RLG205 Lecture 1: May 5

Textual Approach to Studying Religion

  • Focuses on reading scriptures and understanding their historical context.
  • Examines the influences on the scriptures and their impact on society.
  • Asks questions about society based on reading the scriptures.
  • Related fields:
    • History of religions: Understanding society and religious beliefs through scriptures.
    • Intellectual history: Understanding the history of ideas and influences.
    • Philology: Studying the meanings of individual texts and tracking words/ideas across scriptures.
    • Textual criticism: Tracking changes in scriptures over time due to copying errors and alterations.

Material Approach to Studying Religion

  • Pushes back against solely focusing on texts.
  • Recognizes that not everyone in a society reads or knows scripture.
  • Considers the activities and beliefs of those who were not literate or did not have access to religious texts.
  • Involves looking at material culture, such as:
    • Sacred objects and sites.
    • Temples.
    • Inscriptions.
    • Stone carvings.
    • Images.
    • Artwork
  • Related fields:
    • History of religions: Getting a fuller picture by looking at physical evidence on the ground rather than just scriptures.
    • Archaeology of religions: Examining physical evidence like temples, monuments, and objects.

Ethnographic Approach to Studying Religion

  • Further pushes against relying solely on texts.
  • Utilizes access to living people in modern times.
  • Gains a better understanding of what people believe personally, apart from scriptures or institutions.
  • Focuses on how religious ideas and communities manifest in lived experience and practice.
  • Related fields: Anthropology, ethnography, sociology.

Combining Approaches

  • Different approaches can be combined, such as pairing textual analysis with ethnography or material culture.
  • This is not an exhaustive list, but it provides a starting point for thinking about various approaches to studying religion.

Studying South Asian Religions

Special Considerations for South Asia

  • Unique characteristics:
    • Insane surplus of texts and manuscripts in Hindu languages.
    • Relative lack of material culture compared to other regions.

Comparison

  • Greek and Roman classics:

    • Approximately two dozen texts.

  • South Asia:

    • Estimated around 4,000 manuscripts in Sanskrit and other ancient Indic languages.
    • Many remain untranslated and unexamined.
    • Numerous copies of different texts exist.
    • Entire libraries with hundreds of thousands of books have been lost.

Constraints

  • Limited access to material culture.
  • Inability to conduct ethnographic studies on deceased individuals.
  • Reliance on textual evidence to form opinions and educated guesses about the past.

Ancient Period (c. 1800 BCE - 100 CE)

  • Associated with Vedic civilization and Indus Valley civilization.
  • Spans to around the time the Vikram Sambhat calendar came into usage.
  • Limited knowledge, primarily based on the Vedic corpus:
    • Collection of scriptures known as the Vedas.

Classical Period

  • Significant proliferation of Sanskrit.
  • Development of Sanskrit grammar and related sciences (Shastra).
  • Advancements in material culture and the rise of the Gupta and Maurya Empires.
  • Emergence of court culture and high culture.
  • Development of art and science.
  • Material culture available to verify textual information:
    • Ancient temple sites.
    • Inscriptions on pillars of Ashoka.

Medieval Period

  • Development of vernacular languages (non-Sanskritic).
  • Emergence of old Hindi and other languages.
  • Increased availability of evidence, records, and temple sites.
  • Documentation of political and social movements, trade, and empires.

Early Modern and Modern Periods

  • Significant increase in available data.
  • Arrival of Europeans and their travel logs.
  • Detailed understanding of events through various sources.
  • Contemporary methods like ethnography for understanding modern religious practices.

Historical Approach

  • Vedic religion or Brahmanical tradition
  • Development of Buddhism and Jainism.
  • Contemplative and spiritual practices, like yoga.
  • Ritual developments and Tantra.
  • Devotional movements (Bhakti) dedicated to divinities like Vishnu or Shiva.

Contemporary Approach

  • Vaishnavas, Shaivas, and certain forms of yoga and Vedanta are considered part of Hinduism.
  • Emphasis on the fact that Hinduism was not a primary identifier historically.
  • The term Hindu came into consciousness in the early modern period.
  • It was often used to distinguish oneself from the religious practices of others.

Other Religions in South Asia

  • Buddhism is typically not considered a major part of South Asian religions today due to its decline in the region.
  • Religions that entered the subcontinent: Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Judaism.
  • Contemporary South Asian religious landscape: Sikhism, Bahai, etc.

Approaches

  • There are unique constraints which kind of inform the questions we can even ask.

  • Focus on Premodern Traditions: Interested in Vedic/Vedantic, yoga, Buddhist, Jaina, Tantra, Bhakti, and more.

Textual Approach

  • Primarily a textual approach.
  • Reading sacred texts and understanding their cultural contexts.
  • Supplementing readings with academic sources for a better understanding.

Other Approaches

  • Philosophical Thinking: Introduction on philosophical thinking about texts.
  • Phenomenological Approach: Studying experience and bracketing out skepticism.

Course Overview

  • Introduction to South Asian Religions: Overview of a variety of religious traditions.
  • Familiarity with Sanskrit Philosophy: Appreciation for intellectual traditions.
  • Contextualize Meditation: Place the role of meditation and contemplation within the landscape.
  • Space as Metaphor: Divinity or consciousness, and to see the ways in which all of these contemplative practices focused on space as this big kind of grounding force.

Course Aspects

  • Six weeks, 12 lectures (Mondays and Wednesdays, 1-3 PM).
  • Tutorials on Wednesdays.
  • Regular attendance is factored into your grade.

Weekly Post

*Discussion board-based conversation.

*Post one or two paragraphs a week.

*Respond to at least one other student with one or two sentences.

Essay Response

*Midpoint essay response of about two to three pages.

Final Exam:

*Final exams (35% of grade) during finals period.

Why Space

*Space is often overlooked but is fundamental.

*It is often used as a symbol for divinity in various religions and philosophical traditions.

*Different understandings of space inform different understandings of the absolute truth or reality.

*Thinking about space phenomenologically can be therapeutic.

Bronze Age Dialect

*Living fossil to this day.

*There are still reciters of the Veda. Living fossil of people's the scholars think to be a Bronze Age dialect

4 Vedas

  1. Rigveda: verses in metrical form.
  2. Yajurveda: prose for ritual actions.
  3. Samaveda: Rigvedic mantras set to melodies.
  4. Atharvaveda: spells, magic, curing diseases.

4 divisions

  1. Samhitas: prayers/liturgies.
  2. Brahmanas: instructions on performing sacrifices.
  3. Aranyakas: esoteric connections.
  4. Upanishads: metaphysical/mystical insight.

Vedic Deities

  • Gods of nature and natural forces:
    • Indra: rain.
    • Agni: fire.
    • Varuna: waters.
    • Ushas: dawn.
    • Prajapati: creator deity.

Orthodox View on the Vedas

  • Not a historical text.
  • Eternal text with no point of creation.
  • Revealed by sages (Rishis) who spoke the Veda into awareness.
  • Has the highest authority on speaking about things beyond perception.

Theories: Migration Theory

  • A language family that links most of the modern European languages with the exception of, like, Finnish and Basque and maybe one other one.

  • Links the modern, like, Romance and Germanic languages and Slavic languages to, Persian and modern Indic languages.

The Yagna sacrifice

  • There are like many different kinds of yagna which are spoken of within the within the Vedic corpus.

  • One for the daily performances. Things that would be done twice a day, Such as Agnihotra- performed in the morning and in the evening.

  • Very large sacrificial alters were built. (but there is no archaeological evident to back this up.

Vedic Sacrifice

  • Essence: offering a substance (e.g., ghee, milk, rice, soma) into a medium (e.g., fire, water) for a specific result.

Upanhishads

  • You performed this ritual for this result, and in order to attain heaven or the sovereignty of the god.

But the belief is that the action itself is limited.