Heather, you brought up just the question I wanted to answer. :) You see, to call India the parent of all knowledge and civilisation one needs to understand a few things. First, the true original philosophy that I am talking of is the parent of all civilisation. It cannot be characterised by Indian, simply because it is observably distinct from what may be perceived today in India. This is the famous divide between Vedic philosophy and Hinduism, even though only apparent as some may believe. It is the Vedic dharma and not Indian religion that is the parent of all humanity. Hinduism is a degenerate form of Vedic philosophy, just as Buddhist or Christian philosophy is, except that Hinduism is the closest to the Vedic religion, not just in its language and ritual, but in all other aspects (unlike Christianity which needed a certain Jesus of Nazareth to be educated in Eastern philosophy and then sent to the West to preach -- yes, there is considerable evidence that the biblically undocumented 12 years of Jesus' life were in fact spent in Kashmir, where there still lies a tomb of his).
Modern scholars all accept this, but only that they like to call the parent the Proto-Indo-European religion rather than an honest acceptance that it is the Vedic religion, nothing distant from us, nothing unrecoverable. Another important reconciliation between the East and the West: French, German, Arabic, Afrikaans, Japanese, Hindi, all of them, they come from one parent, the Vedic language, except that it all depends on how similar they are. If enough scholarly endeavour were encouraged, we would reach a clear tracing of all the world's languages to this one language. *Hence, the claim that I am not a true Hindu if I speak in English is malfounded, because all languages come from one parent. *Also, the Sanskrit language is considerably different from the Vedic. Sanskrit is a much smaller and colloquial form of the much more abstruse Vedic language. Ergo, let us use the word "Vedic" for the parent civilisation instead of Indian. It only happens that in India, the original dharma was well preserved unlike the rest of the world (in fact, today in the West, not even the true spirit of Christianity is being preserved, let alone the original parent religion of all). There are a lot of factors to this -- Indian geography being a very evident factor. Akshay On 16/01/2008, Heather Perella <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Akshay: > > Most people are first introduced to Eastern > > philosophy > > via Chinese thought (I Ching, Lao-tsu etc.), but > > since it is Indian > > thought > > that is the parent of all thought systems of the > > world (in fact, various > > scholars have began tracing "foreign" religions to > > direct > > correspondences > > with Indian thought, a commonly cited example being > > the relation between > > Latin Ju-piter, Greek Zeus Pater, and Sanskrit Dyaus > > Pita). > > > > SA: "...Indian thought that is the parent of all > thought systems of the world..." It depends on what > you mean by "Indian", but I find this to be very > ethnocentric. So, the Inca thought system can be > traced back to "Indian thought"? > > > SA > > > > ____________________________________________________________________________________ > Be a better friend, newshound, and > know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. > http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ > > Moq_Discuss mailing list > Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. > http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org > Archives: > http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ > http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/ > Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
