05-21-2007, 11:02 PM
Two cross posts from the unmasking AIT thread:
one
<!--QuoteBegin-dhu+Jan 29 2007, 07:03 AM-->QUOTE(dhu @ Jan 29 2007, 07:03 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin--><!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Another observation that Professor Edgerton makes challenges our persistent assumption that animal fables function mainly as adjuncts to religious dogma, acting as indoctrination devices to condition the moral behaviour of small children and obedient adults. Not the Machiavellian Panchatantra: "Vishnu Sarma undertakes", Edgerton notes, "to instruct three dull and ignorant princes in the principles of polity, by means of stories . . . .[This is] a textbook of artha, 'worldly wisdom, or niti, polity, which the Hindus regard as one of the three objects of human desire, the other being dharma, 'religion or morally proper conduct' and kama 'love' . . . . The morals of the stories are often amoral. They glorify shrewdness and practical wisdom in the affairs of life, and especially in politics and the conduct of government."
This realistic practicality explains why the original Sanskrit villain jackal, the decidedly jealous, sneaky and evil vizier-like Damanaka ('Victor') is his frame-story's winner, and not his goody-goody brother Karataka who is presumably left 'Horribly Howling' at the vile injustice of Part One's final murderous events. <b>In fact, in its steady migration westward the persistent theme of evil-triumphant in Kalila and Dimna, Part One frequently outraged Jewish, Christian and Muslim religious leaders â so much so, indeed, that ibn al-Muqaffa carefully inserts (no doubt hoping to pacifiy the powerful religious zealots of his own turbulent times) an entire extra chapter at the end of Part One of his Arabic masterpiece, putting Dimna in jail, on trial and eventually to death. </b>So much for naughty jackals! Â
Needless to say there is no vestige of such dogmatic moralising in the collations that remain to us of the pre-Islamic original â the Panchatantra. Technically, from the perspective of a more subtle and flexible functionality, Joseph Jacobs in 1888[24] offers a less coercive interpretation of how the Panchatantra/Kalila and Dimna stories might work more effectively to modify human behaviour: " . . . . <b>if one thinks of it, the very raison d'être of the Fable is to imply its moral without mentioning it."</b>
panchatantra link wiki<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
[right][snapback]63722[/snapback][/right]
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
and
<!--QuoteBegin-dhu+Jan 31 2007, 07:04 AM-->QUOTE(dhu @ Jan 31 2007, 07:04 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin--><!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->I was thinking of Olender's paper and origins of Pauline Christianity and the AIT and have come to a new conclusion.
The AIT completes the work started by Paul. Paul was the one that broke the social link to Judaism by allowing non Jews to become Christians and rejecting circumcision. However he was unable to take the Hebrew origins out of the Bible. The Greek and Latin versions were explained as trying to make the message reach Europe but the real reason is to take the Bible out of Hebrew. The AIT with its core idea of Sanskrit as the link language for IE languages enables this transformation. Till now I was thinking all these German scholars of AIT were trying to get a glorified ancestors to refute the Brits calling them descendents of Huns and other tribes, but now I see it as the greater project of gettig the Bible out of the Hebrew language in order to make it more universal.
Thus European scholars AIT seeks to break the language link of Hebrew.
But how to reconcile the fact that most AIT scholars are now Jewish? And that the AIT has stagnated now and is going nowhere.
Maybe the real reason is to ensure to goes no where.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-Husky+Jan 30 2007, 06:28 AM-->QUOTE(Husky @ Jan 30 2007, 06:28 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->And what's up with 'Professor' Edgerton describing the Panchatantra as 'Machiavellian'?
[right][snapback]63765[/snapback][/right]
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
husky,
herrenvolk ethics is restricted to the genre of "manifesto" and this restriction has been increasing in severity for a very long time (see quote below). <b>the fact that the prototypical semitism was a leading characteristic of greek thought was a minor scandal for certain quarters when balagangadhara's theories were first aired, as well a polemical point against balu's theory. if the give and take between romans and jews can be traced to the effects of this type of ethics predominating among both, then this would essentially confirm ramana's contention that "The AIT completes the work started by Paul." I mean, we already know that aquinas massively imported greek normative thought to buttress the semitism of christianity. if paul was the one who started the process, by obviously relying on his roman background, then where does that leave the question of the semetic "ethical" "revolutionary locus?? why selectively forget the pagan past of the jews.</b>
<b>AIT allows for IE development within a normative europe, but this an absolute impossibilty given the specific nature of vedic ethics (acc to balu, non-normative (indian) ethics cannot be derived from normative (euro) ethics, while the opposite is certainly possible, given certain specific circumstances. these circumstances were the invasion of indic into europe. </b> notice the early native manifesto polemics accompanying the gypsy migrations into europe which continue down to this day . notice the slight change of parshu zoroastrianism into an "ethical-type prophetic religion", as it migrated into the ME/Med from the east. <b>the panchatantra misinterpretaion and reformulation is just another example.</b> by contrast, there is nil manifesto-type demonization of parsis in india. narratives can travel freely within asia, given that the "the strategy of social interaction is the same within the Asian culture" (balu). such is not obviously the case when going into europe..
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->âThis absence of the terminology to talk about ethics differentiates the Indian traditions from the Greek culture. <b>That is to say, there is a difference in kind between the Greek ethics and the Indian ethics: </b>one had the words to talk about it, whereas the other does not. Secondly, this difference has some significance regarding the 'reflective' thinking that VL is supposed to exemplify. How is it possible to reason and think about ethics, when you do not even have the words in which to do so? Obviously, you cannot. That is, there is a second kind of difference too, a consequence of the first: the Indian culture did not have the ability to reason and think about ethics. (That is why VL provides âa mosaic-like picture of feelings, attitudes and thoughtsâ.) Thirdly, <b>if this is the difference that separates Indians from their Greek (or Roman) counterparts, even though coming after the Greeks by almost by a thousand years, the Indian thinkers are at the lower rung of the moral ladder: the Indians (of about a thousand years ago), followed by the Greeks (more than two thousand five hundred years ago),</b> and then the contemporary moral philosophy. There is, however, a degree of difference between the Greeks and the contemporary moral philosophy: the latter is 'more' reflective than the former. [/B] (Pp.96-97) balangangadhara citing a western theorist<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
kazanas too makes note of a concretedness in ME narratives, which he generalizes to the western sphere:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The Vedic tradition is not encaged in gross material forms </b>and its deities are not such anthropomorphic (or zoomorphic) figures <b>as in other [narratives],</b> <b>like those of Mesopotamia, Egypt or Greece. </b>In the hymns and in later texts we find abstractions, qualities and essences to a greater degree than concrete characteristics and actions. Thus there is creation with gross materials as in the RV hymn to Viövakarman X 81 or the dismemberment of Puruêa in X 90 but also, and more often, with subtle forces like mÃyà or asuratva through will, inner vision and meditation as in the nÃsadÃya X 129, or in X 190, and in the upanishadic formulas sa aikêata âhe envisionedâ, soâkÃmayata âhe desiredâ, sa tapoâtapyata âhe meditated/brooded or practised austerityâ in BÃhÃdaraèyaka Up I, 2, 5-6. Thus the Vedic mind, even if only in few and select individuals, could conceive and accept that Manu and the Seven Seers took with them on the boat the seeds of creatures and that through tapas Manu would be able to create anew all the creatures including devas and asuras (MB III 185, 49-52).
<b>The Mesopotamians, on the other hand, do not display a similar capacity for abstraction:</b> there is nothing like mahazd devÃZnÃm asuratvazm ezkam âsingle is the great god-power of the godsâ (RV III 55 refrain) or the One that breathed without air, of itself, prior to existence and nonexistence (X 129). The creation of men in AtrahasÃs requires gross materials like clay and blood, specialist gods like Nintu (Jacobsen108), who is the great goddess Ninhursag now in her aspect of womb-goddess or divine midwife, and concrete actions as when âShe pinched off fourteen pieces (of clay)/⦠seven pieces on the right/ seven on the leftâ and âShe covered her head/ ⦠/ Put on her beltâ¦â etc (MM 16-7). In the Enäma Elish Marduk creates the universe from parts of Tiamat, deification of Mother-chaos, again in very concrete terms (MM 255-7), like the dismemberment in the Puruêa Säkta. <b>Consider also the Mesopotamian need for temples and statues of gods, whereas the rigvedic people had none and were content to know their deities by their attributes (and as expressions of the One) and made their offerings on any patch of ground strewn with sacred grass.</b> The Tablet of Destinies (symbolic but solid) is another example of the Mesopotamian concrete concepts. <b>Thus the Mesopotamian mind apparently could not deal in abstract entities like Iáà (in the ¬B version) or the Seven Seers (in the epic) or a sacrifice that creates a new generation of humans or the mere âseedsâ of creatures.</b>
link.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
[right][snapback]63833[/snapback][/right]
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
These are important to understand the spread of Indic folklore to the West as it is primarily founded on the Mesopatamian mind despite its Greek and Roman facade.
one
<!--QuoteBegin-dhu+Jan 29 2007, 07:03 AM-->QUOTE(dhu @ Jan 29 2007, 07:03 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin--><!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Another observation that Professor Edgerton makes challenges our persistent assumption that animal fables function mainly as adjuncts to religious dogma, acting as indoctrination devices to condition the moral behaviour of small children and obedient adults. Not the Machiavellian Panchatantra: "Vishnu Sarma undertakes", Edgerton notes, "to instruct three dull and ignorant princes in the principles of polity, by means of stories . . . .[This is] a textbook of artha, 'worldly wisdom, or niti, polity, which the Hindus regard as one of the three objects of human desire, the other being dharma, 'religion or morally proper conduct' and kama 'love' . . . . The morals of the stories are often amoral. They glorify shrewdness and practical wisdom in the affairs of life, and especially in politics and the conduct of government."
This realistic practicality explains why the original Sanskrit villain jackal, the decidedly jealous, sneaky and evil vizier-like Damanaka ('Victor') is his frame-story's winner, and not his goody-goody brother Karataka who is presumably left 'Horribly Howling' at the vile injustice of Part One's final murderous events. <b>In fact, in its steady migration westward the persistent theme of evil-triumphant in Kalila and Dimna, Part One frequently outraged Jewish, Christian and Muslim religious leaders â so much so, indeed, that ibn al-Muqaffa carefully inserts (no doubt hoping to pacifiy the powerful religious zealots of his own turbulent times) an entire extra chapter at the end of Part One of his Arabic masterpiece, putting Dimna in jail, on trial and eventually to death. </b>So much for naughty jackals! Â
Needless to say there is no vestige of such dogmatic moralising in the collations that remain to us of the pre-Islamic original â the Panchatantra. Technically, from the perspective of a more subtle and flexible functionality, Joseph Jacobs in 1888[24] offers a less coercive interpretation of how the Panchatantra/Kalila and Dimna stories might work more effectively to modify human behaviour: " . . . . <b>if one thinks of it, the very raison d'être of the Fable is to imply its moral without mentioning it."</b>
panchatantra link wiki<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
[right][snapback]63722[/snapback][/right]
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
and
<!--QuoteBegin-dhu+Jan 31 2007, 07:04 AM-->QUOTE(dhu @ Jan 31 2007, 07:04 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin--><!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->I was thinking of Olender's paper and origins of Pauline Christianity and the AIT and have come to a new conclusion.
The AIT completes the work started by Paul. Paul was the one that broke the social link to Judaism by allowing non Jews to become Christians and rejecting circumcision. However he was unable to take the Hebrew origins out of the Bible. The Greek and Latin versions were explained as trying to make the message reach Europe but the real reason is to take the Bible out of Hebrew. The AIT with its core idea of Sanskrit as the link language for IE languages enables this transformation. Till now I was thinking all these German scholars of AIT were trying to get a glorified ancestors to refute the Brits calling them descendents of Huns and other tribes, but now I see it as the greater project of gettig the Bible out of the Hebrew language in order to make it more universal.
Thus European scholars AIT seeks to break the language link of Hebrew.
But how to reconcile the fact that most AIT scholars are now Jewish? And that the AIT has stagnated now and is going nowhere.
Maybe the real reason is to ensure to goes no where.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-Husky+Jan 30 2007, 06:28 AM-->QUOTE(Husky @ Jan 30 2007, 06:28 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->And what's up with 'Professor' Edgerton describing the Panchatantra as 'Machiavellian'?
[right][snapback]63765[/snapback][/right]
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
husky,
herrenvolk ethics is restricted to the genre of "manifesto" and this restriction has been increasing in severity for a very long time (see quote below). <b>the fact that the prototypical semitism was a leading characteristic of greek thought was a minor scandal for certain quarters when balagangadhara's theories were first aired, as well a polemical point against balu's theory. if the give and take between romans and jews can be traced to the effects of this type of ethics predominating among both, then this would essentially confirm ramana's contention that "The AIT completes the work started by Paul." I mean, we already know that aquinas massively imported greek normative thought to buttress the semitism of christianity. if paul was the one who started the process, by obviously relying on his roman background, then where does that leave the question of the semetic "ethical" "revolutionary locus?? why selectively forget the pagan past of the jews.</b>
<b>AIT allows for IE development within a normative europe, but this an absolute impossibilty given the specific nature of vedic ethics (acc to balu, non-normative (indian) ethics cannot be derived from normative (euro) ethics, while the opposite is certainly possible, given certain specific circumstances. these circumstances were the invasion of indic into europe. </b> notice the early native manifesto polemics accompanying the gypsy migrations into europe which continue down to this day . notice the slight change of parshu zoroastrianism into an "ethical-type prophetic religion", as it migrated into the ME/Med from the east. <b>the panchatantra misinterpretaion and reformulation is just another example.</b> by contrast, there is nil manifesto-type demonization of parsis in india. narratives can travel freely within asia, given that the "the strategy of social interaction is the same within the Asian culture" (balu). such is not obviously the case when going into europe..
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->âThis absence of the terminology to talk about ethics differentiates the Indian traditions from the Greek culture. <b>That is to say, there is a difference in kind between the Greek ethics and the Indian ethics: </b>one had the words to talk about it, whereas the other does not. Secondly, this difference has some significance regarding the 'reflective' thinking that VL is supposed to exemplify. How is it possible to reason and think about ethics, when you do not even have the words in which to do so? Obviously, you cannot. That is, there is a second kind of difference too, a consequence of the first: the Indian culture did not have the ability to reason and think about ethics. (That is why VL provides âa mosaic-like picture of feelings, attitudes and thoughtsâ.) Thirdly, <b>if this is the difference that separates Indians from their Greek (or Roman) counterparts, even though coming after the Greeks by almost by a thousand years, the Indian thinkers are at the lower rung of the moral ladder: the Indians (of about a thousand years ago), followed by the Greeks (more than two thousand five hundred years ago),</b> and then the contemporary moral philosophy. There is, however, a degree of difference between the Greeks and the contemporary moral philosophy: the latter is 'more' reflective than the former. [/B] (Pp.96-97) balangangadhara citing a western theorist<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
kazanas too makes note of a concretedness in ME narratives, which he generalizes to the western sphere:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The Vedic tradition is not encaged in gross material forms </b>and its deities are not such anthropomorphic (or zoomorphic) figures <b>as in other [narratives],</b> <b>like those of Mesopotamia, Egypt or Greece. </b>In the hymns and in later texts we find abstractions, qualities and essences to a greater degree than concrete characteristics and actions. Thus there is creation with gross materials as in the RV hymn to Viövakarman X 81 or the dismemberment of Puruêa in X 90 but also, and more often, with subtle forces like mÃyà or asuratva through will, inner vision and meditation as in the nÃsadÃya X 129, or in X 190, and in the upanishadic formulas sa aikêata âhe envisionedâ, soâkÃmayata âhe desiredâ, sa tapoâtapyata âhe meditated/brooded or practised austerityâ in BÃhÃdaraèyaka Up I, 2, 5-6. Thus the Vedic mind, even if only in few and select individuals, could conceive and accept that Manu and the Seven Seers took with them on the boat the seeds of creatures and that through tapas Manu would be able to create anew all the creatures including devas and asuras (MB III 185, 49-52).
<b>The Mesopotamians, on the other hand, do not display a similar capacity for abstraction:</b> there is nothing like mahazd devÃZnÃm asuratvazm ezkam âsingle is the great god-power of the godsâ (RV III 55 refrain) or the One that breathed without air, of itself, prior to existence and nonexistence (X 129). The creation of men in AtrahasÃs requires gross materials like clay and blood, specialist gods like Nintu (Jacobsen108), who is the great goddess Ninhursag now in her aspect of womb-goddess or divine midwife, and concrete actions as when âShe pinched off fourteen pieces (of clay)/⦠seven pieces on the right/ seven on the leftâ and âShe covered her head/ ⦠/ Put on her beltâ¦â etc (MM 16-7). In the Enäma Elish Marduk creates the universe from parts of Tiamat, deification of Mother-chaos, again in very concrete terms (MM 255-7), like the dismemberment in the Puruêa Säkta. <b>Consider also the Mesopotamian need for temples and statues of gods, whereas the rigvedic people had none and were content to know their deities by their attributes (and as expressions of the One) and made their offerings on any patch of ground strewn with sacred grass.</b> The Tablet of Destinies (symbolic but solid) is another example of the Mesopotamian concrete concepts. <b>Thus the Mesopotamian mind apparently could not deal in abstract entities like Iáà (in the ¬B version) or the Seven Seers (in the epic) or a sacrifice that creates a new generation of humans or the mere âseedsâ of creatures.</b>
link.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
[right][snapback]63833[/snapback][/right]
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
These are important to understand the spread of Indic folklore to the West as it is primarily founded on the Mesopatamian mind despite its Greek and Roman facade.