/lit/ - Literature

The Atharva Vedas has another story, it says Vedic god Rohita created the creatures,
Atharva Veda 13.1.52 Rohita made the earth to be his altar, heaven his Dakshina. Then heat he took for Agni, and with rain for molten butter he [Rohita] created every living thing [or universe].
Let’s analyse the Purusha Sukta. Purusha Sukta is often quoted to show the process of creation. Some Hindu scholars even say that scientists must read Purusha Sukta to know about the creation and cosmos, they say this Sukta is very unique. I can’t figure out what’s so unique about this Sukta. Later I found that its uniqueness lies in its riddles, It has so many contradictions. It’s about gods sacrificing Purusha and each of his body part becomes the creation. The word Purusha here may or may not denote Man. Purusha literally translates into Man, but majority of scholars translates it (in this verse) as Supreme Soul (God), according to Mahidhara and Sayana it is Spirit or Man, other scholars translates it as Almighty God and Universe. If Purusha is the Almighty god then how come the Almighty God (Purusha) himself was born? Veda says,
Rig Veda 10.90.5 From him Viraj was born; again Purusa from Viraj was born…

The word Viraj here is translated by some as universe. But scholars have different opinion on this word. Majority of scholars including Sayana and Mahidhara say it’s an egg. Some say it’s the egg from which the universe or Men were born, some also say it’s known as Adi Purusa. The word Viraj occurs in Atharva Veda 11.4.12 as Prana (Vital Spirit), in Atharva Veda 9.2.5 Viraj is translated as milch cow, and by Arya Samaj scholars as Splendid Speech [Goddess]. Some interpret Rig Veda 10.90.5 as, The almighty God created Viraj, and Viraj then created the Men (Purusha) or living creatures, they translate the later word Purusha literally as Men. This is wrong since the creation of men and other living beings occurs in verses 8, 10 and 12. There is also a reference (Manu 3.195) which shows that Viraj had sons. Maharishi Manu also makes blunder about the creation which contradicts Vedas also, but on this Viraj issue he tries to make it simple saying that it was Brahma who produced Viraj, He writes
Manu Smriti 1.31-32 But for the sake of the prosperity of the worlds he caused the Brahmana, the Kshatriya, the Vaisya, and the Sudra to proceed from his mouth, his arms, his thighs, and his feet. Dividing his own body, the Lord became half male and half female; with that (female) he produced Virag.
So this affirms the statement of some scholars who say that Purusha is the unborn Almighty God and from him Viraj was born. But it makes the situation more complex because Vedas states in the beginning only Viraj was present and from him Purusha was born,
Atharva Veda 19.6.9 In the beginning rose Viraj: Purusha from Viraj was born. As soon as he was born he spread westward and eastward o’er the earth.

Now this is senseless and as complicated as the saying ”What came first the chicken or the egg?” This is a clear contradiction, because Purusha is unborn they say and from Purusha, Viraj was born. But this verse states the In the beginning rose (Sambhavat) Viraj and from him Purusha was born. To strengthen my argument I would like to quote next two verses of Atharva Veda 19.6.9 which would also clear the mist,
Atharva Veda 19.6.10-11 When Gods performed the sacrifice with Purusha as their offering. Spring was the butter, summer was the fuel, autumn was the gift. That sacrifice, first-born Purusha, they hallowed with the sprinkled Rains. The Deities, the Sadhyas, all the Vasus sacrificed with him.

So this shows that the sacrificed Purusha was born from Viraj. Purusha was the first to take birth from Viraj. So how is it possible that the Almighty God (Purusha) himself was born from an egg (Viraj)?

Who was Sacrificed?

Rig Veda 10.90.6 When Gods prepared the sacrifice with Purusa as their offering, Its oil was spring, the holy gift was autumn; summer was the wood.

It is mentioned in Krishna Yajur Veda,
Krishna Yajur Veda 6.3.5 The Sadhya gods were in this world and nothing else living. They offered Agni as a sacrifice to Agni [Fire], for they found nothing else to offer; thence indeed these creatures were born; in that he casts the fire on the fire after producing it, (it serves for) the propagation of offspring.

How the creation of universe (or of earth) took place?

While Purusha Sukta is often quoted, The Rig Veda 10.72 hymn is often ignored by the scholars. Both have similarity and difference. The similarity is that both these Suktas talk about how the creation took place and the difference is that both these Suktas give a complete different picture of the creation. According to Purusha Sukta the earth was gendered from the Almighty god’s feet (Rigved 10.90.14), while the 72nd hymn states that the earth was born from a tree,
Rig Veda 10.72.1-4 Let us proclaim with a clear voice the generations of the gods (the divine company), who, when their praises are recited, look (favourably on the worshipper) in this latter age. Brahmanaspati filled these (generations of the gods) with breath as a blacksmith (his bellows) in the first age of the gods the existent was born of the non-existent. In the first age of the gods the existent was born of the non-existent; after that the quarters (of the horizon) were born, and after them the upward-growing (trees). The earth was born from the upward-growing (tree), the quarters were born from the earth; Daksha was born from Aditi, and afterwards Aditi from Daksha. – Tr. Wilson

Founder of Arya Samaj Swami Dayanand Saraswati argued against the creation of universe out of nothing. He criticized the Qur’an’s concept of creation out of nothing which is similar to this 72nd hymn of Rigved Mandal 10. Hindu scholars gave more importance to the Purusha Sukta and rejected the 72nd Sukta. Both these Suktas of the same Rig Veda are contradictory.

So who really created the universe?

Rig Veda 10.90.6 When Gods prepared the sacrifice with Purusa as their offering, Its oil was spring, the holy gift was autumn; summer was the wood.

Vedas doesn’t give the list of gods who sacrificed Purusha. But it’s mentioned in Atharva Veda 13.1.55 that Rohita brought the world which rose from the sacrifice (of Purusha). It either means that Rohita alone sacrificed Purusha or Rohita was among the gods or Rishis who sacrificed Purusha. Rohita is considered a sage in that verse. It’s mentioned in Rigved,
Rig Veda 10.129.6-7 Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation? The Gods are later than this world’s production. Who knows then whence it first came into being? He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it, Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not.

Swami Vivekananda’s English translation,
”[6] Who knew the way? Who there declared Whence this arose? Projection whence? For after this projection came the gods. Who therefore knew indeed, came out this whence?

[7] This projection whence arose, Whether held or whether not, He the ruler in the supreme sky, of this He, O Sharman! knows, or know not He perchance”- Rig Veda 10.129.6-7, Tr. Swami Vivekananda. [Source: http://www.swamivivekananda.org.in/main/e-library/hymns/the-hymn-on-creation ]

When Gods are later than this world’s production then who sacrificed Purusha? As we read in Purusha Sukta that it were the Gods who sacrificed Purusha. According to Vedas It was only after the sacrifice of Purusha that entire universe including this world came into existence. Manu also alludes that the Rishis were born after the creation of universe (Manu 1.34-35). So how is it possible that this creation took place without the gods? And who really sacrificed Purusha then?
When the Vedas which was believed by every Hindu god as highest authoritative text doesn’t have the answer about who really created the universe, then why do you believe it to be the word of god? Some may try to twist and turn these verses to hide the fallacies of Vedas, but truth will remain truth. They may deceive themselves but intellectuals will definitely find the truth. It is clear that the composer or God of Vedas is not the creator. Vedas juggles about the creator, but it’s not difficult to find the real creator of this world.

>>17487884
>Why are the Vedas so inconsistent?
The Indian view of the world is broken.
They believe that the world stands on a turtle which stands on 4 elephants which stand on 4 elephants which...
They fell into the trap of having things without a creator. It's just a flawed world view and nothing more.

>>17487905
>They fell into the trap of having things without a creator

Because it was a text which was kept in the oral tradition for centuries and the Hindu don't really felt a need for there to be a single interpretation or to pretend that the parts which don't make sense just don't exist or are invalid. You should also learn something about the religion instead of just trying to find contradictions to prove your own view right, makes you come off like a 14 year old rebelling against his parents beliefs.

not reading all of this

>>17487906
he means to say that instead of a prime mover they have infinite recursion just like pseudoscientists such as Hawkings as of now have.

>>17487987
That's what I was saying. It's why India was a primitive place since they didn't even get that right.

>>17487884
Hinduism is just different Indian tribes at different points in time saying shit that will be abrogated by another tribe at a future point. The rishis eventually came up with monist answer to excuse the contradictions which amounts to: These verses are just explaining the one true God in different ways/avatars. However they continued to abrogate and the shiftest of contradictions is still to this day.

Buddhism doesn’t have this problem, any new innovations in thought, such as those found in Mahayana, trace back to the early Buddhist texts. In this regard, Buddhism is internally consistent and lacks major contradictions.

>>17487953
Based

>>17487895
Another anon lost in translations

>>17487953
this, also the last and most important section of the Vedas, viz. the Upanishads are completely consistent on the point that Brahman is the origin of the universe and that Indra, Brahma, Prajapati etc originate from Brahman

>>17487953
Why do they claim that their writings are revealed, free of errors/inconsistencies then? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80stika_and_n%C4%81stika

>>17488754
>this, also the last and most important section of the Vedas, viz. the Upanishads are completely consistent on the point that Brahman is the origin of the universe and that Indra, Brahma, Prajapati etc originate from Brahman
https://web.archive.org/web/20141007193401/http://truthabouthinduism.wordpress.com/2014/01/03/upanishads-an-analysis/

>>17490565
>Why do they claim that their writings are revealed, free of errors/inconsistencies then?
It's not a major error but that can be reconciled since both the Vedas and the Upanishads say that all the various Vedic deities are just aspects, creations or images of the one Supreme God. So the texts referring to the various deities as creating the world can all be interpreted as referring indirectly to Brahman.

"They call him Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni and he is heavenly nobly-winged Garutman. To what is One, sages give many a title they call it Agni, Yama, Matarisvan"
- Rig Veda 1.164.46.

"Lord of creation! no other than thee pervades all these that have come into being"
- Rig Veda 10.121.10

>>17490831
What about the passages on the creation of the world?

And https://web.archive.org/web/20141007193401/http://truthabouthinduism.wordpress.com/2014/01/03/upanishads-an-analysis/

>>17491202
>What about the passages on the creation of the world?
I don't know, Hindu cosmology holds that there is an infinite cycles of universes being created, maintained and dissolved back into Brahman again. So the different stories could refer to the different deities who are aspects of the one Brahman creating the universe in a different way during previous cycles.

>And https://web.archive.org/web/20141007193401/http://truthabouthinduism.wordpress.com/2014/01/03/upanishads-an-analysis/

A lot of that page just seems to be complaining about Hinduism by someone who has a grudge, and it contains errors as well.

One error for example on the page is that the Upanishads rejected the Vedic theory of salvation or emancipation through rituals, because that theory is not expounded by the Vedas, the Vedas teach rituals that people can follow to obtain sons, wealth, cows etc, but the Vedas don't say that Vedic rituals lead to moksha, so in propounding that doctrine the Upanishads are not contradicting the Vedas. And the rest of the page is him complaining about the text not being respectful of women, or for promoting caste, or for using 'unscientific concepts' in what largely seem to be metaphors; which I don't find to be important objections worth responding to.

Hindu theologians like Shankara don't interpret the Vedas+Upanishads being infallible in the sense of every single word and sentence delimits the exact nature of reality, but rather in the sense that the metaphysical doctrines they present are infallibly true, for example in his commentary on the Aitareya Upanishad Shankara says that one possibility is that the creation story in that text exists only for the purpose of eulogizing the knowledge of the Self or Atma-vidya that the story leads to, and which is one of the main doctrines of the Upanishads.

>>17488473
Buddhism was originally barebones Sanatana Dharma. It was corrupted later and turned into its own tradition. Buddhism the religion is fundamentally incoherent

>>17491525
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 9th century AD quasi-buddhism.

>>17487884
silly anon, religious texts don't need to make sense! the point of all premodern worldviews is the embracement of contradiction and inconsistency, because humans have never been able to adequately interpret the world. stop interpreting a premodern text with a modernist framework and maybe you'll understand a bit better

>>17492223
actually based, pic related

>>17492368
bump

>>17487884

there are just as many paths to enlightenment as there are people

>>17493893
no

>>17490587
Care to elaborate instead of being a faggot by vanishing like a ghost after posting a link?

>>17494803
You’re right, there are more

>>17491525
>Hindu theologians like Shankara don't interpret the Vedas+Upanishads being infallible in the sense of every single word and sentence delimits the exact nature of reality, but rather in the sense that the metaphysical doctrines they present are infallibly true, for example in his commentary on the Aitareya Upanishad Shankara says that one possibility is that the creation story in that text exists only for the purpose of eulogizing the knowledge of the Self or Atma-vidya that the story leads to, and which is one of the main doctrines of the Upanishads.
i don't get it
are you astika or not?
are the vedas revealed or not?

Hindu here.
Before you anons go crazy trying to interpret Vedas let me remind you
>Original Vedas are lost to time. What remains are copies of copies and even then translation is not accurate since ancient Sanskrit is almost extinct.
>But but muh sanskrit scholars. Modern sanskrit is nowhere near close to the Vedic Sanskrit. Anyone who denies speak neither of those languages.
>But you didn't refute the inconsistencies
I know. And sadly I cannot since I don't speak vedic Sanskrit and am sure that translation fucked us up.


There is a reason why Vedas were passed down orally through Guru-Shishya tradition. They knew as soon as it is written it will be open to interpretation and some idiot will invariably corrupt it.

This is why the so called "shudras" i.e. normal people were not allowed to hear the Vedic chants. Because they would invariably interpret it wrong.

>When did the original Vedas die out?
Nobody knows anon. Anybody who gives you a date/timeframe is simply bullshitting.

>>17491598
>Buddhism was [Headcanon]
Done.

>>17487905
>They fell into the trap of having things without a creator.
Another clueless pseud

>>17495228
It’s irrefutable. The Buddha didn’t concern himself with all sorts of metaphysical questions. He was concerned about ending suffering and reaching enlightenment. He compared it to a man who tried to figure out who shot an arrow into them, when that doesn’t matter, it’s healing and fixing the wound that does. The Buddha approached the matter also through a via negativa, saying what the self was not, saying what the world was not, etc. He was a Hindu through and through. His pseud followers misinterpreted it all though, ironically proving the devas wrong who begged him to expound dharma

>>17495325
Buddha rejected sacrificial rites and compared the vedic rishis to blind men leading the blind. He was anti-Hindu through and through.

>>17495325
>The Buddha didn’t concern himself with all sorts of metaphysical questions
yet he makes many metaphysical claims

>>17491525
>Hindu theologians like Shankara don't interpret the Vedas+Upanishads being infallible
>but rather in the sense that the metaphysical doctrines they present are infallibly true
lol

Man, it's not like they were written by a single guy or even people from the same dedicated group. They were cobbled together over time and what was considered canonical changed over and over until we got to the version we're familiar with. Be glad they don't contradict each other more. Same goes for the Upanishads btw.

>>17491525
Hindus seem to have had a hard time trying to decipher something that wasn't cryptic to begin with, its as if they needed prior textual evidence to support their own current dogma (hurr maybe this one creation story is about Atman actually).

>>17495511
Not about the big questions, he outright dismisses those as either unanswerable or not worth answering for the goal of liberation. It's also implied he wasn't omniscient, that was a Mahayana addition along with all the autistic celestial stuff.

>>17495511
He makes those claims as they relate to his dharma, it is not the locus of his teachings to ponder on those claims further. Things like 'what am I? do I have self? where will I go post-nirvana?' are all questions which he believes that any answer will not satisfy the questioner because the questioner is 'embellished in views'.

>>17495512
Yes, almost all Christians who are not biblical literalists (which the Church Fathers were generally not) more or less interpret the bible the same way. It’s a fairly normal approach in theology, to accept that the stories in parables in scripture themselves are not infallibly true but the deeper ideas presented by them are.

>>17495527
>hurr maybe this one creation story is about Atman actually).
The Vedas do speak about the Supreme Self or Paramatman

akāmō dhīrō amr̥taḥ svayambhū rasēna tr̥ptō na kutaś canōnaḥ | tam ēva vidvān na bibhāya mr̥tyōr ātmānaṁ dhīram ajaraṁ yuvānam

Desireless, serene, immortal, Self-existent, contented with the essence, lacking nothing, is He. One has no fear of death who has known Him, the atman—serene, ageless, youthful.

- Arthava Veda 10.8.44

>>17495508
>Buddha rejected sacrificial rites
Did Buddha say that sacrificial rites dont produce any tangible results whatsoever like the acquisition of cows and wealth, or did he just say that Vedic rituals don’t produce liberation from samsara? If he said only the latter than that’s not exactly a rejection of Hinduism because the Vedas don’t claim anywhere that Vedic rituals produce liberation.
> He was anti-Hindu through and through.
So why then did he copy their preexisting teachings of samsara, avidya, rebirth/transmigration, the overcoming of desire, monasticism, the via negativa as applied to the psycho-physical aggregate and various other tidbits?

>>17495508
Is this your “argument” against the Hindu Buddha? Yikes

>>17491811
Retroactively BTFOed by Guenon (pbuh).

>>17496811
>Desireless, serene, immortal, Self-existent, contented with the essence, lacking nothing, is He.
Pretty good definition of para nirvana