The rites were performed in the open on a specially prepared plot -there were no temples or idols -by specialized officiants. These ceremonies were to ensure the orderly functioning of the world for the benefit of noble or wealthy patrons. Many hymns and individual stanzas of the oldest literary corpus (the Ṛgveda Sa ṃhit ā, an anthology drawn from family traditions) were intended for the cult and used in the liturgy of spectacular solemn ( śrauta ) ceremonies, which gradually increased in number, length, and complexity. In later times also, Indians have constantly sought correspondences between objects and phenomena belonging to distinct spheres of nature and conceptual systems. Vedic thought was based on the belief in an inextricable coordination of nature, human society, ritual, and the sphere of myth and the divine it was also founded on the belief that these spheres influence one another continuously and that men have, by means of ritual, an obligatory part to play in the maintenance of universal order and the furtherance of their common interests. The religious life reflected in the oldest Indian literature in preclassic Sanskrit, the Veda (from about the thirteenth century bce), is that of a predominantly ritual and sacrificial system (Vedism) developing, almost in seclusion, at first in the Punjab, later in the Ganges Plain, among the immigrant Aryans (Indo-Europeans), whose ideas and representations of the divine constitute an almost unified synthesis embodied in an elaborate mythology partly paralleled by ritual equivalences. ![]() Indian culture gives free scope to the emotional and imaginative sides of human nature, to speculative, more or less visionary thinking and modes of apprehension, and it has long preserved the cohesion of its provinces: religion, art, literature, and social organization. This culture is characterized by an often almost complete integration of heterogeneous elements, by unity in diversity, by homogeneity despite the utmost variety and complexity of its ethnic and social composition, by a multitude of languages and different cultural patterns, and by a great diversity in mental character and socioreligious customs, cults, beliefs, practices, and ways of life varying widely both regionally and, within the same region, from class to class. The Indians, anthropologically a mixture of immigrant Aryans and partly autochthonous peoples, gradually elaborated a many-sided, highly developed culture rooted in the archaic structure of the human mind.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |