Yoga is Hindu. Period.
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Anonymous
And yet that sacred music is still Christian in spirit. Why is everyone missing the point being made on the thread? Everyone can practice yoga and benefit from it. Yet yoga is still Hindu in spirit. Practicing physical yoga doesn't make you Hindu so why is everyone afraid to acknowledge that yoga is Hindu in origin? Afraid or resistant to acknowledge that yoga was developed, nurtured, and protected by Hindus all these thousands of years? If it wasn't for Hindus practicing and preserving the asanas all these thousands of years, it would've been lost to time like so many others. And so then why is it unreasonable for Hindus to say yoga is Hindu? Just about every Hindu scripture including Gita mentions yoga numerous times in their texts. Go ahead and practice and enjoy the many benefits of yoga. It's a gift from Hindus to the world. Np. |
Anonymous
I don't think anyone is denying the history of yoga. Just denying that it cannot be incorporated in other spiritual practices or even despiritualized. Similarly I am not sure what it means to say that music is Christian in spirit. I can hum a Bach oratorio, while fully denying the divinity and messiahship of Christ. To the extent that the Bach oratorio is more than a beautiful set of notes, it is a generalized ethereal joy. Ethereal joy may have been connected to Christ for Bach, but it can be connected to other things for others. |
Anonymous
Actually, a LOT of people in this thread went to enormous lengths to deny the Hindu history of yoga, as far as trying to argue that Hinduism isn't a real religion or that the an outdated eugenics-based, debunked racial Aryan theory is somehow relevant, or that cultural appropriation is only cultural appropriation when someone walks up to you and straight up says, "Yoga isn't Hindu." |
Anonymous
Because of their long history, scriptural and spiritual connection with yoga, it is sacred to Hindus and they are understandably upset to see it disrespected and dissassociated with Hinduism. Swastika was already "despiritualized" and trashed a long time ago. Hindu idols have been turned into decorative pieces. This is the sort of disrespect and disregard that breeds extremists. Would the members of Abrahamic religions allow their sacred symbols, artifacts, and figures such as the cross, Jesus, Mohammad, Allah, Torah be trashed without speaking up about it or even take some offense with it? At the time of yoga's introduction to the west, it was mostly first gen Indians living here who couldn't defend or see what was coming. They were mostly powerless and trying to establish themselves in a new unfamiliar world. The second and third generation Hindus, with their familiarity of western history and more means, are rightfully speaking out about it. (The French control their wines, cheese etc. with their A.O.C stamp of approval. The Italians with their D.O.C stamp. Japan is in the process of regulating what can be called sushi and what doesn't qualify. They do this because they value these products that have a special meaning in their respective cultures. Hindus similarly value yoga and is the reason it was kept alive for thousands of years. Does all the regulating mean that there won't be imitations and that others don't value them for other reasons? Of course not! Italian San Marzano tomatoes grown in the Valle del Sarno gets the D.O.P stamp whereas the rest are just labeled Italian tomatoes from San Marzano region or just San Marzano tomatoes from Italy etc. San Marzano is a variety of tomato and can be grown anywhere. Farmers in our area grow them and sell them at a premium price at the farmer's markets. Anyone who has tasted both the farmer's markets tomatoes and the D.O.C would agree that the former are a poor imitation of the latter. Roma tomatoes are a cross between San Marzano and two other tomatoes. They are good in their own right but are they San Marzano tomatoes? This is the the point that OP makes: that yoga as practiced in the west is a poor imitation of the real one. Perhaps she should work with the Indian embassy or the Indian government in coming up with a regulation for yoga.) Done and out. |
Anonymous
The theory that the Sanskrit derived Indian languages, and some associated aspects of Indian culture, originated with an invasion, is still widely accepted in academia, and is not a racial theory. |
Anonymous
Yes. The entire Torah and all biblical Jewish figures, stories, texts, etc have been completely appropriated and reinterpreted (often radically, and sometimes in the service of antisemitism) by Christians of all types. To a lesser but still considerable degree, Jewish stories, figures, etc were appropriated and reinterpreted by Islam. Jewish stories, figures, etc have also been adapted by commercial popular culture. Some stories, figures and concepts from Christianity were appropriated and reinterpreted by Islam. Certain concepts of religious law, originating in Islam, were appropriated by early medieval Judaism. Approaches to mysticism, and mystical practices went back and forth among the three Abrahamic religions in the middle ages and afterward. |
Anonymous
| Wines etc, are protected not for cultural reasons, but for their commercial value. The protection involves regulation of commercial products. Telling someone what they can call their spiritual practices would violate our notion of civil liberties. |
Anonymous
Actually, it's not attributed to an invasion anymore. Series of migrations are a theory, but "invasions" have been debunked. The PP who brought it up was also definitely couching it in ethnic, cultural and religious terms simultaneously, it wasn't just that he was pointing out a tangential link to Indian Sanskrit. Furthermore, the existence of a link to Sanskrit outside India doesn't even figure in this argument about yoga, it just tries to dilute the idea that cultural appropriation exists. Vedic civilization and its inheritor, the Puranic Hinduism, created yoga. By the time Patanjali was writing the Yoga Sutras, he was a devotee of the Puranic God Shiva and the Vedic pantheon was already fading into the background of Hinduism. Sanskrit also developed in India. If you are stubbornly trying to deny that a specific culture and religion gave birth to yoga because you think a pre-historic migration pattern proves that said culture and religion don't exist, I really can't help you.
Tell me. If the entire world associated the Christian cross with the inverted, burning cross of the KKK, and Christians got verbally attacked and/or accused of supporting hate crimes for using the cross, would you still sit hear saying that cultural appropriation doesn't matter? This is what happened to the Hindu, Jain, Buddhist and Sikh swastika. I resent that my cultural symbol of good luck, peace and holiness has been stolen in the public consciousness by Nazis, and is still portrayed in media as a Nazi symbol, and still constantly appropriated by Neo-Nazis. I resent it very, very, very much.
If you think comparing food to a highly organized and well-documented spiritual practice is at all appropriate, I can't take you seriously. It also means you didn't read the thread at all, because this has been discussed. |
Anonymous
Oh FFS. From 2012. "The collapse of the Aryan Invasion Theory There is widespread misconception in India that all Western scholars support the Aryan invasion theory. Actually, it is becoming a minority view while the few still interested in ancient India have given up the AIT. Here is what a distinguished Greek scholar has to say. Guest column by Nicolas Kazanas Editor’s introduction: While a few diehards like Michael Witzel and Romila Thapar continue to propagate the AIT in different guises like the Aryan Migration Theory (AMT) mainly to save their careers and reputations, it has been given up by scholars worldwide. Its only use today is by Dravidian and other politicians (and politico-scholars) in India. But textbooks in India controlled by ‘Secular’ politico-scholars continue to propagate this divisive and degrading myth. Kazans's book on Vedic civilization The following survey article by the eminent Greek scholar of the Vedas and Greek philosophy Dr. Nicolas Kaznas gives an idea of the current trend in Western academia. Kazanas, born in Greece studied history and economics at the School of Oriental Studies in London, and Sanskrit and Indian languages at the Deccan College in Pune. He is the editor of Vedic Venues, an international scholarly journal published by Aditya Prakashan in New Delhi. Professor Kazanas is the director of the Omilos Meleton Institute in Athens, Greece. [NSR] The Aryan invasion The Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) started in late 18th and early 19th centuries as an explanation of the caste system. Thus various European scholars postulated an invasion from non-Indic people (Egyptian or Mesopotamian) who conquered the natives: the invaders (with a strong priestly class) became the two upper castes and the natives the two lower ones (vaishyas and shûdras). This was refined and turned into a linguistic matter after Jones made his speech about the relation between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin etc. The invaders became IE and so was formed a general theory of Aryan or IE invasions to account for the Greek, Italic, Germanic people and so on, in their historical habitats. In mid-nineteenth century Friedrich Max Müller turned the Theory into an entirely linguistic affair. He postulated certain dates for the composition of Indic literature and these became fixed in the minds of Indologists. Thereafter, all linguistic refinements for the IE tongues (Hittite, Greek, Baltic, Slavic etc) were worked out on this model, namely that there was a PIE language which mainly through migrations and invasions spread from an unspecified centre (but not India) and developed into the present different IE language including Old Indic (=Vedic Sanskrit) and Iranian (=Avestan and Old Persian). At the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries this view was turned by Europeans (later the Nazis) into a thoroughly racial affair ascribing to themselves superiority. This racial doctrine has now been abandoned and we have only the linguistic one. In the 1920s were made the first important discoveries of the ancient Indus Valley or Harappan civilisation. This should have alerted indologists to the possibility that a large part of the Vedic literature was composed by this civilisation which I shall call hereafter the Indus-Sarasvati Civilisation or ISC in short, since most settlements were unearthed on or along the old Sarasvati river. This did not happen. Instead, indologists (mainly sanskritists) found in the ruins of this civilisation evidence that Indo-Aryans invaded and destroyed these cities just as the Rgveda says, according to their own interpretation, that Indra, the chief god of the conquerors destroyed the enemy purs ‘towns, forts’. So a big paradox remained: on the one hand, there was Vedic Literature (a vast corpus) without any other cultural (=archaeological) remains to support it; on the other, a large culture unearthed by archaeologists but without literature despite its knowledge of writing! [Sic: This is widely known as ‘Frawley’s Paradox’ since the contradiction inherent in the position was first highlighted by David Frawley in the book Vedic Aryans and the Origins of Civilization by Rajaram and Frawley. NSR] Archaeologists find no invasion However, in the 1960?s it was established by archaeologists that there had been no invasion , no wars, no violence, and that those towns had fallen into ruination because of natural causes, such as earthquakes which diverted the waters of some rivers and thus caused desiccation on a large scale. But the linguists persisted in their doctrine and the invasion became now “immigration”. But this produced now a second big paradox, i.e. the aryanisation of this vast area where toponymics (=names of rivers, mountains etc) are Aryan (=Sanskritic), not Dravidian or names from another language: small waves of immigrants, according to linguists, produced the SJ & IA C 2 aryanisation of a country which only invasion, conquest and coercion could have effected! Section of the freshly demarcated Sarasvati in Haryana (pic) Any impartial study of the facts, archaeological and linguistic, shows that there is no evidence of any kind to support the so called “waves of immigrations”. On their side, all archaeologists, Western and Indian, say emphatically that there is unbroken continuity in the development of the ISC from the seventh millennium to the sixth cent. BCE when the Persian incursions occur. There is no trace at all of any other culture intruding into the ISC. (a) Anthropological evidence (cranial and skeletal) shows that there was no demographic disruption down to c 600, except perhaps for the period 6000-4500. (b) Genetic studies now show that there was no inflow of genes into the Indian subcontinent prior to c 600. On the contrary there was flow of genes out of India and into the north-western regions. (c) Max Müller’s dating of the Vedic Literature is based on fictions and has no basis whatever in reality. [Sic: His dating of 1500 BCE for the Aryan invasion was based on the Biblical superstition that the world was created 23 October 4004 BCE which he believed was ‘historical’. There still exist trees that are older. NSR] The so-called linguistic evidence (i.e. isoglosses, loan-words etc) can be, and have been, shown to require no immigration. One eminent linguist at least demonstrated that the original homeland is Bactria which is adjacent to Saptasindhu, the Land of the Seven Rivers (=N-W India and Pakistan). [Sic: Land of the seven rivers. These are the five rivers of the Punjab— Satluj, Beas, Ravi, Chenab, Jhelum plus the Sarasvati and the Sindhu (Indus). NSR] Positing Saptasindhu as the original homeland not only does not create problems but, on the contrary, dissolves all difficulties. For instance: (a) Vedic alone has dhâtus and on the whole invariable principles in generating verbs and their conjugations and nouns and their declensions etc. (b) Vedic has both augmented Aorist (=past tense) like á-dhât and anaugmented dhât from ?dhâ put’. Germanic has only an augmented and Greek only augmented. (c) Vedic poetry has both strict metre and alliteration whereas Greek and Latin have only metrical verses and Germanic poetry has alliterative lines only without strict metre. (d) No two IE cultures ( e.g. Baltic, Celtic, Germanic etc) have any IE theonyms (=names of deities) to the exclusion of Vedic. On the other hand, Vedic has 20 theonyms of which Greek has , Germanic 8, Italic (=Latin) and Celtic 6 and the others even less. It is agreed by all, including Western invasionists like Witzel, that the Rigveda hymns were composed around the Sarasvati area. But while they give a date of composition c 1200-1000, the available literary, anthropological and archaeological evidences indicate a date before 3500. Here I summarise broadly the most important points. [Sic: The 1200 BCE date was first postulated by Max Müller in the mid-nineteenth century, based as just noted on his belief in the Biblical date. There was no archaeology, radiocarbon dating or other tools at the time. Romila Thapar who holds on to the same date knows no science and is a Sanskrit illiterate though she writes about the Vedas. NSR] How old is the Rigveda? 1. The Brhadâranyaka Upanisad has a list of 60 teachers. If we allow 15 years for each one, we obtain a period of 900 years. If the BU is of 600 BC, as the AIT scenario wants, the list takes as back to 1500. But none of the 60 teachers nor the doctrine ‘Atman is Brahman’ or ‘I am Brahman’ appear in the RV; the doctrine appears in the Atharva Veda in an approximate form. Given that the RV is linguistically many centuries earlier than the BU, the RV must be put at least 500-600 earlier, i.e. before 2000! 2. Linguistically the RV is many centuries older than the Brâhmanas and the Mahâbhârata. Palaeoastronomy (astrophysicist N. Achar) has shown that astronomical references in the Shatapatha Brâhmana are true for the date 3000-2950. Several astronomical references in the epic are true for 3100-3000! Thus the RV must be from about 3500 and before. 3. The Rgveda does not have many features that characterise the ISC and appear only later in post-rigvedic texts. Thus there are NOT – (a) Ishtakâ the brick, mostly of raw mud, sometimes baked. This was one of the main construction materials in the Early ISC starting at about 3500. Prior to this, houses were fashioned of wood with wattle-and-daub, as described in the RV; (b) Larger urban settlements in the RV as we find them in the ISC; (c) Fixed altars or hearths as described in the Yajur Veda and the Brâhmanas; (d) Ruins or ruined towns; (e) cotton karpâsa; [Sic: karpasa becomes ‘kapzum’ in Sumerian from which we derive the word kapda for cloth. NSR] (f) silver rajata;(g) rice vrîhi; (h) literacy ‘lipi, lekha(-na)’; [Sic: This is disputed. Writing may have been known in Rigvedic times but not widespread. Rajaram has found a deciphered (i) artistic iconography (sculpture, relief, seals). Bricks are mentioned first in Yajur Veda and extensively in the Brâhmanas. Silver appears as rajata-hiranya in the Yajur Veda; rice vrîhi in the Atharva Veda; cotton karpâsa, first in Baudhâyana's Sûtras; and so on. 4. The river Sarasvatî is praised as a mighty and all nourishing river in all the Books or the RV except the fourth. Even in late hymns such as 8.21 or 10.64 and 10.177 Sarasvatî is said to give wealth and nourishment and the poets invoke her as «great». In 6.52 Sarasvatî is «swollen by other (three or more) rivers»; in 6.61 she is endless, swift-moving, most dear among her sisters and nourishing the five tribes of the Vedic people; in 2.41.16 Sarasvatî is «best river, best mother, best goddess»; in 7.95.2 this mighty river «flows pure from the mountains to the ocean». The river dried up around 1900 BCE. So the RV is referring to a condition long before the end of the river. Archaeologists and palaeohydrologists say that Sarasvatî flowed from the Himalayas to the ocean (in the Rann of Kutch) before 3800 BCE. Satellite photos and other analyses confirm now the route of the river from the mountain to the ocean. After this period some of the rivers feeding the Sarasvatî were, due to tectonic shifts, captured by other rivers (eg the Indus and the Ganges) and so this once mighty river weakened and began to dry up reaching its final desiccation c 1900 BCE. Consequently the RV, or at least all those hymns that praise the Sarasvatî were composed before 3600 possibly before 4000. This date agrees with the building materials and techniques (the pre-brick phase) of the very early Harappan culture, as established by archaeologists and as described in RV. [Sic: N.S. Rajaram and David Frawley in their book Vedic Aryans and the Origins of the Civilization suggest that the composition of the Rigveda had been completed for the most part by the time of the famous Battle of Ten Kings, which they place c. 3700 BCE. Their compilation began about that time under King Sudas and more or less completed 600 years later by Veda Vyasa. NSR] Conclusion: If the bulk of several hymns of the RV were composed c 4000-3600 the Indoaryans using the Vedic language were settled in Saptasindhu at that period. Whatever else might have happened before that period, the Indoaryans were by 1700 BCE thoroughly indigenous. [Sic: In particular, the Harappan people who created the civilization named after them were heavily influenced by the Vedic people before them. NSR]" There's more and a different pp gave you plenty of scientific and academic links, including DNA evidence. But hey, what does that matter when there are still some people saying their had to be an Aryan invasion just because I say so. Are there some in academia (many so called "Indologists" that still cling to this outdated theory? For sure. Should we be highlighting their ignorance as a way to argue against the truth? No. |
Anonymous
Dude, fucking THANK YOU. Are you as creeped out as I am by how stubbornly racist this thread has been? I actually had no clue that they would be in such deep and stubborn denial. |
Anonymous
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" i.e. the aryanisation of this vast area where toponymics (=names of rivers, mountains etc) are Aryan (=Sanskritic), not Dravidian or names from another language: small waves of immigrants, according to linguists, produced the SJ & IA C 2 aryanisation of a country which only invasion, conquest and coercion could have effected! "
How do you know that? How do you know immigration and assimilation could not have done that? So you believe the Indo European languages expanded out of India, as almost no IE specialists think? Or that Sanskrit is not an IE language? Apparently some people do http://deadlinguist.blogspot.com/2012/05/sanskrit-isnt-indo-european.html Also you might have included a link, so we can see if your source is a mainstream website. You might want to go and correct Wikipedia, as they imply aryan migration is still widely held. And, no, calling aryan migration theory in its current form racist does not make it so. |
Anonymous
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I found another site that actually says Sanskrist is not IE. Not surprisingly it is from the encyclopedia of authentic Hinduism.
here is more on Sanskrit and hindutva http://scroll.in/article/737715/fact-check-india-wasnt-the-first-place-sanskrit-was-recorded-it-was-syria https://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2011/03/14/why-hindutvas-reject-the-aryan-migration-theory/ http://creative.sulekha.com/the-great-aryan-non-debate_184688_blog "As Prof. Stephanie Jamison of UCLA recently put it, “The Indo-Aryan controversy is a manufactured one with a non-scholarly agenda, and the tactics of the manufacturers are very close to those of the ID [Intelligent Design] proponents…real scientific questions are being debated on what is essentially a religio-nationalistic attack on a scholarly consensus.” " "There is no evidence of human destruction in Harappa, hence there could not have been an Aryan invasion; this, in turn, proves that the Aryans were indigenous, goes his argument. Frawley, a.k.a. Vamadeva Shastri, uses the classic Hindutva tactic of setting up a proposition that does not truly represent an opponent’s viewpoint, and then proceeding to ‘demolish’ it and declaring victory. In this case, it is a well known fact that the term ‘invasion’ coined by Max Mueller was universally rejected by scholars decades ago in favor of ‘migrations,’ which is what is actually described in most California textbooks, notwithstanding the curriculum standards. Yet, Frawley insists on clubbing the two terms together, and makes the pretense that invalidating Aryan ‘invasions’ somehow also invalidates Aryan ‘migrations.’ " "Hindutva groups have made much of recent DNA evidence to legitimize their Aryan indigenity argument. One such study by Sahoo, et. al. [17] had concluded that the genetic contribution of the west to Indian caste groups appears small -- contradicting earlier studies, based on paternally inherited Y-chromosomes, which had concluded that upper castes are significantly more similar to Europeans than are lower castes. [18] This much-vaunted study, however, did not explain some of its own possibly significant data, which, for instance, indicated that the ‘genetic distance’ of Eastern Europeans from ‘South Indian castes’ is three times that from ‘North Indian castes’ -- which seemed to echo earlier findings that upper castes in northern India were much closer to Central Asian populations than those in southern India. [19] Instead, the researchers appeared to leap to a much broader conclusion, obviously pleasing to Hindutvadis: “[the data] argue against any major influx from regions north and west of India, of people associated with either with the development of agriculture or the spread of Indo-Aryan language family.” Do such DNA studies exonerate opponents of Aryan ‘migrations’? Not by a long shot. As the leader of the research team himself conceded in interviews, the study only dealt with the low presence of western genes in Indian castes and that the Indian subcontinent may have acquired agricultural techniques and languages from the west [20]: "The fact that Indo-European speakers are predominantly found in northern parts of the subcontinent may be because they were in direct contact with the Indo-European migrants, where they could have a stronger influence on the native populations to adopt their language and other cultural entities." This information, which seems to support what Prof. Jamison calls into-India language-migration theory, is obviously not something that Hindutvadis (who chafe at the very suggestion that Vedic culture and Sanskrit could have come from outside current-day India) are sharing widely with their constituencies. In reality, genetic studies are in still in their infancy. Contradictory conclusions reached by research teams appear sometimes to be influenced by ideological considerations. There is no real ancient DNA material available at this point; and error bars in the studies, which use modern DNA, run into many thousands of years. If such studies disprove that the Aryan came from outside India, they could, with equal veracity, also ‘disprove’ the idea of Muslim invasions in the Middle Ages. It is therefore not surprising that a book covering the controversy in great detail did not give genetics any serious consideration." |