RE: [world-vedic] India as a creative civilization

[Guest guest]

Yes all right!!!! The marxist poeple are fanatics follwers, they are no

serius philosophers, they are believers in one materialistic mith. Carg Jung

appoint that they are religionist cult. Yes they have cult to his gods,

divinized Marx and his followers Lenning, Mao, It is a cult, antropholatry

religions. FAnatics. they believe in a mithological sistem.

Hare Krsna das.

 

De: gururajd <gururajd

Para: vediculture <vediculture>

Fecha: Martes 30 de Enero de 2001 11:48 PM

Asunto: [world-vedic] India as a creative civilization

 

 

>

>http://www.organiser.org/21jan2001/cover2.htm

>-----------------------

>

>India as a creative civilization

>

>N.S. Rajaram

>

>Background: Saving colonial history

>

>The recently concluded Indian History Congress saw the Nobel Laureate

>(Marxist) Economist Amartya Sen lecturing to historians not to mix

>mythology with history, all the while protesting that he had no

>competence to tell them how to do their job. This seemingly lofty

>exhortation is actually part of a sustained campaign by the

>secularist Leftists to save their theories and their reputations from

>crumbling. One theme runs through the whole game: label all

>challenges to their theories as "Hindutva propaganda" so there is no

>debate on their merits. And to do this they trot out some 'eminent

>figure' from the West to give them some credibility. A few months ago

>it was Michael Witzel and his not-so-eminent sidekick Steve Farmer

>telling Indians how they had to abuse Hinduism in order to save India

>and objective scholarship from heathens. And now Amartya Sen from

>Cambridge is telling Indians that asking for a Ram temple at Ayodhya

>is confusing myth for history.

>

>Both are diversionary tactics-and part of the same salvage operation.

>Witzel & Co created a conspiracy theory involving a horse seal to

>hide the fact that their pet colonial-missionary model based on the

>Aryan Invasion has collapsed, taking with it the reputations and

>possibly careers, of people like him. And now the same tactic is

>being applied to Medieval history to obscure the fact that

>archaeology exposes temple destructions at Ayodhya and a thousand

>other places. Where Witzel and his cohorts are holding up threat

>to "India and objective scholarship" as their red flag, Amartya Sen,

>the spokesman for secularist historians is holding up "mythologizing

>history". But ever true to his colour, he has also advised Indian

>Leftists to become like the Chinese!

>

>Obscurantism vs. 'progress'

>

>Be as it may. My main goal in this essay is to expose the hollowness

>of the academic dogma that underlies study of India and her

>civilization today. In all this there is an unstated doctrine that

>anything Hindu is obscurantist and everything anti-Hindu-Marxism,

>Christianity, Islam- is progressive and enlightened. It is a

>widespread canard, especially popular in Western academia, but

>faithfully followed by their spiritual slaves in India, that Indian

>civilization developed mainly by borrowing from others and not

>through innovation and creative endeavour. (The Aryan Invasion Theory

>is part of this.) This, however, is a recent view, one that can be

>traced to the motivated scholarship of the European colonial period

>and its immediate aftermath. The reality is that throughout history,

>except during the colonial period, peoples of all nations have looked

>to India as the most creative and original of civilizations. Medieval

>and ancient scholars from Arabia, Spain, China and even Greece-all

>acknowledged their indebtendness to Indian science. For example, the

>medieval Arab scholar Sa'id Ibn Ahmad al-Andalusi (1029-1070) wrote

>in his Tabaqat al-'umam, one of the earliest books on history of

>sciences:

>

>"The first nation to have cultivated science is India. ... India is

>known for the wisdom of its people. Over many centuries, all the

>kings of the past have recognized the ability of the Indians in all

>the branches of knowledge... The kings of China have stated that the

>kings of the world are five in number and all the people of the world

>are their subjects. They mentioned the king of China, the king of

>India, the king of the Turks, the king of the Persians, and the king

>of the Romans... They referred to the king of India as the "king of

>wisdom" because of the Indians' careful treatment of ulum (sciences)

>and all the branches of knowledge. ... The Indians, known to all

>nations for many centuries, are the metal (essence) of wisdom, the

>source of fairness and objectivity. They are people of sublime

>pensiveness, universal apologues, and useful and rare inventions. ...

>To their credit the Indians have made great strides in the study of

>numbers and of geometry. They have acquired immense information and

>reached the zenith in their knowledge of the movements of the stars

>(astronomy).... After all that they have surpassed all other peoples

>in their knowledge of medical sciences.."

>

>Not only medieval Arabs, even early Christian schoalrs recognized

>Indian contribution. Writing in 662 AD, when the Byzantine Empire was

>at its height and it was thought that there was no knowledge beyond

>Greek knowledge, Sebokht, the Bishop of Quinnesrin in North Syria

>observed: "I will omit all discussion of the science of the Hindus

>(Indians), a people not the same as Syrians, their subtle discoveries

>in the science of astronomy, discoveries more ingenious than those of

>the Greeks and the Babylonians; their valuable method of calculation;

>their computing that surpasses description. I wish only to say that

>this computation is done by means of nine signs. If those who believe

>because they speak Greek, that they have reached the limits of

>science should know these things, they would be convinced that there

>are also others who know something."

>

>He was referring of course to the famous place decimal system using

>zero invented by the Hindus. (It is sometimes called the Arabic

>numeral system, but the Arabs themselves called it the Indian system

>acknowledging their indebtedness to India). In fact the Greek (and

>the Roman) method of computing and solving equations was cumbersome

>in the extreme when compared to the method used by the Indians.

>Mathematics as we know today would hardly be possible without this

>invention-probably the greatest single advance in the history of

>mathematics. This brings up a basic issue about India's contribution:

>while the world has by and large acknowledged it in the spiritual

>realm-like Yoga, Vedanta and Buddhism-there is widespread belief that

>the Indians were other worldly and did not pay attention to material

>progress.

>

>This is far removed from the truth. In addition to mathematics and

>astronomy (more of which later), India led the world in ferrous and

>non-ferrous metallurgy, until the industrial base was deliberately

>destroyed by the British. Indian steel was deemed the best in the

>world well into the eighteenth century. (Steel is an Indian

>invention.) Indian textiles have been prized throughout history,

>until it was suppressed by the British, though it is now being

>gradually regained. This being the case, why does this image of India

>as largely an imitative civilization still persist? (This though is

>mainly in the West and among its Indian followers-not Asia.)

>

>Three reasons can be given: (1) colonial stereotyping; (2) Marxist

>domination of intellectual life in the post-colonial period; and (3)

>scholarly incompetence. The colonial image is gradually eroding but

>the Marxist formulation of India as an imitative culture is the

>result of what Marx himself wrote about India: "India has no history.

>What is called history is only the record of successive intruders."

>Marx of course knew nothing about India, but his statement became

>sacrosanct to Marxist scholars who continue to dominate the

>intellectual scene in India as elsewhere. This is the reason also why

>they so fiercely hold on to the Aryan Invasion Theory against all

>evidence. To them, anything good in India must be an import.

>

>Scholarly incompetence

>

>This brings us to the third cause, professional incompetence.

>Scholars of the colonial period whose works still constitute standard

>references on India, were mostly bureaucrats and missionaries and

>lacked the scientific knowledge needed to appreciate true

>achievements. This is generally true of history of science. Einstein

>himself complained more than once that most historians of science

>were linguists who really did not understand the problems that

>scientists were grappling with. It is hardly surprising that charges

>of lack of scientific capacity and originality on the part of Indians

>is made by those who are themselves scientifically ignorant-like

>nineteenth century European theologians and linguists continuing down

>to their modern Indian followers. It is interesting to contrast their

>views with those of the competent scientists who studied ancient

>India-that is to say the views of people who were qualified to

>express opinions about science.

>

>This will help shed light on the true fact-of prejudice and unfounded

>charges used as a fig leaf to conceal their own scientific ignorance.

>Albrecht Weber was a leading nineteenth century German linguist. At a

>time when the relationship between Indian and Greek mathematics was

>being seriously debated, he went on to assert that the Vedic

>mathematics was borrowed by the Indians from the Greeks following

>Alexander's invasion. His actual statement was that there

>was "nothing of a literary-historical nature standing in the way of

>the assumption of a use (by the Vedic mathematicians) of the

>teachings of Hero of Alexandria". Hero of Alexandria is now known to

>have been living in 62 AD! Even in Weber's time Hero was known to be

>later than 200 BC.

>

>Now of course we know from archaeology that Vedic mathematics must

>have existed 200 years before that. There is more to this that goes

>to highlight the creativity and originality of Indian mathematics.

>After more than twenty years of research, the distinguished American

>mathematician and historian of science, A. Seidenberg showed that

>Greek, Egyptian and Old-Babylonian mathematics are derivatives of the

>Vedic mathematics known as the Sulbasutras. In 1962, he reached the

>following epoch- making conclusion: "... the elements of ancient

>geometry found in Egypt (c. 2050-1800 BC) and Babylonia ( c 1900-1750

>BC) stem from a ritual system of the kind observed in the

>Sulbasutras." Fifteen years later, in a famous paper, appropriately

>titled "The Origin of mathematics" Seidenberg elaborated further on

>his revolutionary discoveries: "the arithmetical tendencies here

>encountered (in Vedic mathematics) were expanded and, and in

>connection with observations on the rectangle led to Babylonian

>mathematics...

>

>A contrary tendency, namely, a concern for exactness of thought (or

>the myth of its importance), together with a recognition that

>arithmetic methods are not exact, led to Pythagorian (Greek)

>mathematics." In other words, both of the world's great systems of

>mathematics that are seen as the basis of Western civilization,

>namely, Greek and Egyptian-Babylonian, owe their existence to ancient

>Indian (Vedic) mathematics. In the face of this to argue that Indian

>civilization did not originate anything is a colossal

>misrepresentation based on obsolete and discredited theories. In

>fact, it is well known that the Chinese themselves heavily borrowed

>from India in fields like astronomy and mathematics. It is a similar

>story when we turn to astronomy. William Dwight Whitney and other

>linguists of the colonial period claimed that Indian astronomy was

>based on the Greek-a position still reiterated by many scholars.

>

>A.B. Keith, another linguist of the colonial period gave out the view

>that Indians had borrowed their astronomy from some "Semitic source"

>without specifying which one. It is illuminating to contrast Keith's

>(and Whitney's) statements with what Jean-Sylvain Baily, a leading

>French astronomer had to say about the astronomical record of the

>Hindus: "...the motions of the stars calculated by the Hindus before

>some 4500 years very not even a single minute from the tables of

>Cassine and Meyer (used in Europe in the nineteenth century). The

>Indian tables give the same annual variation of the moon as that

>discovered by Tycho Brahe-a variation unknown to the school of

>Alexandria and also to the Arabs who followed the calculations of the

>school. ...

>

>The Hindu systems of astronomy are by far the oldest and that, from

>which the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and even the Jews derive the

>knowledge." This statement, it is worth noting, is by a great

>astronomer-not some colonial bureaucrat or missionary scholar who

>knew some Indian language. And this view was echoed by John Playfair,

>Astronomer Royal at the University of Edinburgh and many others.

>

>Fine arts and spirituality

>

>In the spiritual realm, no one seriously disputes India's

>contributions, though even these are often distorted. While it is

>unnecessary to go into the details of yoga, meditation and others, it

>is worth noting that even these have potential for concrete

>applications. For example, the great linguist Panini gave the concept

>for meta-language-and constructed one-thousands of years before

>computer scientists began exploring the same idea. No one has been

>able to match him to this day. Similarly, Patanjali, in his

>Yogasutra, gives rules for testing the correctness of proofs of

>statements and proof theories centuries before mathematicians began

>to ponder about these fundamental problems. It is worth noting that

>one of the central problems of modern Physics (Quantum Physics) is

>the problem of reality and consciousness. This was anticipated by

>Vedic seers thousands of years ago.

>

>The great physicist. J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote: "The general

>notions about human understanding... which are illustrated by

>discoveries in atomic physics are not in the nature of things wholly

>unfamiliar, wholly unheard of or new. Even in our own culture they

>have a history, and in Buddhist and Hindu thought a more considerable

>and central place. What we shall find (in modern Physics) is an

>exemplification, an encouragement, and a refinement of old wisdom."

>It is the same in the arts. In his book The Art of South East Asia,

>Philip Rawson writes: "The culture of India has been one of the

>world's most powerful civilizing forces. Countries of the Far East,

>including China, Korea, Japan, Tibet and Mongolia owe much of what is

>best in their own cultures to the inspiration of ideas imported from

>India. The West, too, has its own debts.

>

>But the members of that circle of civilizations beyond Burma

>scattered around the Gulf of Siam and the Java Sea, virtually owe

>their very existence to the creative influence of Indian ideas... No

>conquest or invasion, no forced coversion imposed them. They were

>adopted because people saw that they were good and that they could

>use them..." In the face of this history and this reality, it is not

>merely wrong but a grotesque misrepresentation to portray India as

>civilization that only received from outside. The truth, as every

>serious student knows, is the exact opposite: India has always given

>a great deal more than she has received. Civilization as we know

>today would not exist without India. This record is what anti-Hindu

>scholars are trying to erase. Having failed, they are trying to get

>the likes of Amartya Sen and Michael Witzel to help them. This is

>called Negationism.

>-- end --

>

>

>

>

>This is an information resource and discussion group for people interested

in the World's Ancient Vedic Culture, with a focus on its historical,

archeological and scientific aspects. Also topics about India, Hinduism,

God, and other aspects of World Culture are welcome.

>

>