On Mar 14, 2005, at 11:38 PM, mark robert wrote:
Vaj,
This is interesting. Tell me more about “Soma-siddhanta”. I could not find anything about its history. You call it a tradition and a practice. Is it a book or texts? What is its liturgical basis? You say it could be older than the Vedas. Upon what do you base this?
We know Shiva, but what is “Uma”?
Mark:
Uma is "Parvati". They reside, in Union, in the thousand-petalled lotus.
Soma-siddhanta primarily appears in Kashmir Shaivism. It is a doctrine concerning soma and different aspects of yogic practice. Some concern the goddess Sarasvati. It is also known as Soma-tantra. Some texts consider it an heretical doctrine. While these probably represent streams of oral tradition, some of these trads., esp. the Kapalika (a Shaivite sect) ones found there way into Tibet to become the Vajrayana. The texts which refer to Some-siddhanta are very obscure, so probably not worth mentioning, but we have mention of Soma-siddhanta in numerous KS texts as well as some of the Puranas.
Giuseppe Tucci has found elements of Soma-tantra in both China and Tibet.
There is also some solid evidence, I am told, that the sama--the actual "Vedic" hymns were pre-Vedic, dating from the stone age basically. They were co-opted and codified by the Aryans.
-Vaj
