instead there was a bold and disarming directness:[???!!!]
Thus spake King Devanampiya Piyadasi. In the twenty-seventh year of my annointment I have caused this religious edict to be published in writing. I acknowledge and confess the faults that have been cherished in my heart ...

The king had obviously undergone a religious conversion and, from the nature of the sentiments expressed, it was clearly Buddhism that he had adopted. The purpose of his edicts was to promote this new religion, to encourage right thinking and right behaviour, to discourage killing, to protect animals and birds, and to ordain certain days as holy days and certain men as religious administrators. The inscriptions ended in the same style as they had begun.
In the twenty-seventh year of my reign I have caused this edict to be written; so sayeth Devanampiya; ''Let stone pillars be prepared and let this edict of religion be engraven thereon, that it may endure into the remotest ages."


Something about both the language and the contents was immediately familiar: it was Old Testament. Even Prinsep could not resist the obvious analogy -- "we might easily cite a more ancient and venerable example of thus fixing the law on tablets of stone". Perhaps it was just out of reverence that he called them edicts rather than commandments. But the message was clear enough. Here was an Indian king uncannily imitating Moses[???!!!], indeed going one better; as well as using tablets of stone, he had created these magnificent pillars to bear his message through the ages.

But who was this king? "Devanampiya Piyadasi" could be a proper name but it was not one that appeared in any of the Sanskrit king lists. Equally it could be a royal epithet, "Beloved of the Gods and of gracious mien''. At first Prinsep thought the former. In Ceylon a Mr George Turnour had been working on the Buddhist histories preserved there and had just sent in a translation that mentioned a king Piyadasi who was the first Ceylon king to adopt Buddhism. This fitted well; but what was a king of Ceylon doing scattering inscriptions all over northern India? One of the edicts actually claimed that the king had planted trees along the highways, dug wells, erected traveller's rest houses etc. How could a Sinhalese king be planting trees along the Ganges?

A few weeks later Turnour himself came up with the answer. Studying another Buddhist work he discovered that Piyadasi was also the normal epithet of a great Indian sovereign, a contemporary of the Ceylon Piyadasi, and that this king was otherwise known as Ashoka. It was further stated that Ashoka was the grandson of Chandragupta and that he was consecrated 218 years after the Buddha's enlightenment.

Suddenly it all began to make sense. Ashoka was already known from the Sanskrit king lists as a descendant of Chandragupta Maurya (Sandracottus) and, from Himalayan Buddhist sources, as a legendary patron of early Buddhism. Now his historicity was dramatically established. Thanks to the inscriptions, from being just a doubtful name, more was suddenly known about Ashoka than about any other Indian sovereign before AD 1100. As heir to Chandragupta it was not surprising that his pillars and inscriptions were so widely scattered. The Mauryan empire was clearly one of the greatest ever known in India, and here was its noblest scion speaking of his life and work through the mists of 2,000 years. It was one of the most exciting moments in the whole story of archaeological discovery.

-- Chapter 3: Ashoka, Excerpt from India Discovered, by John Keay


Ong112

112 Ibid., p. 61.

 
takes up the special case of grammatical analysis. He claims: "If you cannot write, is 'text-based' one word or two? The sense of individual words as significantly discrete items is fostered by writing." Here Ong, like so many native speakers of English, is misled by his mother tongue that centuries ago dropped most inflectional endings. For a speaker of Sanskrit there was no doubt that raja-purusah was one compound word, and rajnah purusah were two words. Indeed, already the padapatha of the Rgveda (eighth or seventh century B.C.) broke the Vedic stanzas down into the individual words, and probably not much later Panini composed his admirable grammar that taught the formation of correct Sanskrit words and sentences, which presupposes a deep analysis of the structure of his language. He knew about script (Aramaic script?) and may, as a subject of the Persian empire, himself have been literate -- though this is unlikely; but he was by no means a member of a literate society.

Oral literature has certain characteristic features which we easily recognize in Indian oral literature. One of them is frequent repetition, found most prominently in the Buddhist canonical texts. This repetitiousness is partly caused by acoustical problems: perhaps a listener would not properly hear every word the first time or his attention may have momentarily lapsed during a long presentation. So everything of importance is brought up again and again. Another feature is what Levi-Strauss113

113 C. Levi-Strauss, La pensee sauvage, Paris 1962, trans. by George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd. as The Savage Mind, London 1966 (4th impression, Chicago 1968), pp. 16-36. Cf. J. Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind, p. 27: "not... a mysterious collective authorship ... It is rather that the individual signature is always getting rubbed out in the process of generative transmission."


called bricolage "tinkering, patchwork," assembling and reassembling elements of an extensive yet limited repertoire in the manner of a kaleidoscope. Furthermore, there is frequent patchwork of another kind. Since corrections would be awkward, any improvements are added on like so many patches. We can see that in Manu's Dharmasastra where rules regulating the levirat (niyoga), whereby a relative of the deceased would beget a son and heir for him with the widow, are followed by rules that condemn this practice.114

114 Manu IX 58-68.


We see it also in Panini's grammar where sometimes injunctions are given spread over two rules. In the Mahabhasya the question is raised why there are two varttika-s 9 and 10 on Panini VIII 2 6 rather than one. The answer is that Katyayana first saw varttika 9, and only later he saw varttika 10, and "teachers do not turn away (i.e., suspend) rules after they have made them."115

115 Mahabhasya ed. F. Kielhorn, vol. III p. 393, 1-3: na cedanim acaryah sutrani krtva nivartayanti. Differently Yutaka Ojihara, IT 6 (1978), pp. 219-234 ("Ah non! Il ne peut se faire, en l'occurrence, que les Maitres soient en train de tailler les sutra tout en les composant" [Google translate: Oh no! It cannot be, in this case, that the Masters are in the process of carving the sutras while composing them.]); he seems to have overlooked the use of nivrtti in the Mahabhasya; cf. P. Thieme, GGA 212 (1958), pp. 47f.

 
A literary author would probably have edited his work more smoothly.

Oral traditions often preserve amazing genealogies that can stretch over many generations, from the lists of successive teachers in the Brahmanas and Jain abbots to the Dayaks of Borneo or African tribes, but as modern studies have shown they are often more political statements than objective historical facts: the list of leading clans in an African epic recorded by Western visitors half a century ago is subtly changed in recent records, with clans that lost power being omitted, newly empowered clans credited with an impressive past they did not have before. At the turn of the century, British administrators recorded the legends that explained the seven divisions of the state of Gonja in northern Ghana as based on the seven sons of the founder of the dynasty; sixty years later, two of the divisions had disappeared and the then current legends had reduced the number of the founder's sons to five.116

116 J. Goody and I.Watt, in Literacy, p. 33. Maoris remember names from twenty generations, but "cultural amnesia" may lead to changes in the record of the ascending male line: Bernard W. Aginsky and Peter H. Buck, American Anthropologist 42 (1940), pp. 199f. and J.A. Barnes, The Rhodes-Livingston Journal 5 (1947), pp. 48-55 (esp. pp. 52f.). Arthur Grimble reports similar traditions of genealogies covering twenty-three generations from South Pacific islands, as well as the remarkable textual preservation of a myth he had recorded fifteen years earlier: A Pattern of Islands, London 1953, pp. 157 and 43.

 
In oral literature there is no sense of copyright. Everybody is free to retell what he has heard, closely following his source or in his own words. But Bana, 117

117 Harsacarita chapter 1 stanzas 4f.


Anandavardhana,118

118 Dhvanyaloka, ed. K. Krishnamoorthy, Dharwar 1974, IV 17 (pp. 298f.).


Rajasekhara (both ninth century) and Allasani Peddanna (sixteenth century), at a time when writing was common, paid some attention to the acceptable and objectionable use of previous authors' creations.119

119 Kavyamimamsa ed. C.D. Dalal and R.A. Sastry, Baroda 1934 (GOS no. 1), chapters 11-13 (pp. 56-78). Cf. V.M. Kulkarni, JOIB 3 (1954), pp. 403-411 and S. Lienhard, A History of Classical Poetry (HIL vol. III fasc. 1), Wiesbaden 1984, pp. 43-45.

 
Wholesale appropriation of striking expressions should be avoided, but "There are no poets who are not thieves."120

120 Kavyamimamsa, p. 61 nasty acaurah kavi-jano.


Peddanna in his Manucarita refers to a "pseudo-poet" (kukavi) who goes through manuscripts to steal writings and pass them as his own.121

121 M. Rama Rao, JAHRS 8 (1934), p. 222.

 
Elaborations or improvements of inherited formulations were common and even appreciated. The accusation of plagiarism is first brought up by the Roman poet Martial (first century A.D.), but gained importance only after the invention of printing; authors would seek a royal copyright privilege, when the mass production of pirated work would harm the original author's profit.122

122 W. Ong, Orality, p.131. On a related issue see below p. 46.


Print entered Indian culture only with the colonial powers and gained importance but slowly.123

123 A perhaps unique form of early publishing (reminiscent of Roman practices!) is reported from the late twelfth century. After the Jaina monk Hemachandra had completed the grammar his king had commissioned, King Jayasimha hired three hundred copyists who were ordered to produce copies of the work for three years. These copies the king then sent to leaders of all sects in India and to rulers in India and abroad: Georg Buhler, Uber das Leben des Jaina Monches Hemacandra (Wien 1889; DAWW 37), pp. 183 and 232f.


As a consequence there were in Indian texts no indices (in our sense of the word), since each manuscript of a text would have a different pagination making a page index almost useless, and there were no alphabetical dictionaries. There are, however, anukramanika-s, detailed tables of content (e.g. the first chapter of the Arthasastra), sometimes keyed to the folia of a particular copy.124

124 D.P ingree, JAOS 108 (1988), p. 638.


One of the early English Sanskrit scholars, James Ballantyne,125

125 J.R. Ballantyne, Pandit Revisited, p. 51f.


recalls how traditional Indian Pandits who worked from memory, having an astonishing command of copious texts in their specialty acquired in painstaking years of study, were amazed at watching Western scholars at work who after just a few years of study could refer to texts of widely different fields, trace cross references and compile substantial works. Much of their success was due to indices matched with printed editions and their ability to use other modern scholars' printed studies.

The advance to high literacy in Western culture has led to an ever diminishing role of memory training which is still continuing.
Earlier European textbooks on rhetoric recognized five parts of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. In the sixteenth century textbooks began to omit the topic of memory (i.e., mnemonics, an antique technique of linking in one's mind textual data to familiar localities) and reduced the role of delivery, since these were less essential to written forms of communication.126

126 W. Ong, Orality, p. 116.

 
The slogan became popular that it was not necessary to know everything, but just where to find it. Modern Indian education has not so far reached this stage, but may eventually get there.

The emotional attachment to a text one has memorized with enormous effort may explain the weakness of criticism noted by K. Zvelebil: "The faculty of criticism is concerned with imaginative interpretation of data within the empirical limits. It is the truly critical function which was apparently absent from the ancient Indian scheme of speculation."
127

127 K. Zvelebil, Companion Studies to the History of Tamil Literature, Leiden 1992, p. 99.

 
Orality accounts for a peculiarity of Indian texts noticed first, perhaps, by Paul Deussen in his The System of the Vedanta: "Besides it is characteristic of Indian philosophers, that on the one hand they exhibit wonderfully profound conceptions reached by no other people of antiquity, and at the same time, on the other hand, a total lack of feeling for aesthetic form; in consequence of this they constantly allow themselves to drift without organizing their material and are chiefly guided by the desire to find a pro and contra for every question, thus satisfying a highly developed taste for dialectic disputation, whether this leads to an explanation of the subject, or merely hinders and confuses it. The consequence is, that the same fundamental thoughts are dealt with again and again to the point of weariness, without a true insight into their connection with the system as a whole, and thereby an insight into the thoughts themselves, being gained after all."128

128 Paul Deussen, The System of Vedanta, pp. 219f. of trans., p. 235f. of the German original.


Paul Hacker echoes this thought:129

129 Paul Hacker, Die Schuler Sankaras, AAWL, Mainz 1950, p. 19. Sylvain Levi, Memorial Sylvain Levi, pp. 299-305, on the other hand, points to an important inscription where modern scholarship completely missed the progression of the author's ideas.


"Die Inder kennen zwar den europaischen Begriff des wohldurchdachten Aufbaus eines Gedankengebaudes uberhaupt nicht." [Google translate: The Indians do not know the European concept of the well thought-out structure of a thought structure at all.] When the student has memorized a text, e.g., Panini's grammar, it is of little concern that he has to move forth and back constantly in his interpretation (or, in the case of the grammar, for the build-up of every word) and that items that are closely linked are spread out throughout the text. Nor would it bother him that "between important and unimportant matters the Sanskrit grammar makes no express distinction,"130

130 J.R. Ballantyne, in: Pandit Revisited, p. 47. Note also his remark: "This defect of literary perspective and proportion in the grammar ... has at all events this converse result, that the student who has thoroughly mastered the essentials is likely to be found perfectly conversant with every, even the least important, particular."


or that there is no conspectus of the text or an index. But well organized texts are not altogether absent; the Tamil grammar Nannul (13th century A.D.) comes to mind, and Jan E.M. Houben suggests that the Vaisesika-sutras follow a didactic design, viz. to proceed from the obvious to the less obvious.131

131 Jan E.M. Houben, As. St.48/2 (1994), p. 733.

 
One crucial educational aspect of Indian orality has been the total dependence on the teacher-student contact which dominated not only the time of primary orality, when script was unknown, but also the time of residual orality when writing was known but not fully internalized, and has still left its imprint on modern education132

132 E.E. McDonald, Journal of Asian Studies 25 (1965/66), pp. 456, 459.


when literacy has been internalized by a large middle class. The teacher was the sole font of wisdom, acquiring knowledge from other sources was discouraged,133

133 Manu III 160 speaks disparagingly of a man who learns the Veda from his son (putracarya "having his son as his teacher").


and students displayed usually no initiative of their own.134

134 The face-to-face contact in oral instruction makes "the totality of symbol-referent relationships ... more immediately experienced ... and ... thus more deeply socialized" (J. Goody and I. Watt, in Literacy in Traditional Societies, p. 29). A text that is memorized and fully internalized results in a much more powerful bond with the student's mind than a text merely read once or twice, resulting in a more conservative attitude; this has been observed by H .Coward among modern Buddhists: ALB 40 (1986), pp. 299-313.


This has been called a bi-polar instruction;135

135 John Adams, Evolution of Educational Theory, London 1912, p. 18.


tri-polar instruction136

136 J.E. Adamson, The Individual and the Environment, London 1921, pp. 30-32; cf. also N. Vedamani Manuel, in Heritage of the Tamils. Education and Vocation, pp. 103f. It is remarkable what Abu 'l-Fazl says in his Ain-i Akbari (trans. H. Blochmann, Calcutta 1927 repr. Lahore 1975, p. 289) about Akbar's view on this matter: "Care is to be taken that he learns to understand everything himself, but the teacher may assist him a little."


is rarely alluded to or even recommended, and that only in later texts: this would be a concept of education as a relation between the pupil and the world around him to which he must adjust, with the teacher as a catalyst. An exception may have been some religious instruction, where the highest insights of self-realization, one's identity with brahman, etc., cannot be taught. Already the Bhagavadgita declared: "For in this world there is no purifier equal to wisdom; that finds he who becomes perfected by yoga, by himself in his self in the course of time."137

137 Mahabharata VI 26, 38 (= Bhagavadgita IV 38)
na hi jnanena sadrsam pavitram iha vidyate /
tat svayam yoga-samsiddhah kalenatmani vindati / 38 /

 
The most outspoken -- in fact, quite striking -- exception is the sectarian Yogavasistha (ninth century A.D.?) which claims: "The enlightenment evolves when this [text] is just read, as from a potent seed that has been sown a good fruit will necessarily come into being ... Anybody knowing something of words and word meaning understands this [text] by himself; but he who does not know it by himself, should hear it from a learned man."138

138 Yogavasistha Maharamayana of Valmiki ed. Thakur Prasad Dwivedi, Delhi 1988, I 18.1; 34.
asyam vacita-matrayam prabodhah sampravartate /
bijad iva sato vyuptad avasyam bhavi sat phalam / 1 / ...
budhyate svayam evedam kimcit pada-padarthavit /
svayam yas <vas> tu na vettidam srotavyam tena panditat / 34 /


Vasishta Yoga Samhita (also known as Maha-Ramayana, Arsha Ramayana, Vasiṣṭha Ramayana, Yogavasistha-Ramayana and Jnanavasistha.) is a historically popular and influential syncretic philosophical text of Hinduism, dated to the 6th CE or 7th CE-14th CE or 15th CE. It is attributed to Maharishi Valmiki, but the real author is unknown. The complete text contains over 29,000 verses. The short version of the text is called Laghu yogavāsiṣṭham and contains 6,000 verses.

The text is named after sage Vasistha who is mentioned and revered in the seventh book of the Rigveda, and who was called as the first sage of the Vedanta school of Hindu philosophy by Adi Shankara. The text is structured as a discourse of sage Vasistha to Prince Rama.

The text consists of six books. The first book presents Rama's frustration with the nature of life, human suffering and disdain for the world. The second describes, through the character of Rama, the desire for liberation and the nature of those who seek such liberation. The third and fourth books assert that liberation comes through a spiritual life, one that requires self-effort, and present cosmology and metaphysical theories of existence embedded in stories. These two books are known for emphasizing free will and human creative power. The fifth book discusses meditation and its powers in liberating the individual, while the last book describes the state of an enlightened and blissful Rama.

Yoga Vasistha teachings are structured as stories and fables, with a philosophical foundation similar to those found in Advaita Vedanta, is particularly associated with drsti-srsti subschool of Advaita which holds that the "whole world of things is the object of mind". The text is notable for expounding the principles of Maya and Brahman, as well as the principles of non-duality, and its discussion of Yoga. The short form of the text was translated into Persian by the 15th-century.

-- Yoga Vasistha, by Wikipedia


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 meditation 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. 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.

-- The Birth of Orientalism, by Urs App


The Tamil grammar Nannul [13th century] 25 says that "as the crookedness of a piece of timber is made straight by the application of a nul (lit. "thread"), a carpenter's line or cord, so the crookedness of the mind is removed or made straight by the application of nul, a literary work; therefore the word nul, besides signifying thread, is also figuratively used to denote a carpenter's or mason's line or cord." nul is the Tamil rendering of Sanskrit sutra "thread, text, single statement of a text." Is this an indication that a text by itself can guide the student? Perhaps not; the Nannul elsewhere stresses listening to teachers' oral instruction. But the students are expected to deepen their insight by talking to fellow students, by teaching, and by public lecturing.139

139 Cf. Kamil Zvelebil, Companion Studies, pp. 227-234 and p. 221 below.


Nannūl is a work on Tamil grammar written by a Jain ascetic Pavananthi Munivar around 13th century CE. It is the most significant work on Tamil grammar after Tolkāppiyam. The work credits Western Ganga vassal king Seeya Gangan of Kolar with patronising it.

About 20 commentaries have been written on Nannūl up to 19th century CE. Nannūl was divided into five sections: written language, spoken language, semantics, poetic language and rhetorical devices. The latter three sections have been lost, so only the parts on written and spoken language are extant today.


-- Nannul, by Wikipedia


Generally it is unimaginable that an Indian student could have come across a manuscript of Panini's grammar, of the Mahabhasya or a philosophical sutra and would have figured out the content of these texts by himself. It was this attitude and not the alleged colonialist prejudices of the Asiatic Society that prevented Indian pandits from deciphering the inscriptions of Asoka [Ashoka] [Ashoka]140

140 The historian Shams-i-Siraj 'Afif reports that Firuz Shah Tughluq (A.D. 1351-1388) attempted without success to have some inscriptions on Asoka's [Ashoka's] pillars read by brahmins: H.M. Elliot, The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians: The Muhammadan Period (ed. John Dowson, London 1867-1877) III 352. Lewis Rice, Mysore Inscriptions, Bangalore 1879, repr. New Delhi 1983, p.v reports similar problems with old inscriptions from Mysore.


before the Englishman James Prinsep did, as Peter T. Daniels has recently alleged.141

141 Peter D. Daniels at the 1987 AOS meeting in Los Angeles. Though Indian (Hindu) scholars had proved incapable of reading the old inscriptions when they were asked by the Muslim rulers, Indian pandits (Prem Chandra Tarkavagis and Kamalakanta Vidyalankara) rendered valuable assistance to the early decipherers of Indian inscriptions: Samita Sinha, Pandits in a Changing Environment, Calcutta 1993, pp. 129f. and 140; R. Salomon, Indian Epigraphy, New York 1998, p. 202.


Orientalism has been subjected to imperialism, positivism, utopianism, historicism, Darwinism, racism, Freudianism, Marxism, Spenglerism. But Orientalism, like many of the natural and social sciences, has had “paradigms” of research, its own learned societies, its own Establishment. During the nineteenth century the field increased enormously in prestige, as did also the reputation and influence of such institutions as the Société asiatique, the Royal Asiatic Society, the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, and the American Oriental Society. With the growth of these societies went also an increase, all across Europe, in the number of professorships in Oriental studies; consequently there was an expansion in the available means for disseminating Orientalism. Orientalist periodicals, beginning with the Fundgraben des Orients (1809), multiplied the quantity of knowledge as well as the number of specialties....

In January 1784 Jones convened the inaugural meeting of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, which was to be for India what the Royal Society was for England. As first president of the society and as magistrate, Jones acquired the effective knowledge of the Orient and of Orientals that was later to make him the undisputed founder (the phrase is A.J. Arberry’s) of Orientalism. To rule and to learn, then to compare Orient with Occident: these were Jones’s goals, which, with an irresistible impulse always to codify, to subdue the infinite variety of the Orient to “a complete digest” of laws, figures, customs, and works, he is believed to have achieved....

Many of the early English Orientalists in India were, like Jones, legal scholars, or else, interestingly enough, they were medical men with strong missionary leanings. So far as one can tell, most of them were imbued with the dual purpose of investigating “the sciences and the arts of Asia, with the hope of facilitating ameliorations there and of advancing knowledge and improving the arts at home”
: so the common Orientalist goal was stated in the Centenary Volume of the Royal Asiatic Society founded in 1823 by Henry Thomas Colebrooke... Proper knowledge of the Orient proceeded from a thorough study of the classical texts, and only after that to an application of those texts to the modern Orient. Faced with the obvious decrepitude and political impotence of the modern Oriental, the European Orientalist found it his duty to rescue some portion of a lost, past classical Oriental grandeur in order to “facilitate ameliorations” in the present Orient. What the European took from the classical Oriental past was a vision (and thousands of facts and artifacts) which only he could employ to the best advantage; to the modern Oriental he gave facilitation and amelioration -- and, too, the benefit of his judgment as to what was best for the modern Orient.

-- Orientalism, by Edward W. Said


Reading a book is essentially individualistic and not a group activity as for instance the group chanting of Vedic texts called ghosa.142

142 F. Staal, Nambudiri Veda Recitation, pp. 59f.; examples in the record by John Levy and Frits Staal, The Four Vedas, LP Album, New York 1968.


This fact may explain the outburst of literary activity in the early Mahayana schools at a time when writing became more common. Traditional Buddhist texts were handed down orally and their validity and correctness were constantly reaffirmed by group recitation of the monks; making additions to the canon was difficult if not impossible. But a single author could produce and propagate a manuscript, circumventing the control by the monastic community.143

143 R. Gombrich, Journal of Pali and Buddhist Studies (Nagoya) 1 (1988), pp. 29-46. Note in this context W. Ong's observation: "Sight isolates, sound incorporates ... A sound-dominated verbal economy is consonant with aggregative (harmonizing) tendencies" (Orality and Literacy, pp. 72f.).


The increasing distrust in one's own ability of reasoning is exposed in the commentaries on Samkhya-karika 51 where the eight attainments (siddhi) are listed:

uhah sabdo 'dhyayanam duhkha-vighatas trayah suhrd-praptih /
danam ca siddhayo 'stau ...


"Reasoning, oral instruction [from a teacher], study, three repressions of [the threefold] misery, intercourse of friends, and gift are the eight attainments ... "

The oldest preserved commentary, the Yukti-dipika (ca. A.D. 550) explained uha 'reasoning' as "understanding the intended object solely by the force of reasoning that goes beyond perception, inference and tradition" and calls it the first attainment. The commentary ascribed to Gaudapada essentially says the same: Reasoning like "What is the truth here? ... What is the highest good?" leads to the understanding that the soul (purusa) is different from the Prime Materia (pradhana) and the other principles of Samkhya which lead to liberation. It is the first attainment. The commentary by Vacaspatimisra (ca. A.D. 850) calls reasoning the third attainment, subordinate to the suppression of pain, and consisting only in "an investigation of the meaning of the tradition by a reasoning that is not inconsistent with the tradition itself." The intercourse of friends likewise is reinterpreted in a traditionalist mode. For the Yuktidipika it was the situation where "one obtains removal of doubt by reliance on a close good friend," for Gaudapada it was that "one obtains liberation through knowledge secured from a friend"; but for Vacaspatimisra "One does not trust the matter even when one has investigated it oneself with reasoning, until one has discussed it with the teacher and junior and equal students."  
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Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

Postby admin » Mon Jan 09, 2023 7:40 am

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

Image
[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:

Image
? = 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.

Image
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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Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

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Part 2 of 2

_______________

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:

Image
? 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.

Image
PLATE 1 DHINIKI COPPERPLATE GRANT.

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PLATE 2 DHINIKI COPPERPLATE GRANT.  

Transcript. Plate I.

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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.
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Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

Postby admin » Thu Feb 02, 2023 6:28 am

“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.


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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.”

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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.

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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)

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Rene Cloke, Fairy Artists
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Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

Postby admin » Sat Feb 04, 2023 1:33 am

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

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Seals showing Indus script, an ancient undeciphered writing system

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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

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Jiahu symbols

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Banpo symbols

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Longshan symbols

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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.

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Dispilio tablet

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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

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Indus script

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Vikramkhol inscription

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Pushkarasari script

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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.

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Proto-Elamite script

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Byblos syllabry

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Cypro-Minoan syllabry

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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

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Ba script

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Khitan large script

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Khitan small script

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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

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Singapore Stone

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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.

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India-Singapore relations


Central Asia

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

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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]

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Cretan hieroglyphs

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Linear A

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Phaistos disc

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Southwest Paleohispanic Script

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Sitovo inscription

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Folio 7r of MS 73525

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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)

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Libyco-Berber

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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

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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.

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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.

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Cascajal block

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Isthmian script

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Zapotec script

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Teotihuacan glyph

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Mixtec Script

Pacific scripts

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

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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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Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

Postby admin » Sat Feb 25, 2023 2:37 am

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.
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