Removing The Sheen From Buddhism

[Husky]

Post 3/3



2. thehindu.com/news/states/tamil-nadu/article2408091.ece

Palani excavation triggers fresh debate

T.S. Subramanian



Chennai, August 29, 2011



Did the Tamil-Brahmi script originate in the post-Asokan period, that is, after the 3rd century BCE, or is it pre-Asokan? A cist-burial excavated in 2009 at Porunthal village, on the foothills of the Western Ghats, 12 km from Palani in Tamil Nadu, has reignited this debate because of the spectacular variety of grave goods it contained.



One of the two underground chambers of the grave was remarkable for the richness of its goods: a skull and skeletal bones, a four-legged jar with two kg of paddy inside, two ring-stands inscribed with the same Tamil-Brahmi script reading “va-y-ra” (meaning diamond) and a symbol of a gem with a thread passing through it, 7,500 beads made of carnelian, steatite, quartz and agate, three pairs of iron stirrups, iron swords, knives, four-legged jars of heights ranging from few centimetres to one metre, urns, vases, plates and bowls. It was obviously a grave that belonged to a chieftain ( The Hindu , June 28, 2009 and Frontline , October 8, 2010).



When K. Rajan, Professor, Department of History, Pondicherry University, excavated this megalithic grave, little did he realise that the paddy found in the four-legged jar would be instrumental in reviving the debate on the origin of the Tamil-Brahmi script. Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating of the paddy done by Beta Analysis Inc., Miami, U.S.A, assigned the paddy to 490 BCE. “Since all the goods kept in the grave including the paddy and the ring-stands with the Tamil-Brahmi script are single-time deposits, the date given to the paddy is applicable to the Tamil-Brahmi script also,” said Dr. Rajan. So the date of evolution of Tamil-Brahmi could be pushed 200 years before Asoka, he argued.



This dating, done on the Porunthal paddy sent to the U.S. laboratory by Dr. Rajan, took the antiquity of the grave belonging to the early historic age to 490 BCE, he said. It held great significance for Tamil Nadu's history, he added. This was the first time an AMS dating was done for a grave in Tamil Nadu.



There are two major divergent views on the date of Tamil-Brahmi.



While scholars such as Iravatham Mahadevan and Y. Subbarayalu hold the view that Tamil-Brahmi was introduced in Tamil Nadu after 3rd century BCE and it is, therefore, post-Asokan, some others including K.V. Ramesh, retired Director of Epigraphy, Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), consider it pre-Asokan.



According to Dr. Rajan, the AMS dating of the Porunthal paddy grains has the following implications: the context of the Tamil-Brahmi goes back to 490 BCE and it is, therefore, pre-Asokan; Tamil Nadu's ancient history can be pushed back to 5th century BCE and it was contemporary to mahajanapadas (kingdoms) such as Avanti, Kosala, Magadha and so on; paddy cultivation goes back to 5th century BCE; and it establishes that the megalithic graves introduced in the Iron Age continued into the early historic times.



When contacted, Mr. Mahadevan, a leading authority on the Tamil-Brahmi and Indus scripts, and Dr. Subbarayalu, Head, Department of Indology, French Institute of Pondicherry, said it was difficult to reach a conclusion on the basis of one single scientific dating.



Mr. Mahadevan described the dating as “interesting” but said “multiple carbon-dates are needed” for confirmation. “If there are several such cases, history has to be re-written because up to now, the scientifically proved earliest date is from Tissamaharama in southern Sri Lanka, where a Tamil-Brahmi script is dated to 200 BCE.” If there is scientific evidence that the paddy is dated to 490 BCE, “we have to sit up and take notice, and wait for confirmation,” Mr. Mahadevan said.



The Asokan-Brahmi is dated to 250 BCE. Megasthenes, the Greek Ambassador to the court of Chandragupta Maurya, Emperor Asoka's grandfather, had stated that the people of Chandragupta Maurya's kingdom did not know how to write and that they depended on memory. Besides, there is no inscription of the pre-Asoka period available. Mr. Mahadevan said: “Supposing a large number of carbon-datings are available from various sites, which will take us to the period of the Mauryas and even the Nandas, we can consider. But to push [the date of the origin of the Tamil-Brahmi script] a couple of centuries earlier with a single carbon-dating is not acceptable because chances of contamination and error are there.”





Dr. Subbarayalu also argued that on the basis of one single scientific dating, it was difficult to reach the conclusion that Tamil-Brahmi was pre-Asokan. There should be more evidence to prove that Tamil-Brahmi was earlier to the time of Asoka, in whose time was available the earliest Brahmi script in north India.



Mr. Mahadevan's conclusion that Tamil-Brahmi is post-Asokan and it had its advent from about the middle of the third century BCE is based on “concrete archaeological as well as palaeographical grounds” and this date is as yet the most reasonable one, in spite of minor points of difference on his dating of individual inscriptions, said Dr. Subbarayalu.



The date of the Tamil-Brahmi script found at Porunthal, on palaeographic basis, could be put only in the first century BCE/CE and “cannot be pushed back to such an early date [490 BCE].”

(Note typical circular reasoning of Mohadevan, who's apparently famous for it: 1. There's no such thing as pre-Asokan Brahmi in India. 2. Since Porunthal find is dated to 490 BCE, it MUST be wrong and must therefore be 1st century BCE or preferrably CE, since rule 1 always applies. But the real reason he's angry is the dating - pre-Asokan and pre-Buddhist introduction into TN or south AND the revelation of the text being "Vaira" which is the Tamizh equivalent of Skt Vajra (at 490 BCE), and which Mohadevan MUST fit into a Buddhist framework quickly, else it spells doom and gloom



The three letters “va-y-ra” found on the ring-stands were developed and belonged to the second stage of Mr. Mahadevan's dating of Tamil-Brahmi. “It is premature to revise the Tamil-Brahmi dating on the basis of a single carbon date, which is governed by complicated statistical probabilities,” Dr. Subbarayalu said. The word “vayra” is an adapted name from the Prakrit or Sanskrit “vajra” and it is difficult to explain convincingly the generally dominant Prakrit element in Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions found on rock and pot-sherds if Tamil-Brahmi is indigenous and pre-Asokan and transported from south India to north India, he says.



(NO. The find says nothing about whether the ancestral *Brahmi* was developed in TN. Or direction of its travel or anything. We don't know *how* it came to be based on these finds. We only know that a form of Brahmi - called Tamizh Brahmi based on locus of discovery and perhaps similarity to other Tamizh Brahmi finds - existed at the plausible dates given in the 2 news items.



Let's get it clear what one can work out from such a find as this particular one: What it says is that in 490 BCE - before any evidence of Buddhism coming south - the Tamizh Hindus had a form of Brahmi that they were obviously familiar enough with to start comfortably using and moreover used it to write a word that spells VAIRA(M) - e.g. vaira toDu - which is the *TAMIZH* WORD for diamond DIRECTLY ASSOCIATED WITH THE SKT WORD Vajra for diamond. There's no actual reason to insist it "must" be a Prakrit (capital P) word as Mohadevan presumes, as Skt Vajra naturally/prakritically (small p) turns to Vaira in Tamizh without external help. Because it's exactly how Tamilisation of such Skt words works too.



Back to the matter of the find of vaira in Tamizh Brahmi and what this *does* tell us.

Repeat: by 490 BCE - that's before the Sangam era is currently dated to - there were already Skt-related words in Tamizh that Tamizh people were using with the kind of ease that comes from familiarity. That means that it's not likely they came across the word Vajra in 500 BCE to have the word Vairam in common use by 490 BCE. It also means it's not likely that Tamizh Brahmi only started to be used for the very first time ever in 500 BCE in order to have become an easy part of life in 490 BCE. <- It means, there was at least some significant time - how long??? - that Tamizh Hindus were familiar with both Tamizh Brahmi and the word Vaira - a Tamizh word with Skt connections. So now do the math and work out when the natives of TN first came into clearly-influential contact with Skt speaking natives of the subcontinent. The answer is unknown: you don't know. At least, you can't tell from the above archaeological find. It could have been a 100 years, 200 years, 400 years before that. Far longer even. You don't know. But clearly, what you do know, is that by 490 BCE neither (a form of) Brahmi nor the word Vaira was a novelty in TN: both were then used with a ready ease.

No wonder Mohadevan is not happy. No wonder Buddhism peddlers who were seen implying even declaring that Buddhism invented Brahmi are less Ra-Ra about it now. <- The only proof the latter had offered for their Mere Assumption is that for some time Asokan edicts in Asokan-Brahmi were the oldest Brahmi finds in the country, from which innocuous data they *chose* to magically conclude that Buddhism "must" have invented Brahmi. After all, as I mentioned above, they insist on the blind assumption that Hindus - by which Buddhism always points only to "Brahminists" - had "no use for writing" and "hence" would never have invented a script. Megasthenes' observation - even if taken as literal truth by someone who had absolute and total knowledge on the matter, something which he isn't at all guaranteed to have had - said nothing about the whole of Bharatam, recall: it says only something about the *Mauryan* empire as at the time.)



On the other hand, Dilip K. Chakrabarti, Emeritus Professor, Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, called the Porunthal Tamil-Brahmi script “an epoch-making discovery in the archaeology of Tamil Nadu” and said there “is no doubt” that Tamil-Brahmi belonged to the pre-Asokan period. In two of his books — “An Oxford Companion to Indian Archaeology” and “India, an Archaeological History” — he had written that the evolution of Tamil-Brahmi should go back to circa 500 BCE.



He refuted the theory that Tamil-Brahmi was post-Asokan.



Dr. Ramesh, who retired as the ASI's Joint Director-General in 1993, said the Porunthal scientific dating strengthened the argument that Tamil-Brahmi was pre-Asokan. He dismissed the assessment that Tamil-Brahmi was post-Asokan as “the argument of people who say that there cannot be pre-Asokan inscriptions.” (He too appears to have noticed the unavoidably-obvious circular reasoning used by the Dravoodianists.) “How can you question the scientific dating given by an American laboratory?” Dr. Ramesh said the Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions found at Mankulam, near Madurai, were pre-Asokan. [The Mankulam inscriptions are the earliest Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions and they are dated to second century BCE]. “The consonants in the Mankulam inscriptions do not have vowel value attached to them. They are pre-Asokan and the script is more rudimentary than the Asokan-Brahmi,” he claimed.

(Chindu felt it necessary to insert the stuff in the square [] brackets there, was it done by the Chindu editors? It seems to be to pre-emptively negate in readers' minds the line Dr Ramesh is quoted as saying thereafter: that the inscriptions in Mankulam were also pre-Asokan. Which they can't be, surely, if they're 2nd century BCE, since pre-Asokan was explained at the start of this news piece as being before 3rd century BCE or at least before 250 BCE? Would like to know what date Dr Ramesh and others of his view assign to these Mankulam inscriptions.)





The date given by the American laboratory was “a wonderful result,” said M.R. Raghava Varier, former Professor, Department of History, Calicut University, “because the earliest date given so far to a south Indian site was 300 BCE.” The archaeological sites of Uraiyur in Tamil Nadu and Arikkamedu in Puducherry fell within the time-limit of 300 BCE and Arikkamedu belonged to a later period than Uraiyur. While the [pre-Asokan] date given to a Tamil-Brahmi inscription found at Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka “has not been proved convincingly,” there was “a convincing date” at Porunthal and it was based on a scientific dating system, said Professor Varier, who was the honorary Editor of Kerala Archaeological Series. Its importance lay in the fact that while the Asokan-Brahmi began in the 3rd century BCE, the Porunthal script could be dated to 5th century BCE, he says. “But we cannot argue that Brahmi was invented by the southern people. That is a different issue.”

So, the oldest (in terms of confirmed date) legibly written word found in TN - and it predates Sangam, going by how Sangam works are *currently* dated (though the statement in the 1st news piece that the Tamizh Brahmi finds from possibly-7th/8th century BCE could therefore be from "probably earlier than the Sangam period" -

again: so the confirmed-oldest legibly written word found in TN is a Tamizh word with definite connections to Samskritam? Brilliant. Yes no wonder Mohadevan etc can't allow it.

Sure, in itself it doesn't reveal anything much about the origin of Tamil Brahmi: was it developed locally or shared from/shared among another part of the country? (Clearly Tamizh is at that point in contact already with Skt, so can't rule out that it was shared, but can't make out the direction of sharing either.) But finding the word Vaira around 500 BCE in TN says something about the chase for "Pure Tamizh": that it's still on. Because the oldest Tamizh word found certainly isn't the so-called "Pure Tamizh" of wackypedia that the christist Johnson brought up. So where's the "Pure Tamizh"? Go back as far as you will in the record, and we *still* haven't got past the close - and, by 500 BCE already, well-established - connection with Samskritam.



After reading the first news item above, Hindus could wait years and years for more news on the subject: the news that was promised the readers was to be about the further investigation that would confirm/deny whether the dates for the first find really were 7th/8th centuries BCE.

Of course nothing much has turned up, not much for public consumption anyway. It's a touchy subject after all. (Perhaps the christians and neo-Buddhists, currently mangling Indian archaeology in favour of their agendas, jumped onto the scene too as they have elsewhere in the state? And joined the dravoodianists already busy on the subject.)

Because if I've learnt one thing on the matter of Indian history it is this: *everything* is made controversial. In fact, not just Indian history. The Indian present too. Indian scripts even. Dravoodianists and their western handlers were all sour about letting the script that Tamizh Hindus use for Skt get the Unicode treatment. The Unicode consortium doesn't seem to be the sort to be made up of ideological/political nutcases, so maybe the Dravoodianism-peddling gang had no influence on them? Leastways, hope not. (But Hindus appear to still be waiting for Unicode to come through on the matter.)



In any case, when there were gangs a-stir for even *that*, imagine the controversial nature of any Brahmi finds - in India a.o.t. SL, in TN moreover - that predate not just Asoka but Buddhism (and possibly Jainism too, depending on the outcome of the discoveries in the news item of the previous post).

You can see how the matter doesn't even enter into the heads of the more sensible people quoted in the news items: they are still only debating about the "controversiality" of the finds being pre-Asokan and Tamil Brahmi. Not about what this means in terms of Buddhism etc, the way the brain of everyone scrambling to claim the script for Buddhism etc works.



Because, as long as the only finds discovered were "Asokan Brahmi", Buddhism was happy to claim Brahmi. At the very least, they would claim this as Buddhism being the [first] one to peddle it in India and propagate proper Indic writing (because the west - ah yes the west - did not allow Brahmi to even be Indian, as everyone knows, but I'll get back to this for another reason). Jainism invented one or two origin theories:

1. IIRC some female Jaina character has the name Brahmi and was rather loosely associated with the origin of the script via a light mythological motif, in order to claim it for Jainism. Whether she was invented for the purpose or the purpose got attached to her, don't know. (But either way, in that case, brAhmI is certainly an ancient Hindu Goddess name too, nah: brAhmI=Saraswati as all Hindus know, plus the word itself is *Skt*, being specifically the female variant for BrahmA, not to mention that Saraswati is the mother of/identical to the akSharas of Skt as well as of the many Indian languages which all share the same askSharas.)

2. as people may know, the Jains assigned a teerthankara as having given rise to writing (all writing) in the world (plus also conveniently all the 64 kalaas which were first enumerated by - and directly associated with - *Hindu* religion, BTW).

So that means they claimed the Chinese script too, backwards in time and entirely ignorant about the existence of the Chinese and countless other ancient scripts around the globe. Nice one. The 2nd story says nothing particular about Brahmi however, but just about general writing and about all the till-then 64 *Hindu* kalaas. Both stories are the most vague and non-commital ever, and yet they are offered up as "proof" via "seed of origin theory", though no one - as far as I can work out - appears to have tried to peddle them publicly, until the more recent finds that started indicating the ancientry of the script within India, when there appears to have started yet another scramble for a piece of Indian history - this time to claim originating writing. (Sort of like the scramble in India to make gradual ideological claims on the IVC after its first discovery.)



But theologies aside, and to get back to the point: as long as the only finds were still "Asokan Brahmi", in India at least, Buddhism was informally advertised as the driving (even gestational) force behind [all Indian] Brahmi. Where that failed, Jainism would do in a pinch, though promoters of "Either way, it was anything but Hindu" were less comfortable with appealing to Jain theology for proof: at least Asoka was known for tangible edicts that were (until more recently) the oldest evidence of the use of Brahmi in India and the subcontinent.



So then, by that same logic that they used to pounce on Brahmi (or even "The Origin of Indian Writing"), when Brahmi finds predate Buddhism (and even Jainsm), Hindus are surely allowed to claim Brahmi, no? The answer - and every Hindu knows this - is No. It will be secular onlee. If it is found in Dravoodistan - i.e. the territory earmarked by the Dravoodians for themselves, specifically as being "not Hindu originally" - then it will be declared dravoodian onlee (except the very word discovered is "Vaira" which is a Tzh word that has undeniable ties to Skt.*) However, since the 490 BCE find is obviously not tied to dravoodianism, but shows such undeniable connections with :gulp: Skt, the answer is (you guessed it): the IVC. The "IVC" - contrary to Hindus appealing to it for their indigenousness - is now actually turning into a catch-all "Not Hindu" clause. It's being connected to the concocted ur-Shramanism. If ur-Shramanists were to be compared to the Indo-Europeans, then IVC is like to ur-Shramanism what the urheimat is to the "original Indo-Europeans".



Whenever anything can't be donated to Buddhism & Jainism proper, it is declared "IVC" connoting ur-Shramanist. This places it beyond Hindus' reach you see. "Yes but", say the Hindus, "What about the Pashupati seal? That's so obviously a Shiva? Doing Yoga. And the Mahishasuramardini etc?"

But haven't you heard, it's now to have been some Teerthankara. Magically, backwards in time, with all the features of Shiva, backwards in time. And have you never come across some - not looney-fringe but more mainstream - Jains declaring that 'Shivalingas are actually Hindus worshipping Kailasa which is the home of a Teerthankara'? (Meru and Kailasa and even several Hindu Gods having been magically copied into the other Indian religions from Hindu religion. But in order to claim originality, they then then have to resort to claiming Hindus copied *them*.) And of course Yoga is declared ur-Shramanist onlee and hence "Jain (& Buddhist) originally" but not ever - oh anything but that - Vedic. So no, no use pointing at the Pashupati I mean teerthankara seal etc.

In a way the ur-Shramanism theory is more foolproof - less dependent on actual evidence - than even PIE and AIT. It's the other half of PIE actually... Where PIE/AIT tells the story about the Oryan invaders, the "ur-Shramanism of the IVC" (ur-Shramanism has become equated with the IVC) conveniently fills in the story about the "original inhabitants" (who further got oppressed/disenfranchised/more sobstories invented backwards in time).



[* BTW, even if definitely and distinctly Prakrit words *were* to be found in these early time ranges, Prakrits are not peculiarly owned by Buddhism and Jainism, not even the 2 specific types of Prakrits they ended up primarily employing (being Pali and Ardha-Magadhi): Prakrits were merely the state of the popular languages in the parts of India including when & where Buddhism and Jainism arose and developed. *As a consequence* - and only as a consequence - to their [specific Prakrits'] then-current existence, they became the languages used and later promoted by the two respective religions. It doesn't say they weren't equally Hindu: since the then pre-existing society clearly used Prakrits.]





And the final point, then:



- For a long time, the ancestral Brahmi script (the "one script" from which the Tamil Brahmi, Asokan Brahmi and the Brahmi that the Siddhamatrika derived from, and all other Brahmis) was declared to NOT be Indian in origin but influenced by Phoenician script. I.e. had there been no Phoenician script, Indians would never have been able to develop their Brahmi since it was supposedly based off it, so we were told. And it was a story that stuck hard and fast. Only a small part of the excuse was that Vedic Hindus, being Vedic, had no need for writing (hence reading) and therefore wouldn't invent writing. Despite Phoenician being the primary argument, a part of the thrust was to deny Hindus the ability to come up with a script. Sort of like denying that Skt could be, let alone is, native to Hindus.

- Now (somewhere under the last decade, this being as far as I have noticed), even *western* sites discussing languages and scripts have this to say about Brahmi: that there are two plausible theories as to its origin. External Phoenician again, being theory 1. And, after admitting that there are now more ancient finds of the script in India (implying earlier local development), there comes the magic word: "IVC". (That the origin of Indian writing - leading to Brahmi and its descendants - had indigenously developed after all, since the dawn of known Indian civilisation, equated with the IVC)

There you have it, then:

So even when the script (its origins) is at last allowed to become native to the land, they have only allowed it *because* they know sufficient theories have now been advanced concerning the IVC so as to disallow the Hindus access to it. :grin:



Apparently it's inconceivable for a bunch of people possessed of a marvellously-grammatically sensible spoken language with near mathematical properties to ever conceive of coming up with a writing system.





I'm surprised that Buddhism & Jainism haven't lobbied to have more accurate dating done for their founders, the 2 confirmed-historical founders I mean. But then, since every major milestone in ancient Indian history, at least prior to Alexander, was assigned arbitrarily (but relative to the previous ones at that hazier point in time), wouldn't that push everything earlier somewhat further back in time? Like the Itihasas all the way right up the chain to the Vedas? I doubt the west and the state of "Indian history" as it is studied there would allow that.





Anyway, it's amazing how Hindus get dismissed out of hand. But it is deliberate, of course. Hindus are not allowed to exist in the present (e.g. aparently the recent report by the USCIRF -sp?-, on the various religious communities persecuted by islam in TSP-E & W, deliberately makes no mention of Hindus, though they're the majority victims). And Hindus are gradually erased from history too.