Wisdom and Knowledge Series, post #22. Buddhism, post #15 (22.2.14):
Harappan Culture
For starters, it's believed that the first hints of Hinduism came from the Harappa people, a culture that inhabited the Indus River Valley of India around the year 4000 B.C. As time progressed, the formerly isolated Harappan culture came under invasion by outside people groups. One of these people groups were groups of Indo-Europeans, also known as Aryans.
As these Aryans invaded, they brought with them their faith known as Vedism. Many historians assert that when the Harappan faith mixed with the Aryan's Vedism, Hinduism was born.
As a religion, Hinduism is polytheistic. In other words, Hinduism believes in more than one god. Being very different from many Western belief systems, Hinduism doesn't hold to the concept of heaven. Instead, its goal is what they call moksha, the release from the cycle of rebirth and death. With this brief summary of Hinduism in ancient India, we now turn our attention to Buddhism.
Siddhartha Gautama
Quite ironically, perhaps, the founder of Buddhism, Siddhartha Gautama, started out as a Hindu. For this reason, Buddhism is often referred to as an off-shoot of Hinduism. Known to the world as Buddha, Gautama is believed to have been a wealthy Indian prince. However, just like the rather hazy information surrounding Hinduism, the founding of Buddhism is also rather unclear. In fact, the birth of Gautama is sometimes placed around 480 B.C., while others place it around 463 B.C.
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Historical Vedic religion
The historical Vedic religion (also known as Vedism, Brahmanism, Vedic Brahmanism, and ancient Hinduism[note 1]) refers to the religious ideas and practices among Indo-Aryan-speaking peoples of ancient India after about 1500 BCE.[2][3][4]
note 1: Scholars such as Jan Gonda have used the term ancient Hinduism, distinguishing it from "recent Hinduism". These terms are chronologically differentiated. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica from the Vedic religion emerged Brahmanism, a religious tradition of ancient India. It states, "Brahmanism emphasized the rites performed by, and the status of, the Brahman, or priestly, class as well as speculation about Brahman (the Absolute reality) as theorized in the Upanishads (speculative philosophical texts that are considered to be part of the Vedas, or scriptures)."[1]
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Vedic religion
Vedic religion, also called Vedism, the religion of the ancient Indo-European-speaking peoples who entered India about 1500 BCE from the region of present-day Iran. It takes its name from the collections of sacred texts known as the Vedas. Vedism is the oldest stratum of religious activity in India for which there exist written materials. It was one of the major traditions that shaped Hinduism.
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Vedas
The Vedas (/ˈveɪdəz, ˈviː-/;[1] Sanskrit: वेद veda, "knowledge") are a large body of religious texts originating in ancient India. Composed in Vedic Sanskrit, the texts constitute the oldest layer of Sanskrit literature and the oldest scriptures of Hinduism.[2][3]
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The Vedas are among the oldest sacred texts.[35][36] The Samhitas date to roughly 1700–1100 BCE,[37] and the "circum-Vedic" texts, as well as the redaction of the Samhitas, date to c. 1000–500 BCE, resulting in a Vedic period, spanning the mid 2nd to mid 1st millennium BCE, or the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age.[38] The Vedic period reaches its peak only after the composition of the mantra texts, with the establishment of the various shakhas all over Northern India which annotated the mantra samhitas with Brahmana discussions of their meaning, and reaches its end in the age of Buddha and Panini and the rise of the Mahajanapadas (archaeologically, Northern Black Polished Ware). Michael Witzel gives a time span of c. 1500 to c. 500–400 BCE. ...
The Upanishads reflect the last composed layer of texts in the Vedas. They are commonly referred to as Vedānta, variously interpreted to mean either the "last chapters, parts of the Vedas" or "the object, the highest purpose of the Veda".[124] The concepts of Brahman (Ultimate Reality) and Ātman (Soul, Self) are central ideas in all the Upanishads,[125][126] and "Know your Ātman" their thematic focus.[126][127] The Upanishads are the foundation of Hindu philosophical thought and its diverse traditions.[61][128] Of the Vedic corpus, they alone are widely known, and the central ideas of the Upanishads have influenced the diverse traditions of Hinduism.[61][129]
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Upanishads
More than 200 Upanishads are known, of which the first dozen or so are the oldest and most important and are referred to as the principal or main (mukhya) Upanishads.[15][16] The mukhya Upanishads are found mostly in the concluding part of the Brahmanas and Aranyakas[17] and were, for centuries, memorized by each generation and passed down orally. The early Upanishads all predate the Common Era, five[note 6] of them in all likelihood pre-Buddhist (6th century BCE),[18] down to the Maurya period.[19] Of the remainder, 95 Upanishads are part of the Muktika canon, composed from about the last centuries of 1st-millennium BCE through about 15th-century CE.[20][21] New Upanishads, beyond the 108 in the Muktika canon, continued to be composed through the early modern and modern era,[22] though often dealing with subjects which are unconnected to the Vedas.[23]
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