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Secularist, the kind who know next to nothing of their tradition yet condemn it out of hand anyway.

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Secularist, the kind who know next to nothing of their tradition yet condemn it out of hand anyway. Empty Secularist, the kind who know next to nothing of their tradition yet condemn it out of hand anyway.

Post by Rishi Wed Mar 06, 2013 11:24 pm

Coming to the Upanishads, it is their classification that arouses unorthodox suspicions. According to Daya Krishna: “Most are not independent works, but selections made out of a pre-existing text”. (p.104), which raises questions, such as: who made the selection, and why? Thus, the Aitareya Upanishad forms the middle part of the Aitareya Aranyaka, the Kena forms the 10th chapter of the Jaiminiya Upanishad-Brahmana, the Taittiriya is the 7th to 9th chapter of Taittiriya Aranyaka, while the Katha is part of the Taittiriya Brahmana.

Daya Krishna wisely avoids pronouncing on the difficult question of their absolute chronology, but he observes that in relative order, Upanishad is a genre stretching from the old Upanishads which are embedded in Vedic literature, through the middle ones to a host of late ones as recent as the Muslim period. Again, the fact that many clearly postdate the Vedic period (even by the large definition of “Vedic” current in India) casts doubt on their status of apaurusheyatva. Here too, we know the situation and the story of Yajnavalkya, Satyakama Jabala, Uddalaka Aruni and others seers, as of any human writers.

Briefly, Daya Krishna was a Hindu philosopher who knew his classics very well, and who took a questioning position. He was not a secularist, the kind who know next to nothing of their tradition yet condemn it out of hand anyway. But he was not a believer either, aware as he was of the contradiction between the common beliefs about Vedic literature and what the Vedas themselves say.

http://koenraadelst.blogspot.com/2012/12/an-indian-sceptic.html

Rishi

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