The history that vanished when disbelieving Western scholars messed with the past and tempered with time to fit the 4000-year-old biblical creation

[Guest guest]

The history that vanished when disbelieving Western scholars messed with the

past and tempered with time to fit the 4000-year-old biblical creation

 

" The History That Vanished

 

Since the early 1920s, archaeologists have been unearthing an

astonishing ancient civilization in northwestern India, now called

the Indus-Saraswati culture. It was enormous, at least seven hundred

miles from north to south and eight hundred miles from east to west.

If you dropped the entire Egyptian civilization along with all of

Sumer (two high cultures which were flourishing at about the same

time) into that same geographical area, you still would have lots of

room left over!

 

Here researchers found the best-planned cities anywhere on the

planet. The neatly arranged gridiron pattern of streets and houses

revealed organizational and construction skills unparalleled in the

ancient world, and not always equalled in the world today. There

cities were gargantuan for the time—three miles in diameter, which

isn't a bad size for a town even today.

 

The quality of the drainage system in these towns, which included

brick-lined sewers complete with manholes, would not be seen again

till Roman engineers set up shop two thousand years later.

 

The people who lived there had many of the trappings of civilization

as we know it today (except maybe TV). They had nicely appointed

bathrooms where they took bucket showers. They had one of the

earliest written languages in the world. They had a sophisticated

system of weights and measures that was burrowed by the businessmen

of Mesopotamia.

 

They had seaports, but those excavated docks are eerie to look at

these days because the river tributaries they once served have gone

away. The long-abandoned piers now overlook the bleak Thar desert.

 

Messing with the Past

 

Western archeologists were astounded by these findings but orthodox

Hindus weren't surprised at all. Their ancient chronicles—enormous

religious anthologies like the Puranas and the Mahabharata—often

mentioned glorious cities of the distant past. They even mentioned

legendary architects like Asura Maya who could whip up spectacular

buildings with gardens and lotus-laden pools and mirrored walls.

 

But western scholars never believed those ancient chronicles for a

minute. The surprising thing is that even as they dug up more and

more evidence that the Hindus' own version of their history was more

or less correct, Western scholars still couldn't believe it!

 

Here's why. In the nineteenth-century European intellectual circles,

Oxford University professor Frederick Max Muller was held in only

slightly less esteem than God. One day Muller announced that the

Veda, India's most ancient classic and the very foundation of its

faith, had been composed between 1200 to 1000 B.C.E. As far as

Western scholars were concerned, God had spoken. This in spite of the

fact that some of the positions of the stars and planets mentioned in

the Veda could only have occurred sometime between 3500 and 4000

B.C.E.!

 

Tampering with Time

 

Where did Muller come up with a date as late as 1000 B.C.E. for a

scripture Hindus themselves considered much older? It turns out that

unlike the Hindus who believed the universe was billions of years

old, a Christian Muller believed the world had been created in 4004

B.C.E. By adding the ages of the patriarchs listed in the Bible who

lived between Adam and Noah, Muller could calculate the number of

years that had passed since the creation and the Great Flood. This

brought him to 2488 B.C.E.

 

Now, Muller was no fool. He knew it would take time for Noah's

descendents to migrate to India, repopulate the subcontinent, and

create the hundreds of different languages and distinctive cultures

flourishing here. This, he figured out, must have taken at least

1,200 years, maybe as much as 1,400. Veda, the earliest Hindu

scripture, could not have been written earlier than 1200 B.C.E.

University textbooks uncritically repeated this date through the mid-

1990s!

 

To give this guy credit, later in life Muller had second thoughts

about his guesstimate, admitting, " Whatever may be the date of the

Vedic hymns, whether 1500 or 15,000 B.C., they have their own unique

place and stand by themselves in the literature of the world. " But

the damage had been done: Everyone believed that when he's given out

that date of 1200 B.C.E. he knew what he was talking about.

 

Muller's mistake had catastrophic consequences for the study of

Indian history. Saints who according to the Hindus had lived before

3000 B.C.E. were shifted to 1000 B.C.E. The Buddha, who according to

Northern Buddhist school lived around 1000 B.C.E., got shuffled to

somewhere around 500 B.C.E. No less an authority than the sixteenth

Dalai Lama has appealed to Western scholars to get together, clear

their minds, and straighten out this mess for once and for all!

 

" There is no more absorbing story than that of the discovery and

interpretation of India by Western consciousness, " noted the renowned

Rumanian professor of religion, Mircea Eliade. You can say it again,

Mircea.

 

Chronological Conundrums

 

Back to our archeologists. They've discovered a high civilization

that flourished in north-western India between 2700 and 1900 B.C.E.

Since the Veda wasn't composed till maybe 1000 B.C.E. (according to

Muller) and the sages who composed the Veda were the founders of

Hinduism (according to Western scholars), then the people who lived

in these cities must not have been Hindus. They supposedly lived

nearly 2000 years before Hinduism was invented! Who were these people

and where did they go?

 

Enter the Aryan Invasion Theory. It was decided that the original

inhabitants of India were Dravidians. They are the people who fill up

much of South India today. They speak a totally different language

from most north Indians, and some of them have skin that's a little

darker in color. Till 1000 B.C.E., they must have inhabited the whole

of India, Muller's twentieth-century disciples decreed. The ancient

cities in the north were built by them.

 

Then, the Western experts concluded, somewhere between 1500 and 1000

B.C.E., the primitive barbarians who composed the Veda invaded

northern India, driving the hapless Dravidians into the southern part

of the subcontinent where they live today. There were two

difficulties with this popular theory:

 

1. Today's northern Hindus have absolutely no memory of having

ever driven the Dravidians out of north India. None of their ancient

manuscripts mention any such thing.

2. Today's Dravidians have absolutely no memory of ever having

lived in North India. In fact, their ancient traditions suggest that

their forebears came from the South, not from the North.

 

The Aryan Invaders

 

Minor problems like these did not discourage the European and

American scholars of the time. Thousands of pages of the Hindus' own

historical records were simply dismissed as fiction. These white

scholars were sure a virile white race of white warriors, much like

themselves, had invaded India.

 

Linda Johnsen, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Hinduism, pages 18-20

Paperback: 432 pages

Publisher: Alpha; 1st edition (October 11, 2001)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0028642279

ISBN-13: 978-0028642277

 

 

 

---

 

Sages who were already ancient to its composers living in 4000

B.C.E.!

 

" Inner Religion

 

One of the great ironies of religious history is that, although the

religions that came out of the Near East--Judaism, Islam,

Christianity--adamantly reject most of Hinduism's fundamental

teachings, their mystical traditions--the Kaballah, Sufism, and

Christian Gnosticism--reflect Hindu insights in almost every detail.

Numerous students of comparative religion, from Muslim scholar Al

Buruni in 1000 C.E. to the world famous writer Aldous Huxley nearer

our own time, have expressed their amazement at the parallels between

the major mystical traditions of the world and Hinduism...

 

Hinduism is by far the most complex religion in the world, shading

under its enormous umbrella an incredibly diverse array of

contrasting beliefs, practices, and denominations. Hinduism is by far

the oldest major religion. It has had more than enough time to

develop a diversity of opinions and approaches to spirituality

unmatched in any other tradition. "

 

Linda Johnsen, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Hinduism, pages 76-77

Paperback: 432 pages

Publisher: Alpha; 1st edition (October 11, 2001)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0028642279

ISBN-13: 978-0028642277

 

 

" The Eternal Religion

 

Hinduism is so ancient its origins are lost in the mist of

prehistory. Many sages are associated with it, but none claim to be

its first prophet. Hindus believe their religion has existed forever,

even before the universe came into being. They say the truths of

their faith are inherent in the nature of reality itself, and that

all men and women peering into the depths of their inner nature will

discover the same truths for themselves.

 

The image too many outsiders have of the Hindu tradition is of

primitive, superstitious villagers worshipping idols. As we get to

know the Hindus better, we'll see that their understanding of who and

what is God is is incredibly sophisticated. In fact, their view of

the world and our place in it is so stunningly cosmic in scope that

our Western minds start to boggle!

 

Let's enter the universe of Hinduism, an amazing world where inner

and outer realities reflect each other like images on a mirror, and

the loving presence of the divine is a close as the stillness behind

your own thoughts...

 

Beginningless Truth

 

You might think it takes a lot of chutzpah (if I may borrow a Jewish

term) to claim that your religion is eternal. What Hindus mean when

they say this is their tradition doesn't come from any one founding

father or mother, from any single prophet towering over the bastion

of hoary antiquity. In fact, the first few verses of the Veda, an

incredibly old book, parts of which were composed 6,000 years ago,

acknowledge the sages who were already ancient to its composers

living in 4000 B.C.E.!

 

Very old Hindu texts speak of a time when it became almost impossible

to survive on Earth because of ice and snow. This could be a

reference to the last Ice Age, some Hindu scholars believe.

Archaeologists have unearthed small statues of goddesses from 10,000

years ago (that's about the time the Ice Age was ending) like those

being worshipped in Indian villages today. So even if we're not

willing to grant that Hinduism is eternal, we still have to admit it

got a jump on the other major religions...

 

I'd really like to bring home to you the vastness of the time scale

Hindus are talking about here. One area where Hinduism and Judeo-

Christian tradition agree is in saying that at the moment we're in

the seventh day of creation. But according to the Hindu sages, a day

for God is a bit longer than our human day of 24 hours.

 

The following schema was taught to me by Swami Veda Bharati, a

renunciate who lives in a tiny ashram in Rishikesh in northern India.

He's a devotee of the Divine Mother. (The Goddess is a major league

player in Hinduism, and you'll soon see.)

 

Swami Bharati's time frame, preserved in the Hindu mystical

tradition, starts with a day and a night in the life of our local

creator god. Years here mean human years:

 

> One day and night in the life of Brahma is 8,640,000,000 years.

> The lifetime of Brahma is 311,040,000,000,000 years.

> One day and night in the life of Vishnu equals 37,324,800,000,000,

000,000 years.

> The life of Vishnu is 671,846,400,000,000,000,000,000 years long.

> One day and night in the life of Shiva lasts 4,837,294,080,000,000,

000,000,000,000,000 years.

> Shiva's lifetime corresponds to 87,071,293,440,000,000,000,000,

000,000,000,000 years.

> One glance from the Mother of the Universe equals 87,071,293,440,

000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years...

 

If you had been around in the third millennium B.C.E., India is where

you would have wanted to be. The quality of life was higher there

than practically anywhere else in the world. In fact, the towns of

North India in 2600 B.C.E. were more comfortable and technologically

advanced than most Europen cities till nearly the time of the

Renaissance!

 

Religious life was vibrant in ancient India. Some of the oldest

surviving spiritual writings came from this part of the world. They

reveal a religion that was both boisterously earthy and

transcendently mystical--not unlike Hinduism today. "

 

Linda Johnsen, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Hinduism, pages 1-17

Paperback: 432 pages

Publisher: Alpha; 1st edition (October 11, 2001)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0028642279

ISBN-13: 978-0028642277