Antiquity of Vaishnavism and Related Traditions

[Guest guest]

By Bhakti Ananda Goswami

The Antiquity of Vaishnavism and Related Traditions

 

Editor's Note: In the following, portions in italics are questions

and quotes from a member of the theos-talk discussion group.

Portions in regular font are replies by Bhakti Ananda Goswami.

 

Even if the Vedas are 7000 years old as you say, which would make

them about contemporaneous with the earliest manuscripts of the I

CHING, what do you make of the fact that the human race is believed

to have originated at least 50,000 years ago according to some

reckonings, and as many as 2 million years ago by others? If Vishnu

is real, why did he wait so long to reveal himself?

 

The 7000 is someone's speculation; I generally don't like fixing

earliest dates for a particular version of something when there is

so little evidence. Here is my opinion.

 

The Vedas are the Rig, Sama, Atharva and Yajur Veda. Together,

these 4 Vedas, or books of knowledge (OIDA in Biblical Greek! and

YEDA in Hebrew!) are the testimony of an ancient `high'

civilization. They evidence the existence of people who had a

complex theo-centric sacramental social order, a monotheistic

religious faith expressed in devotion to God and His Shakti /

Prakriti through a multiplicity of emanations, theophanies and

incarnations, a beautiful and sophisticated `sacred' language (Vedic

Sanskrit), agriculture, time keeping, travel and trade, and all the

other things that make-up a `high' civilization. Such a

civilization does not really just appear overnight. However, in the

geological / archeological record the sudden `dawn' of high

civilizations is one of the most perplexing facts. However one is

inclined to assign dates to an ancient text like the Rig Veda,

the `oldest' of the Vedas, one must always keep in mind that

whatever is existing in the text is much older than the text

itself. There are over 1000 hymns in the Rig Veda! Many consider,

based on linguistic and / or astronomical evidence that some of

these hymns are 5000 or more years old. The oldest hymn, based on

current speculation of many scholars is the Purusha Sukta. This

hymn clearly describes that the cosmic manifestation, including all

the Devas, Aryan Civilization and the Vedas Themselves, have all

been born from the Self-Sacrificed Body of God as Purusha Yupa

Dhvaja.

 

Now there are two questions. The first, confining our inquiry to

the Sanskrit Text at hand, is why are we trying to date the

civilization by dating an extant text? Which leads to the second

question. Granted that the civilization existed long before the

preserved text that we have, should we not look for evidence of

things IN THE TEXT outside of the text, to date the civilization?

The interdisciplinary way that I inquire is to look at the text in

the context of what is known about the society that produced and

preserved it. Then I look at that society in the context of the

natural world and other societies. Nothing can really be excised

out and studied separately without losing significant meaning.

Everything must be approached in its context as much as possible,

and studied in an interdisciplinary manner to get the Whole, Big

Picture as much as possible. So for example, what we can know from

the separated study of the Vedas and I CHING is magnified many times

over by a comparative study of these ancient source works. When we

analyze the earliest Chinese and Vedic evidence of high civilization

we find very many striking parallels. These are at the religio-

cultural roots of both civilizations. If we think of the Aryans as

one race or language group, then we are faced with the problem of

the same religio-cultural factors appearing in two `different'

racial and linguistic groups in the same time period. This forces

us to postulate that one group `got it' from the other at some

earlier time. While there are many clear histories of innovation and

diffusion in the human adventure, the universalism of certain

features of ancient civilizations should raise some questions for us

regarding ANY racist or ethno-centric assumptions about `who had it

first.' The farther back we go, the farther back the connections

go. This is where we come to your excellent question:

 

…what do you make of the fact that the human race is believed to

have originated at least 50,000 years ago according to some

reckonings, and as many as 2m years ago by others? If Vishnu is

real, why did he wait so long to reveal himself?

 

I have shown elsewhere that the worship of Vishnu as Purusha, the

primal Deity of the Rig Vedic Civilization, was the social-

organizing impetus of that civilization. For example, high

civilization in Egypt developed out of the alliances of HERU-ASU

worshiping Temple Communities, which grew into city-state Nomes

which were allied by their common faith. Whether we believe in God

as a Transcendent Being or some peoples' invention, we can use the

same scientific methodology when we are trying to determine what

someone else's beliefs and experiences were, and what these beliefs

and experiences impelled and compelled them to do or refrain from

doing. So, taking a scientific approach to the study of religion at

the heart of civilizations, let us consider whether God (or the Gods

of various peoples) did `wait' until the recording of the extant Rig

Veda or other roughly `datable' ancient texts to reveal Himself.

 

Sources

`Super Linguistics' or linguistic archeology, physical archeology,

genetic studies, astronomy, even the study of diseases, zoology,

climate and botany, etc. can contribute to our understanding of the

global experience of humankind, and humanity's relationship to the

Divine (however defined). For the simplest way to grasp what I am

saying about the worship of Purusha and Prakriti at the heart of

human civilization, let us just consider two facts. I have

previously shown, and the new field of Super Linguistics is

demonstrating more every day, that there are some word roots that

are found in language families previously thought to have been

unrelated. What makes these in-common word roots important is that

they are not late borrowings between the major linguistic groups,

but are at the very ancient-most heart of the different language

families! Fact one is that this common linguistic heritage MUST go

back to before the geographical isolation THAT CREATED THE SEPARATED

LINGUISTIC FAMILIES! Fact two is that the evidence of these common

roots parallels recent findings in genetic research. Thus the

diffusion of our ONE human race is attested to by both genetics, and

these few in-common word roots. Genetics tells the story of our

spread, archeology tells the story of our daily life,

accomplishments and setbacks over time, and comparative linguistics

tells the story of what we were thinking about before and after

we `put it in writing.'

 

Where my unique contribution comes into this emerging picture is

that in the 1960s while studying the Names of God Ess in the Bible

and related regional traditions, I observed that some of these in-

common BIJA (Sanskrit for 'seed') Names of God Ess (Hebrew ISHISH =

ISIS) were quite obviously there in the earliest EXTANT Afro-

Egyptian sources, The Bible and West Semitic sources, and in the

European sources. Studying the etymology of Greek, Latin and other

European Deity Names and words, I understood the relationship of

these to the ancient Vedic Sanskrit. Thus from the start of my

studies, I was particularly interested in the connections between

the Afro-Egyptian, Sumero-Semitic and Indo-European language

families. At the core of these connections was MONOTHEISM, and it

was quite obviously the SAME MONOTHEISM!

 

In the current correlation of peoples and languages, `genetic

distance' is spoken of, and in the science of Linguistic

Superfamilies, linguistic changes are traced over long periods of

time in tiny increments of change, analogous to the tiny increments

of adaptive change in the genetic record. Glottochronology projects

linguistic changes back into prehistory. For example, in the

following:

http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test3materials/BeforeBabel.h

tm, Proto-Nostratic is theorized as having been spoken about 15,000

years ago. However, the Nostratic Superfamily does NOT include the

African NIGER-KORDOFANIAN or NILO-SAHARAN language families, which

my research shows Nostratic connections to. The Niger-Kordofanian

language group covers most of Central Africa. It includes the Bantu

group, which Swahili, Zulu and Tswana are members of, and Niger-

Congo, of which Yoruba is a member. My own independent research has

shown connections between the Supreme Deity's Names in these two

major African Language Families, and those of the Afro-Asiatic

Superfamily. Since the Afro-Asiatic Language Family is part of the

postulated Nostratic Superfamily, when I am proven correct in the

connections I have been describing since the 1960s, we will then be

admittedly confronted with a primal tongue of humanity. Fortunately

I do not have to fight the battle to establish my own 1960's

discoveries as fact. The whole field of Super Linguistics is

gradually creating the context for acceptance of `my' discoveries.

So it does not really matter in one sense that I am unpublished and

few people know about my work. What I have been saying from the

1960s is being independently discovered more and more by others

every day, and it is just a matter of time until the Whole Big

Picture emerges with or without my input about Monotheism.

 

IN TERMS OF TIME-DEPTH, IF THE POSTULATED SUPER LINGUISTIC `MOTHER

TONGUE' INCLUDES ANY OF THE PRIMARY NAMES OF PURUSHA-PRAKRITI, WE

ARE CONFRONTED WITH THE FACT THAT THIS ORIGINAL FATHER-MOTHER GOD

ESS DID NOT `WAIT' TO REVEAL HIM-HER SELF TO HUMANITY. How far back

does Super Linguistics trace the diffusion and changes of

language ? Well, the genetic studies are paralleling the Super

Linguistics studies, so whenever the genetic time-distance

indicates, that is where we can look for related linguistic

evidence. The fact is that wherever we find communities of humans,

and whatever we think about the time frame of their presence in an

area, both the gross physical and linguistic evidence shows that

they were religious beings with a social order inspired by religious

sentiments. The evidence shows that these ancient humans had a

sense of origins and ancestry. They cared for their living AND

THEIR DEAD. As a FATHER-MOTHER GOD ESS MONOTHEISM is and was common

in African Tribal traditions, it was also common in these other

ancient civilizations. The genealogy of the Monotheism of the Adi

(Former, Original) Purusha and Prakriti therefore is as old as

humankind itself.

 

Clearly Vishnu and Shakti did not wait until the Rig Veda to reveal

Themselves to Their children. They have been with their children

all along. Thus the Supreme Father God of the Niger-Kordofanian

Language Family is OLU, Who is clearly the Predynastic Egyptian

Supreme Deity HERU, Who is none-other than the Semite's ELI, the

Indo-Europeans HELI / SOLE / SURA or HARI and the Sumerians ILU.