02-17-2009, 01:57 PM
<span style='color:red'>The Ancient History of Test Cricket</span>
Filed under: Uncategorized â Tags: Buddhism, Cricket, Judaism â Acharya Somuchidononanda Pandey @ 3:56 pm
It appears to be cricket season with India performing quite well against Australia. At this juncture, it would be befitting if one were to go back to scholarly history to understand the truly ancient roots of this great sport.
Some time ago Nitin Pai alerted us by email to a report in the Times of India.
Terian notes that in the Armenian Gospel of the Infancy, translated into Armenian in the 6th century from a much older lost Syriac original, a passage tells of Jesus playing what may well be the precursor of cricket, with a club and ball.
Terian, who discovered the manuscript more than a decade ago at the Saint James Armenian Monastery in the Old City of Jerusalem, says he has now identified the same passage in a couple of other manuscripts of the same gospel of which some 40 copies exist in various archival collections in Europe and the Middle East, including the oldest copy now in Yerevan, the capital of the Armenian Republic.
I too have come across many scholarly works mentioning some form of âCricketâ being played in the middle-east as early as the 5th Century BCE. One notable treatise being that by Dr Yippi Schlein of Vanderbater University. Since its publication in early 1997 I have met Dr Schlein twice and have had the good fortune to discuss this with him.
Dr Schlein mentions a quaint Bar Mitzvah ritual where the young boy is given a thin flexible reed and made to stand in front of three stone pillars. 5 other boys are each given 6 rocks to hurl at the pillars. The task for the Bar is to defend the 3 stone pillars with the reed. This ritual is supposed to teach the young man that it is well neigh impossible to do so unless one were to physically stand in the way of the pillars, which would entail being stoned. This may well have evolved into the Haj ritual of stoning the devil, and the Biblical parable where Jesus shames those trying to stone the prostitute.
According to Dr Schlein, this practice died out by the later Roman times itself. Since he mentioned this to me way back in the year 2000 at the ACISTI conference in Tehran, I have not been able to spend too much time researching this, but have been able to collect some data which I have still not completely collated.
Of significance is one particularly remarkable piece of Archaeological evidence. This is yet to be fully studied and I have been in close contact with Dr Ahmed Kayyuosti of Kandahar who is working on a full-fledged paper which is to be published soon. As recently as the year 2006, Afghan Archaeologists digging near Bamiyan found a Greek/Armenian Ashokan inscription which also mentions this âsportâ. The Hebrew name for it was Tâost Kirzah, in Sanskrit it was called Thesta Krishkatam (Tettha Kriccum in Pali).
But instead of the reed, and the three pillars, there is a mention of young buddhist monks-in-training running continuously for five days between two sets of wooden spikes separated by a distance of 44 angas. The object of this ritual was to run as few times as possible between the two spikes until an elderly monk made a sign of a huge square on the ground (the Thalavischa Ripla Yantra), and everyone stopped and looked up at the hills overlooking the monastery. If a particular star (most probably the red giant 15Y Theta Pleiades) was visible over the ridge, then the young trainee was to stop and return to the Vihara, otherwise, he should continue running. The âgameâ was supposed to teach the boys about the ways to escape rebirth (one of the spikes represented birth and the other, death). There is an anecdotal mention of a monk named Rahula from the Dakshina Desha who is reputed to have âattained nirvanaâ within 5 âlife cyclesâ every time he ran.
It appears that with the advent of later mystic Buddhist branches such as Tibetan and Theravada Buddhism, Thetta Kriccum was significantly shortened from the original 5 days to half a day or so. There also seems to have been an ideological shift. While ancient Buddhism seemed to allow for âno-resultâ in a game, the later forms enforced a result in the game where there was utmost pressure on the Buddhist monks to either attain Nirvana or renounce the faith. Like all manmade artefacts, this sport too seems to have had its life-cycle complete when it is disappeared from popularity and was later revived in England in the form of Test Cricket.
It is quite possible that Marco Polo was the first European to come across the game as a variant could well have been played by the Central-Asian nomadic peoples. How it reached England and became the modern game as we know will be the subject of an entirely new study.
http://pandey.ru/blog/acharyasomuchidonona...f-test-cricket/
Filed under: Uncategorized â Tags: Buddhism, Cricket, Judaism â Acharya Somuchidononanda Pandey @ 3:56 pm
It appears to be cricket season with India performing quite well against Australia. At this juncture, it would be befitting if one were to go back to scholarly history to understand the truly ancient roots of this great sport.
Some time ago Nitin Pai alerted us by email to a report in the Times of India.
Terian notes that in the Armenian Gospel of the Infancy, translated into Armenian in the 6th century from a much older lost Syriac original, a passage tells of Jesus playing what may well be the precursor of cricket, with a club and ball.
Terian, who discovered the manuscript more than a decade ago at the Saint James Armenian Monastery in the Old City of Jerusalem, says he has now identified the same passage in a couple of other manuscripts of the same gospel of which some 40 copies exist in various archival collections in Europe and the Middle East, including the oldest copy now in Yerevan, the capital of the Armenian Republic.
I too have come across many scholarly works mentioning some form of âCricketâ being played in the middle-east as early as the 5th Century BCE. One notable treatise being that by Dr Yippi Schlein of Vanderbater University. Since its publication in early 1997 I have met Dr Schlein twice and have had the good fortune to discuss this with him.
Dr Schlein mentions a quaint Bar Mitzvah ritual where the young boy is given a thin flexible reed and made to stand in front of three stone pillars. 5 other boys are each given 6 rocks to hurl at the pillars. The task for the Bar is to defend the 3 stone pillars with the reed. This ritual is supposed to teach the young man that it is well neigh impossible to do so unless one were to physically stand in the way of the pillars, which would entail being stoned. This may well have evolved into the Haj ritual of stoning the devil, and the Biblical parable where Jesus shames those trying to stone the prostitute.
According to Dr Schlein, this practice died out by the later Roman times itself. Since he mentioned this to me way back in the year 2000 at the ACISTI conference in Tehran, I have not been able to spend too much time researching this, but have been able to collect some data which I have still not completely collated.
Of significance is one particularly remarkable piece of Archaeological evidence. This is yet to be fully studied and I have been in close contact with Dr Ahmed Kayyuosti of Kandahar who is working on a full-fledged paper which is to be published soon. As recently as the year 2006, Afghan Archaeologists digging near Bamiyan found a Greek/Armenian Ashokan inscription which also mentions this âsportâ. The Hebrew name for it was Tâost Kirzah, in Sanskrit it was called Thesta Krishkatam (Tettha Kriccum in Pali).
But instead of the reed, and the three pillars, there is a mention of young buddhist monks-in-training running continuously for five days between two sets of wooden spikes separated by a distance of 44 angas. The object of this ritual was to run as few times as possible between the two spikes until an elderly monk made a sign of a huge square on the ground (the Thalavischa Ripla Yantra), and everyone stopped and looked up at the hills overlooking the monastery. If a particular star (most probably the red giant 15Y Theta Pleiades) was visible over the ridge, then the young trainee was to stop and return to the Vihara, otherwise, he should continue running. The âgameâ was supposed to teach the boys about the ways to escape rebirth (one of the spikes represented birth and the other, death). There is an anecdotal mention of a monk named Rahula from the Dakshina Desha who is reputed to have âattained nirvanaâ within 5 âlife cyclesâ every time he ran.
It appears that with the advent of later mystic Buddhist branches such as Tibetan and Theravada Buddhism, Thetta Kriccum was significantly shortened from the original 5 days to half a day or so. There also seems to have been an ideological shift. While ancient Buddhism seemed to allow for âno-resultâ in a game, the later forms enforced a result in the game where there was utmost pressure on the Buddhist monks to either attain Nirvana or renounce the faith. Like all manmade artefacts, this sport too seems to have had its life-cycle complete when it is disappeared from popularity and was later revived in England in the form of Test Cricket.
It is quite possible that Marco Polo was the first European to come across the game as a variant could well have been played by the Central-Asian nomadic peoples. How it reached England and became the modern game as we know will be the subject of an entirely new study.
http://pandey.ru/blog/acharyasomuchidonona...f-test-cricket/