This is a new topic

[mimicr]

Isn't that great?

[Ness]

......

[Dime]

On 2004-02-03 18:01, Ness wrote:
......



owned

[Ness]

On 2004-02-03 18:03, Dime wrote:


On 2004-02-03 18:01, Ness wrote:
......



owned



http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_smile.gif

[Dime]

Double owned

[mimicr]

Should I just shutup for now?

[Dime]

DUNNO

[Ness]

Time to kill this topic!

THE RELIGION OF THE UPANISHADS

Many collections of Upanishads have been published, one of the largest including no less than 108 texts. Only a small number of these are ancient. Many of the later ones are sectarian writings. The oldest Upanishads, by contrast, represent spiritual teachings and investigations which are a common reference point for all subsequent Indian philosophy, including the thinkers of many sects who reject the scriptural status of the Vedas. Commentaries by the great philosopher Shankara on eleven of Upanishads are still extant, and these eleven have acquired a special status shared by very few others. They are the brhadaraNyaka, chandogya, kaTha, kena, iisha, mandukya, mundaka, aitereya, shevataashvatara and taittiriiya.

In Hindu tradition the Upanishads as the Vedanta, the last element in the Veda, have full scriptural authority. They are Shruti, revealed scripture handed down by the sages. [Their status as Shruti suggests the experience underlying the sages' words is accepted as self-authenticating.]

The Upanishads allow us to watch the ancient sages teaching, we can sit alongside and overhear the discourses and discussions they hold. The upanishads are teaching texts, memorised and handed down generation to generation in the traditional vedic schools for centuries, before they were eventually committed to writing.

Vedic religion was sacrifice-centred, ritualistic and originally polytheistic. The hymns of the Rg Veda and Sama Veda express the religious consciousness of this tradition, but even in those hymns we see the emergence of speculative and sceptical philosophical thought reshaping the religion away from polytheism into a rationally and spiritually more satisfying focus on a single Divine Reality, seen as source and sustainer of the Universe.

The Vedic sacrifices were rites of quite extraordinary complexity, involving numbers of different priests with distinct functions. The elaborate physical with the various sacrificial fires ordered to significant directions, its array of priests with distinct specialised roles in the rite and its carefully organised sequence of ritual actions, offerings and hymns, is also a mystical cosmogram, representing the order and structure of the world and the divine powers sustaining it. In the course of certain parts of the rites, the priests asked each other riddling questions about the sacrifice, the gods, the ultimate structure of the Universe. The ritual riddles express something highly significant about Brahminical culture: the ancient Brahmin priests were not simply ritual experts content to carry out their religious duties and hand on the tradition handed down to them: they were also speculative and analytic thinkers, seeking the inner significance of their rites, word-warriors arguing and debating the meaning of their rites. The Brahmanas, lengthy liturgical commentaries handed down with the hymns and ritual texts of the Vedas, represent their attempts to interpret the sacrificial rites as embodiments of the ultimate meanings of the Universe and of human life.

The Aranyakas, the "forest books" which are appended to the Brahmanas, contain a subtly different form of theological speculation. These texts emanate from the mystical meditations of Brahmin sages working in their forest hermitages, no longer themselves carrying out the sacrificial rites, but recollecting them, imagining them and using their meditations on the rites as a means of investigating ultimate reality.

The Upanishads emerge from the Brahmanas and Aranyakas, their investigations moving beyond focus on the sacrificial rites to seek a direct, immediate and life-transforming knowledge of the Self and of the Real.

The brahmins were living encyclopaedias of sacred text, doctrine and law and the ritual experts of the community. As urban life developed and spread, it became possible to develop educational and cultural institutions, and the temple, the royal court and the school, all of which reshaped the priestly role.

It came to be common for religiously motivated Brahmins to relinquish family life after fulfilling their household duties and to retire to an eremitical life in the forests or to become wandering ascetics, their homeless life a lived symbol of their spiritual quest. Many forest hermits became teachers, drawing young celibate students as well as older men who had retired from domestic life to seek to share their wisdom. In such loose communities the spiritual quest went far beyond the search for the inner meaning of the sacrificial rites. Householders too were caught up in this quest: the great philosopher-priest Yajnavalkya is presented as already an expert on the ultimate even before he abandons domestic life. More surprisingly, given the age of the Brihadarnayaka Upanishad where the story of his leaving home is told, one of his wives is also described as sharing his quest for knowledge of brahman. Another woman philosopher, Gargi, was one of Yajnavalkya's most formidable opponents in verbal combat.

The Upanishads represent the spiritual tradition of the forest hermits and to a lesser extent of the wandering ascetics. It is a tradition of:

UPASANA - meditation, both discursive meditation exploring the inscape of meaning of religious symbols and contemplative meditation seeking direct experience of the Self and the Real, Aatmanand Brahman.
TEACHING - the forest sage became Guru to the young brahmacarins who came to sit at his feet,
ASCETICISM- a disciplined, frugal, simple life was typical of the sages, a life that put aside all the riches and all the security and support offered by the settled life.
DEBATE - one of the sources of vitality of Indian philosophical tradition is the practise of disputation and debate. Sages disagreed, they became rivals and fought each other in informal or in formal verbal combat -and from an early period began to compose handbooks of debating technique -and teachers used the techniques of debate to teach and test their disciples.
The Upanishadic tradition has its roots in mystical experience but it seeks rational and intelligible expression and invites the testing of its conclusions.

CRITICAL ORTHODOXY -the Upanishadic sages belong to Hindu tradition, not only in the obvious sense that their teachings are preserved in texts which Hindus accept as scripture, but also in the much more important sense that they stand within the living tradition of Brahminical Hinduism. The Upanishadic sages are frequently critical of elements in the priestly tradition, some deny the efficacy of rites and sacrifices as a means to Liberation. They still remain, however, within the same tradition as the sacrificing priests, they still make use of sacrificial imagery to interpret human life or to depict the structure of the cosmos.

Despite belonging to the Orthodox tradition, the Upanishadic sages represent a style of religious practise and thought far removed from what we find in the early Vedic hymns.

[Blitzkommando]

On 2004-02-03 18:18, Ness wrote:
ORTHODOXY

I saw my orthodontist today. Does that count?

[derBauer]

I'm crazy for you

[Blitzkommando]

On 2004-02-03 19:02, derBauer wrote:
I'm crazy for you


http://img14.photobucket.com/albums/v41/blitzkommando/Half-Life/imp.gif

Impy likes your sig. http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_wacko.gif

[Hrith]

I fear you might hurt yourself BK http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_disapprove.gif

[mimicr]

What does an orthodontist have to do with cheese again?
I got lost.

[Kizaragu]

Everything my friend. Everything.