--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham" <richard.wordingham@...> wrote:
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "shivkhokra" <shivkhokra@> wrote:
>
> > Unfortunately, for a class of historians who want to show that Mahabharata post dates the arrival of Greeks in India, yavan implies Greeks which is obviously as incorrect as saying yavan mughals were greeks!
>
> The relevant issue is the *original* meaning of the word in the Indian world. You seem to be saying that the match between Hebrew _yawan_ 'Greek' and Sanskrit _yavana_ is a coincidence.<
As an old hand at discussions with Hindu revisionists, with whom I agree on some points but disagree on others, please let me explain the "relevant issue". It is that most of these Hindus have no sense of historicity. They look at the past the way a prescientific eye looks at the sky: no sense of depth, all phenomena above seem to be part of a single flat depthless panorama: clouds, lightning, "falling stars", comets, moon, planets, constellations, the Andromeda nebula etc. Thus, in their understanding of Hinduism, they fail to see evolution and change, projecting all the actual or recent beliefs onto the ancientmost scriptures, e.g. back-projecting the Puranic notion of reincarnation and karma onto the Rg-Veda where it is absent.
They don't understand that their scriptures have a *history*, e.g. that the Mahabharata describes in embellished version events from probably the mid-2nd millennium BC (or from the 32nd century BC, accoridng to the prevalent tradition) that was elaborated over centuries and in which newer elements kept getting integrated until the final editing ca. the time of Christ. Hence funny inter-Hindu debates on e.g. the inclusion of elements like the "Yavanas", who had appeared on India's horizon centuries after the core events of the epic but also a few centuries before its final editing. Or on the inclusion of the Babylonian-Hellenistic Zodiac, which reached India ca. 3rd century BC, but whose mention in the epic is used as proof that "astrology already existed in India in the 32nd century BC", indeed, "it originates in India".
They interpret their own self-description Sanatana Dharma, "eternal system" (endonym for "Hinduism") as meaning that nothing has ever changed and that consequently the present state of affairs must have been in existence identically since eternity. This attitude goes pretty deep: even the 19th-century reformer Swami Dayananda Saraswati who attacked the Puranas (1st mill. CE) as degenerate and advocated a return to the Vedas, nonetheless read the Vedas with Puranic eyes, projected plenty of Puranic beliefs onto them (e.g. that the Vedas are God-given, in conflict with the Veda's own testimony that they were composed in a historical setting by human poets) and then preached that as pure Vedic.
Likewise with words: they refuse to consider the semantic history of words (and a fortiori the evolution of languages out of older languages, e.g. Sanskrit out of PIE). Both the Alexandrine Greeks and the Moghuls were called Yavanas, and you and I understand that this is because a change of meaning in the word has occurred. Yavana meant Greek, and was subsequently extended to all the foreigners coming from the NW. This is a pretty common phenomenon in history, but many Hindus have a Platonic understanding of words as having eternal God-given meanings. I have noticed many times that even after you've explained it all to even those among them who are willing to learn, they still don't get it.
In this case, I'm afraid that ShivKhokra sincerely doesn't realize what an embarrassment his interventions are among trained philologists.
Kind regards,
KE