/lit/ - Literature

>>15799077
I cringe so hard whenever I see white people autistically reading about Eastern religions.

>>15799088
You'd prefer them to read neurotypically about it?

>>15799088
Ok, but I'm not white and your comment contributes nothing to the post.

>>15799077
>>15799088
This but unironically OP, if you're western don't get into eastern religion, because linguistic determinism makes westerners and easterners have a different perception of reality, this is why once buddihsm and hinduism came into the western world in the 19th and 20th century it became so malformed and different from actual buddhism and hinduism

>>15799077
The Rig Veda is probably the best one to start with. The Jamison and Brereton edition is the most recent high-quality translation by academics but is around 200-300 dollars. The Griffiths translation is very dated but is free to read online and is still aesthetically pleasing. I'm not aware of the other Vedas being fully translated by academics, most of the translations of the other ones are by amateur researchers and priests from what I've seen. The most metaphysically interesting portion of the Vedas are the last portion/layer called the Upanishads. Olivelle has a good translation of them, if you want to read a good commentary on the Upanishads by a major Hindu philosopher (which IMO is muh better reading than modern translations by scholars) I'd recommend the commentaries on them by Adi Shankara.

>inb4 that one neurotic Jewish Buddhist posts his retarded muh Shankara is a crypto buddhist spam

>>15799143
*because lingusitic determinism made westerners and easterners have a different perception of reality in the past and antiquity, not now

Now rapid globalization and industralization and overtake by technology make their perceptions of reality the same, that's why modern buddihsm and hinduism is nothing like their traditional variants

>>15799160
No... no, go on. I'm listening. Should I completely avoid the other Vedas then?

do you mean the upanishads or the vedic corpus as a whole, or specifically the vedas? most people don't read the vedas as a whole, they read the upanishads (1/4th of the traditional division of the vedic literature). the other 3/4s, the rgveda and the brahmanas and even the aranyakas, are mostly tedious formulary for rituals or extremely repetitive/esoteric. even specialists openly call them mind-numbing to read and philosophically uninteresting, in most cases. the brahmanas in particular.

the vedas proper are composed of an original body of ritual formulary, mythological hymns, and extremely occasional metaphysical speculations. these are then broken up into several "collections" (rgveda, yajurveda, samaveda, atharvaveda), with the rgveda being the oldest and atharveda the youngest, and the samaveda and yajurveda being selections/repetitions of the rgveda for the most part. i believe the main theory about the origins of these divisions is that the samaveda and yajurveda are selections specifically for certain grades of priests who only needed them for a specific purpose, and the atharvaveda is a separate compilation of local folk traditions and magical recipes not derived from the original rgveda. they were all collated from orally transmitted hymns and formulary, plus the folk traditions, by a "reform" vedism with a brahman priesthood around 800-500BC.

luckily there are compilations of the most famous, most philosophically interesting bits of the rgvedas. radhakrishnan's sourcebook for indian philosophy is a classic although it's somewhat biased in favor of a monistic interpretation, assuming that vedic philosophy was always internally developing towards monism (which is arguable). but it still has most of the classic rgvedic sections you would be most interested in. wendy doniger's collection is also ok and has a lot of overlap with a newer translation although she is just as biased in the opposite direction, of portraying indian thought as a plurality.

if you want to read anything "in full," be prepared for endless repetition and boredom.

>>15799160
>I would be careful about reading Advaita Vedanta interpretations such as Shankara's as a commentary to the Upanishads, they are extremely reliant on Buddhist philosophy (Shankara is called a "cryptobuddhist" by most Hindus, and most scholars agree). If you want to read the Upanishads, work through them with editions and commentaries that aren't sectarian, or at least read an interpretation that is closer to the original meaning of the Upanishads, rather than Shankara's 8th century AD quasi-buddhism.

pic related

>>15799253
no, the best approach is to read a source anthology like radhakrishnan/doniger so you get the highlights. this can also include interesting bits from the brahmanas and aranyakas, which are few and far between especially for the brahmanas. this is what most people do, along with reading a good history of sanskrit literature so you know what the structure is.

>>15799284
i meant to say in the last part of this post that you should read a sourcebook/overview for the pre-upanishad sources but you can just read the major historical upanishads fully, the "principal" upanishads.

>>15799308
I've been studying Radhakrishnan for a bit but I wanted into the vedas, kind of looking for the closest thing to the source I can get without actually learning the language.

>inb4 learn the language brainlet

>>15799501
most people don't read this these days, but it's very fun to go through max muller's history of sanskrit literature. not his more popular writings but his actual nitty-gritty history of vedic literature. he assumes you already have some familiarity, and it's somewhat outdated obviously, but you get the experience of taking a high level seminar with probably one of the top 5 people to ever be completely immersed in the ancient sanskrit corpus and have complex opinions on its morphology and history.

>>15799077
>Wasting your time with reading about Steppeniggers being steppeniggers