Comparative History of Civilizations in Asia: Volume 1 by Chaim Adler

Author:Chaim Adler [Adler, Chaim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Political Science, World, Asian, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9780429689642
Google: DCmNDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 44597692
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

hermit, and ascetic. At the appropriate time boys were assigned to teachers for a period of spiritual instruction, the duration of which varied depending on whether the youth was a brahman, kshatriya, or vaishya. This crucial event marked the beginning of social maturity and entry into ritual practice. It was regarded figuratively as a spiritual birth, hence the term twice born (dvija) to refer to the members of the top three castes. The stages of life, in which a man first underwent a spiritual apprenticeship as a student and then engaged in a full spectrum of social relations as a householder before withdrawing progressively from society in old age, constituted an accommodation to social reality. The student stage provided for socialization into the brahmanical tradition through training in Sanskrit literature, the householder stage brought the productive years of life within the purview of orthodoxy, and the last two stages enabled Brahmanism to encompass forms of withdrawal from society which became especially popular in the first millennium B.C.

With the epics Hinduism came into its own, as heroic tales were given a religious interpretation and God emerged in a new relationship to man. The Mahabharata, a poem of more than 90,000 stanzas, is the story of a prolonged power struggle centering on the area around Dehli and culminating in an heroic eighteen day battle that destroyed all the protagonists except the five brother heroes. Discourses on many subjects have been sandwiched into the text, a fact that makes it far more than an account of historical events. The most important of these later interpolations, the Bhagavad Gita (Songofthe Lord), takes the form of an address to Arjuna, one of the heroes, by his comrade and charioteer Krishna on the eve of the great battle. Krishna speaks to Arjuna's doubts about the slaughter soon to take place, assuring him that death is unimportant and does not involve the destruction of the soul. In the course of this exposition Krishna reveals himself as the Supreme Being. Thus the Bhagavad Gita, which was probably composed in the early Christian era, marks the emergence of a popular Hinduism in which Krishna supersedes the Vedic god Indra and transcends a declining Brahmanism by offering men a new relationship to God. The doctrine of the Bhagavad Gita is compatible with that of the Upanishads in that it accepts the essential unreality of the world, yet the Gita endorses an active disposition in the world in which one "acts without acting" by engaging in an action without becoming involved in its results. (Thus Arjuna could play his role on the battlefield without being concerned about the outcome.) Also present in the Gita is the notion that all persons, regardless of status, can have a direct relationship with God by means of personal devotion. Here perhaps is an example of Hinduism responding to the challenge of Buddhism and Jainism.

The other major epic, the Ramayana, also began as a secular tale and was later modified and reinterpreted as a sacred Hindu text.

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