Dear Thomas, Piya and Gunnar,

life is indeed full of irony. Can we not say the same of Punjab, where the Sikh religion and people originated but now also a province of Pakistan? Pakistan was but the invention of the colonial British government.

Indus is the name given to the sacred river by the ancient Indian people. The name can be found in ancient pre-Buddhist Vedic literature. The ancient Greeks, Persians and Chinese also used the word broadly to refer to the inhabitants around the river and the Indian subcontinent.

Ancient Chinese pronunciations of "Indus" vary, as shown in offical records: 身æ¯' (shen-du), 天竺 (xian-zhu). The earliest written record was around 100BC, and there was probably Persian influence. In fact, Persian merchants were among the earliest to introduce Buddhism to China. During the Tang dynasty, the popularly known scholar monk Xuan-zang (玄奘) corrected the pronunciation to 印度 (yin-du), and has been used up to the modern day.

I believe the Greeks had borrowed the word (to refer to the Indian people) from the Persians too. And, the Persians, as we are aware, have a common ancestry with the Indians, "eons" ago. After the ancient Persians and Indians parted ways, the significance of Indus as a sacred river was slowly reduced and replaced by Ganges. (Indus still remained a holy river, but alas, it's now in Pakistan.)

The use of Hindu to refer to followers of Hinduism is post-medieval, commonly ascribed to the Turkish invaders of India in the 13th century.

Hence, many people are confused between Hinduism as we know today and the religious movements during Buddha's time.

metta,
Yong Peng.

--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, gunnargallmo@... wrote:

> Firstly, "Hindu" is an anachronistic term here. The term
> actually was not even Indian (it was Iranian, also sued by the
> ancient Chinese)."

As shown by the initial "h", which in Persian often corresponds to Indo-Aryan "s" - hind/sindh, ahura/asura etc. (For the Zoroastrians, the relation between ahura/asura and daeva/deva are inverted in relation to the traditional Indian one - the daevas are demons, and the supreme god is Ahura Mazdah.)

In Greek, this initial s or h was sometimes dropped altogether, so the Indian stem "sindh" and Persian "hind" became Greek "ind", and that's the origin of the name "India".

Ironically, the province of Sindh is not even part of India any more, but of Pakistan...