Removing The Sheen From Buddhism

[Husky]

The following is relevant in this thread. I'm pleased someone wrote it. :at last: It's actually much needed.



My profuse comments are all over the place but are at least demarcated by being in purple again.

But better yet is that my comments can be easily avoided by reading the article at the link:



haindavakeralam.com/HkPage.aspx?PAGEID=17262

A Rejoinder to Hoole: Tamil Hinduism and Arumuka Navalar

01/05/2013 00:05:59





Romesh Jayaratnam

Kandy





I respond to the three opinion pieces of Samuel Ratnajeevan Herbert Hoole namely



(i) "Arumuka Navalar: Fake Images and Histories" published in the Colombo Telegraph on March 30, 2013 and in the Sunday Leader and Sri Lanka Guardian;

(ii) "The Jaffna Version of the Tamil Bible: By Peter Percival or Arumuka Navalar" published in the Colombo Telegraph on April 5, 2013 and in the Sunday Leader and Sri Lanka Guardian; and

(iii) "Heritage Histories: What They Are and How They Operate Through Jaffna" published in the Colombo Telegraph on April 6, 2013 and in the Sunday Leader and Sri Lanka Guardian.



Mr. Hoole asserts that Arumuka Navalar was built up by "ill-educated" "Tamil Saivite extremists" and that everything about Navalar was "fake" be it "his portrait, caste and name, and perhaps religion..". He alleges that Navalar, a "high school dropout", had 'tiny ears and a big forehead on a huge head, thin hands and legs, strong facial hair, and huge body without any strength". Hoole explains that Navalar was unable 'to complete high school after 6 years in Tamil school and 13 years under Percival". He adds that Navalar had a multitude of names each spelt differently and that he was but an "unpaid" "menial assistant" to the missionary Percival!



Hoole similarly claims that the Tamils "were Buddhist and Jain before Saivism took root after the seventh century AD". He adds that 8,000 Jains who refused to convert to Saivite Hinduism were impaled in the 7th century. He asserts "that many Hindu temples today were once Buddhist and Jain", agreeing with a Sinhala Buddhist nationalism that is eager to plant Buddha statues in places of old Hindu worship in Sri Lanka.[color="#800080"](*)[/color] He ends by asserting that "Christians live in fear - living oppressed and as the the oppressed'.

(* Such SL Buddhists didn't restrict themselves to rewriting the history of SL Hindus: some SL Buddhist monks have since at least the 70s been actively peddling deliberate lies about TN's Hindu religion and history, and even that of the rest of India. All for the purpose of missionising on the population their religion was never able to conquer.)



I will be brief as I respond. In the interests of brevity, I will focus on just two subjects i.e. (i) the roots of Tamil Hindu tradition prior to the period of Jain and Buddhist literary influence; and (ii) Arumuka Navalar. Hoole needs to verify his information. His is a highly selective and wishful narrative with numerous errors. Little of what Hoole says is credible. Its time to set the record straight in the interests of a more nuanced interpretation.





Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism in early Tamil history



If one were to appraise the religious character of early Tamil society, one will need to refer to the earliest specimens of Tamil literature that exist today i.e. the Sangam-era work. The Sangam works consist of two literary compendia namely the Ettutogai or Eight Anthologies and the Pattu Paatu or 10 songs. Both are dated to between the 1st and 3rd centuries of the Common Era (CE). It is also important to cite the earliest Tamil grammar in existence today i.e the Tol-kaapiyam. The latter text is usually dated to the early centuries CE. There is an academic debate on the internal consistency and date of the Tol-kaapiyam.



The Sangam compendia I refer to excludes the 18 later works or the Pathinen-keezh-kannaku nool which subsumes the Silapadikaram, the Manimekalai, the Tirukural and other later texts. Those are post-Sangam works.



If one were to explore the Sangam-era, one finds a bardic tradition interspersed with references to the veneration of the Hindu gods Seyon or Murukan, Maayon or Vishnu, Venthan or Indra, Korravai or Durga and Varuna. These were the patron deities of the Tamil land. Seyon or Murukan was the benefactor of the hill tribes while Venthan or Indra was the God of Rain and the protector of the fertile agricultural tracts. Varuna, the God of the Sea, was the guardian of the maritime tracts and all those whose livelihood depended on the sea. Korravai or Durga was the patron of the fierce tribes of the arid tracts. Maayon or Vishnu, also known as the lotus-eyed or Taamarai Kannanaar, protected the herdsmen. The Sangam literature refers to the mighty womb of Korravai that gave birth to Seyyon. There are allusions to the three-eyed God, Siva.



(1. About that last line: they're not allusions, they're direct references to Shiva. These references in Tamizh tend often to have one-to-one correspondences to his many descriptive Vedic names [true for many a Hindoo God, not just Shiva], and are hence actually his Tamizh names. Can see descriptives being personal names in other heathenisms also, including in their sacred and epic texts.

2. The above just underscores that, as far back as you look, Tamizh Hindus' Murugan was always the same as the one known throughout the subcontinent by his other names like Kartikeya. But countless Tamizh Hindus already know this identity-relationship from their own first-hand knowledge. Every Hindu God has Tamizh names also, after all. (Actually, every Hindu God manifest in every Tamizh Hindu Kovil has both Skt and Tzh names. Sometimes these are translations of each other, where they're not, they are descriptives of different parts of the activities of those Gods at the Kovil/kShetra - i.e. descriptives from the same Sthala Puranam. Or otherwise, they're just famous descriptives of the Gods' appearance/identifying features.)

3. Who's betting the peddlers of the ur-Shramanism fiction and the Shramanic missionaries - neo-Budddists, other assorted Buddhists and Jain Minority Forum types - will next start writing propaganda about how the Vedic Gods were "originally Shramanic" too? How else can they otherwise still pretend, as they do at present, that the ancient Tamizhs - who worshipped the Vedic Gods - and even the ancient inhabitants of all of India, were [to have been] Buddhist/Jain "originally"?)



There are references to the Brahmins who tended the sacred fire and studied the four Vedas or Naan Marai. Several Brahmins contributed to the corpus of early Sangam literature. This included Kapilar, Uruttira-kannanaar, Nakeerar, Paalai Kauthamanaar and Perum Kausikanaar to mention just a few. There were several others. Several of the Chera, Chola and Pandya monarchs performed the Vedic sacrifice as documented in the Sangam corpus. The practice of suttee existed. This inheritance is what we today call Tamil Hinduism. The literary allusions to the Jains and Buddhists were far fewer in the Sangam-era.[/color]



(Again, no surprises there. As was common knowledge until the recent history rewriting/falsification started:

- Buddhism and Jainism arrived in the south quite late. Not to mention they never had much success - contrary to modern theorising - even when they exerted themselves. It remained predominantly the settlers who were of those religions; and the few converts they did manage to make they [deliberately made] among the ex-kShatriyas and ex-brAhmaNas among the region's native Hindus. The new religions fortunately didn't bother about the laity - who were not interested - right until the new religions obtained political power and tried to press their interests on all.

- In contrast, go back as far in the historical record as you will, and you find an intrinsicly Hindu character to the south, one that is inseparable from the region's native Hindus. Also seen in the very pantheon of - the very noticeably Vedic - Gods that the ancient Tamizh Hindus interacted with and hence worshipped, not just the ones listed above (the famous example again: during the sacred southern Hindu religious festival called Pongal, the Hindus worship some further Gods of their pantheon like Surya, Lakshmi and the Go. Hindu fishermen have since time immemorial seen and hence worshipped Varuna plus entourage of Samudra devargaL). Apparently even the old GrecoRomans wrote of Tamizh Hindus worshipping Kanyakumari (sister of the Padmanabha and eternal-intended of her eternal-husband the NilakaNTha) in that ancient Tamizh region named after her. That just shows how even ancient heathens of other parts of the world have left behind documentation of the south's Hindu religion, all well before the 7th century CE. So it's not just TN's native internal Sangam literature that provides documented evidence of the ancientry of Hindu religion in the south. But Sangam literature is handy as proof in this case precisely because from the Tamizh POV itself, it shows that Hindu religion is the native - not to mention most ancient - religion of the south).

Hindu - aka Vedic religion - is the native religion of the south of India, just as it is the native religion of all the other directions of the subcontinent. The ancientry of the Hindu religion there - to borrow a phrase from today's Hellenes - is lost in the mists of antiquity.

Proselytising religions have these days resorted to wishful rewriting and outright lying about the subcontinent's history in order to lay claims to a greater originality for their own ideologies in a region/the whole country, and to simultaneously eject the actually ancient and indeed *ancestral* religion (i.e. a heathenism) of the region as being "foreign/not native" and/or as mere "latecomer" instead. Which is exactly why the ur-Shramanism fiction was concocted: to implement the same India-wide. But their elaborate lying is not going to change the *facts* of the past, no matter how many dweebs get brainwashed into believing their missionary lies and for however long. Like how, despite millions of christos in Europe believing the world was flat for centuries on end - some christians still do, apparently - this never actually succeeded in *making* the world flat.)





The pottery and stone inscriptions in Tamil Brahmi dated to the decades before the dawn of the common era offer insights as well. The potsherd inscriptions linked to a megalithic culture contain references to Murukan while the few early rock inscriptions document individual donations to itinerant Jain monks.

(That reminds me again of some stuff to post that I keep putting off.)



The more copious literary record that has survived to date reflects a Hindu folk idiom linked to the rural populace, chieftains and the priesthood while the rock inscriptions suggest individual traders sponsoring Jainism. Buddhism in that early era was numerically less significant. Hoole's point that Hinduism influenced the Tamil land only in the 7th century is therefore false.

(Bold bit -> shows again that Hindu religion is the ancestral religion of the natives - being therefore especially the ancestral religion of all the population/laity - despite the missionary competition always calling Hindus' religion "brahminism" in the hopes that this will lead people to imagine it is peculiarly the religion of brahmanas.)



Buddhism emerged in a significant manner in the Tamil land with the later Kalabhras. The Kalabhra dynasty had invaded and ruled Tamil Nadu between the 4th and the 6th centuries CE. Inscriptional and literary evidence indicates that the Chola, Chera and Pandya kings were ruthlessly suppressed. The Kalabhras patronized Buddhism and used Prakrit. Buddhism remained an urban phenomenon. Most Tamil Buddhist monks of this period chose to write in Pali, not Tamil. [color="#800080"](The modern dawaganda is that Tamizh Hindus hardly contributed anything in Tamizh, all while ancient known Hindu works nowadays get passed off as "Either Buddhist or else Jain". Actually, mustn't forget that christians are trying to claim Tirukkural as christian - after having first wrested it from Hindus by donating it to Jainism - while when it comes to the Tiruvachakam on Shiva they're still in the phase of trying to "secularise" it as a 'General Tamizh work that could be and therefore is about any random Divine, hence it is also about jeebus' before declaring 'it is about jeebus and hence written by a christian' as they always do in these very cases.)[/color] This included Buddhadatta Thera from Uragapura (Uraiyur) and Dhammapala Thera from Tambarattha (Tirunelveli) who traveled to Sri Lanka to translate the proto-Sinhalese language commentaries into Pali. The celebrated Buddhist commentator Buddhaghosha lived for a while in Madhura-sutta-pattana (Madurai) en route to Sri Lanka to study the proto-Sinhalese texts. Hoole's contention that Sinhalese literature is a 9th century phenomenon linked to the suppression of Buddhism in the Tamil land is therefore flawed!



(Christians/neo-Buddhists etc do look particularly foolish accusing Hindus of having had to suppress Buddhism, when even SL Buddhists monks writing as late as the 1970s still admitted to Jainism having been the active cause of Buddhism being suppressed in TN - and IIRC the rest of the south - and which drove out Buddhism from TN/south to SL. Note these were not just any average SL Buddhist monks confessing this, but the particular kind that peddled anti-Hindu tracts about against the entirety of the subcontinent's Hindu religion (i.e. not just against SL Hindus): tracts containing deliberate fictions of the kind that's today popularly parroted by neo-buddhists/christians/brainwashees in India as "history". Note these SL Buddhist monks were most willing to lie about Hindu religion and its history in India. That even they were unable to spin absurd fables writing out Jainism's key involvement in Buddhism's finally being packed off from the south, shows how undeniable and unassailable even *they* think that fact is. In other words, said Buddhist monks were *forced* to admit it.

And by the way, it's not like Buddhism was all innocent and hadn't tried to do get rid of the other Indic religions: it had. Desperately. And it lost. Deservedly.)



The Buddhist zeal of the Kalabhras triggered a home-grown Saivite and Vaishnava revival in the 6th century. This in turn saw the eclipse of Pali scholarship in the Tamil land and a renewed pride in the Tamil language.



Buddhism however continued in urban Tamil Nadu until the 14th century. The Culavamsa describes Sinhalese kings inviting Tamil monks from South India to visit Sri Lanka between the 12th and 14th centuries CE. The Tamil grammar, the Vira-choliyam, was authored by a Buddhist in the heyday of Chola rule in the 10th century CE. The Saivite Hindu Cholas sponsored this Buddhist author. Meanwhile, the Jain center of Sittanavaasal continued to flourish between the 7th and 9th centuries. Saivite Hinduism did not annihilate Buddhism or of Jainism in 7th century Tamil Nadu as Hoole writes. The Buddhist presence in Tamil Nadu ended with the establishment of the Madurai Sultanate in the early 14th century. Tamil Jainism continues to exist to this day.



Hoole highlights the alleged impalement of 8,000 Jains in 7th century Tamil Nadu and cites Nambi Aandaar Nambi, an early medieval Saivite scholar, in support of his claim. This was a literary allusion with no independent evidence. The Chalukyas and Rashtrakutas ruled in neighboring Karnataka. Several of the near contemporary Chalukya and Rashtrakuta monarchs, not to mention the Pallava kings in Tamil Nadu were Jain. There is no corroborating Jain literary or inscriptional evidence of any such impalement. The inquisition was a Christian instrument of persecution, not Hindu.



Hoole is likewise dishonest in selectively quoting Nilakanta Sasti's History of South India to extrapolate that Buddhist and Jain temples were converted into Hindu places of worship ignoring the extensive evidence provided by Professor Sastri on the Brahmanic and Vaishnava presence in the earliest period of Tamil history.

(Just for the record: the ancient Vaishnava presence in TN included Brahmanas also.)



In conclusion, what we now designate as Hinduism was pre-eminent in the earliest years of recorded Tamil history. The Jains did extensively contribute to Tamil literature at a subsequent date. (While Tamizh Hindus had since ancient times contributed extensively to Tamil literature, since it is after all Tamizh Hindus' ancestral language and the local language of Hinduism. Tamizh is known to predate the arrival of Jainism and Buddhism in the south. But Tamizh is *not* known to predate Hindu religion, because in tthe most ancient documented Tamizh, the Tamizh language - as also the Tamizh identity - always appears joined with the religion of the Hindu Gods, since ancient times.)

To argue that we were Jains and Buddhists before we became Hindu is simply incorrect.



(It's not merely incorrect - as if such arguments were no more than an "innocent" mistake - it is a deliberate lie by the christo Samuel Herbert Hoole.

Yet it's not just christians claiming this. Various Buddhist groups - not just neo-Buddhists - and the Jain Minority Forum types are regularly claiming that theirs is the "original" religion of S India - or at least 'ought to be' (with special pleading) - with a particular green eye they cast on TN for some reason. (Probably each imagines the current volatile situation is ripe for a harvest in their favour at last.) And in fact, the same groups have invented the increasingly popular "ur-Shramanism" falsehood specifically in order to launch the same claim for all of India, not just the south.

But the fact is that the Reverse of their absurd claim is the real truth: the oldest religion - and ancestral religion of all the subcontinent's teeming millions - is actually Hindus' religion of the Vedic/Hindu Gods. <- When the self-perceived competition can lie and say everyone was originally Buddhist/Jain - or else, even more desperately, "ur-Shramanist" - onlee [the underlying intention is to insinuate "convert 'back' already"], then Hindus are surely allowed to respond by referring to self-evident *facts*?)





Arumuka Navalar



Let me now turn to the subject of Arumuka Navalar. Whether Navalar had any input in the translation of the Bible into Tamil, how he looked, how he spelt his Tamil name in English in a era where such spelling had not been standardized and where births and marriages were unregistered, what caste he belonged to and whether his father was baptized is irrelevant to his legacy as a pioneer who recognized the importance of the media, print technology and western education to the dissemination of Tamil Hindu learning.



Mr. Hoole has had a 15 to 20 year track record of attacking Hinduism and individuals linked to the Hindu revival in Sri Lanka. I had rebutted an earlier article of his dated May 14, 2010 where he had attacked Arumuka Navalar and Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan. "In Defense of the Sri Lankan Hindu of Yesteryear: Arumuka Navalar and Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan" was published in the Sri Lanka Guardian on May 20, 2010 and in the HaindavaKeralam and LankaWeb. What I stated there still holds. Let me repeat what I said there rather than reinvent the wheel.



One needs to revert to primary sources if one is to accurately describe Arumuka Navalar. Navalar lived between 1822 and 1877 CE. His works include the 'Prabandha Thirattu', 'Saiva Thooshana Parihaaram', 'the Prohibition of Killing', and his classic deconstruction of the Bible. These texts help one to understand him better.



One discovers herein an astonishing man who grasped the imperative to establish Hindu primary and secondary schools in the 19th century, modernize and broadbase Hindu education, use simple Tamil prose to disseminate Saivite Hindu doctrine and leverage the printing press to republish the Tamil classics and Saivite Hindu scripture. Navalar made it a point to study Christianity to more effectively combat the white missionary enterprise. Navalar worked in Jaffna and Tamil Nadu. He established schools in Jaffna and in South India of which the Saiva Prakasa Vidyalayam was the first. Arumuka Navalar's emphasis on a modern Hindu education in Sri Lanka was the prelude to the later Hindu Board of Education in Sri Lanka.



He was the first person to avail of the modern printing press to publish rare Tamil classics in the mid-1800s anticipating the subsequent seminal work of U.V. Swaminatha Iyer and the other Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu stalwart C.W. Thamotherampillai.Navalar established a printing press in Sri Lanka and in Tamil Nadu. The one in Jaffna was called the Vidyanubalana Yantra Sala. Professor Dennis Hudson of the State University of New York has chronicled Navalar's use of the printing press on both sides of the Palk Straits in the 19th century. Navalar published 97 Tamil language documents. He published rare works of Tamil grammar, literature, liturgy and religion that were previously unavailable in print. For instance, the first ever Sangam text that saw the light of print was the Tiru-murukaatru-padai of the Pattu Paatu. Navalar brought this out in 1851.



Noted Czech scholar of Tamil, Kamil Zvelebil, demonstrated that Navalar was the first author to use modern Tamil prose in a manner understandable to the layperson. Professor Meenakshisundaram echoed this view when he reiterated that Navalar was the first to use simplified and unadorned lay Tamil. He had adopted a highly effective and unadorned preaching style borrowed from the missionaries that consisted of five steps to quote Hoole i.e. (i) preface; (ii) exposition; (iii) doctrinal analysis; (iv) applying the interpretation; and (v) conclusion. So yes, Navalar made stellar contributions to Hinduism, the Tamil language, Tamil prose and Sri Lankan Tamil identity.



The Hindu revival preceded the Buddhist revival in Sri Lanka by a full generation. As Bishop Kulendran of the Church of South India in Jaffna conceded, it was Navalar's Saivite Hindu revival that stemmed the conversions to Christianity in northern Sri Lanka in the 19th century. It was Navalar likewise who first articulated in modern times that the Sri Lankan Tamil identity was parallel to and not the same as the South Indian Tamil identity.



Navalar, like almost all in the mid-1800s, suffered from caste prejudice. The 1800s was an unenlightened age where the Christian missionaries in India and Ceylon exemplified a deep religious bigotry, the Sri Lankan Tamils exemplified a hateful caste prejudice while the Europeans were busy enslaving or exterminating the Black population in America, Australia and South Africa often in the name of Christianity. Navalar can not be absolved on the issue of caste. This said, a critical interpretation of history forces one to acknowledge his other accomplishments.



Bibliography



(i) K.A. Nilakanta Sastri, A History of South India: From Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar, Oxford University Press, 1955;

(ii) V.R. Ramachandra Dikshitar, Studies in Tamil Language and History, University of Madras, 1936;

(iii) Vaiyapuri Pillai, History of Tamil Language and Literature, Chennai, 1956;

(iv) George Hart, The poems of ancient Tamil, their milieu and their Sanskrit counterparts, 1975 (University of California, Berkeley);

(v) Takanobu Takahashi, Tamil love poetry and poetics, 1995;

(vi) Kamil Zvelebil, The Smile of Murukan on Tamil literature of South India, 1973; and

(vi) V.S. Rajam, A comparative study of two ancient Indian grammatical traditions: The Tolkapiyam compared with Sanskrit Rk-pratisakhya, Taittriya-pratisakhya, Apisal siksa, and the Astadhyayi, University of Pennsylvania, 1981.

Note how Hoole - whose claims are being refuted above - is typically some SL christo. I'm sure that we'll start seeing even more of SL christoism openly putting their claws into SL's native Hindus soon, since the christian LTTE has been decommissioned and so christinanity no longer has any real use for SL Hindus. Hoole - who has parroted fables in line with those spun by some SL Buddhist monks - also shows another pattern that we're not unlikely to see in future: SL christos sidling up to SL Buddhism and hoping the SL Buddhists are stupid enough to overlook that the whole LTTE terrorism thing was a christian op (with brainwashed once-Hindus as mere footsoldiers) and christian eelam remains a christian project (though no doubt they'll expand that last to a larger "christian SL + christian India" enterprise in sufficient time, which also happens to be in line with Papal commandments too).

Christianism slowly trying to cosy up with SL Buddhism would certainly parallel its larger game in the subcontinent: in India, christists are roping in neo-Buddhists in their efforts to rewrite Hindu history. I've noticed examples of this in matters India-wide, but it's especially steaming up in TN (as part of the whole "christo eelam" project). Anyway, it's not like they're going to leave out the rest of the nation: that's what the whole ur-Shramanism concoction is for. Eventually it will be developed even further to come to the same point as the history rewriting has come to in the south (i.e. christianisation/shramanisation of Hindus' history).





The above article can come in handy for Hindus who wish to tell the Replacement Theologies which keep rewriting the history of the south (in order to write out Hinduism from it and write themselves in) that the Hindu Dharmic Religion - aka "Vedic Religion", usw - is the ancestral religion of the natives of the south. It's also handy in enlightening Hindus from more distant parts of the subcontinent about how Tamizh Hindus [and TN for that matter] were NOT "originally" (nor even ever significantly) Buddhist/Jain/ur-Shramanic/Dravoodian-religion/what-have-you type nonsense, despite all the relentless propaganda these days. While the article speaks largely about Hindus of the Tamizh regions of the subcontinent, the history follows largely the same pattern for all of the south of the country. And indeed, for all of the regions of the subcontinent: Hindus' religion/the Sanatana Dharma *is* the ancestral religion of the natives of the subcontinent, after all. (And this would be, I think, at least part of the reason why IIRC that old Japanese scholar identified Shintoism with Hinduism - and in direct distinction from Buddhism. Oh, but I forget, I haven't put that cute little statement up yet.)