Removing The Sheen From Buddhism

[Husky]

Post 6/6



And some further things that caught me eye in the article.



In the section on the Jain-Teerthankara Rishabha:

The name Vrishabha is mentioned in the Vedas,7 but the meaning is not certain.

(Despite the "7" etc, no references are presented at the end of the article, BTW.)



But vRiShabha? :hysterical: Wow are they desperate -



The *word* vRiShabha certainly occurs about a gazillion times even in the RV (saw it often enough when searching for the *RiShabh* substring). But it would occur in its original Vedic meanings - starting from I think the plain bull and as [embodiment of] Vedic dharma - which legitimately includes its use as references to/descriptives of and even epithets of Vedic Gods etc. (vRiShabha is the proper name of Shiva, viShNu, Indra too IIRC and probably a whole host of other Hindoo Gods - long before Buddhism/Jainism appeared and before Jainism eventually made claims on this terribly Vedic Skt word.)



Now, if any Jain wishes to argue that their Teerthankara(s) were "indeed, actually" referenced in the Vedas, then they may present an actual traceable number for the alleged shloka/shlokas. Having seen enough of their claims in this direction turn out to be nothing more than falsehoods, I have no reason to take their word at face value (ever again. Indeed, never again.)



Repeating from a few posts ago:

'Yet, that has not stopped Buddhists or Jains from backprojecting such additional, later-acquired meaning of the word into earlier texts, in order to thereby *force-read* themselves into such texts as "proof" of external (in particular Hindu) validation of their own earlier existence.'



vRiShabha was a descriptive/name/epithet (even vahana) later used by Jainism and associated with the Jain teerthankara RiShabha. Yet they go looking in the Vedas for occurrences of the word - as they did with ariShTanemi and ajita (see below) etc - and declare that whenever they do find these words/names occurring, that it "must" therefore refer to their teerthankaras - "backwards in time" of course.



I'm not surprised that the history for the wacky RiShabha page shows that this page had earlier claimed that 22 of the Jain teerthankaras are mentioned in the Vedas. It wouldn't be unlikely that a selection of 22 -note- Vedic Skt words (descriptives/names/epithets) do occur in the Vedas and which Jainism later ended up using for its theology of teerthankaras stretching backwards in time. But that doesn't mean the Veda references are to Jain teerthankaras of course (the way Rishabha and ariShTanemi in the RV Samhita weren't references to any teerthankara at all, as seen in some posts above somewhere). Again: if any Jain wants to claim otherwise, they're required to prove it. (Which they appear not to have been able to do, since the current/recent state of the Rishabha wacky page doesn't assert that '22 Jain teerthankaras' were attested in the Vedas anymore.)



And similarly, the article declares:

The Yajurveda mentions the name of Ajitanatha3 but the meaning is not clear.

That's supposed to be the 2nd Jain teerthankara, right?

Uh, how to put it. The YV-TaittirIya Samhita does contain the word "ajita" a number of times (well, suffixed to other words - and that's not counting aparAjita type words that I can recognise as distinct). In one section it was repeated lots of times with differing prefixes. So looked up the online British-Raj translation and it wasn't even a name at that point. So I got bored and gave up going through the occurrences - may perhaps do so some other time. But there's actuall no need as here's the MW entry instead:

1 ajita mfn. not conquered , unsubdued , unsurpassed , invincible , irresistible ; m. a particular antidote ; a kind of venomous rat ; N. of Vishn2u ; S3iva ; one of the Saptarshis of the fourteenth Manvantara ; Maitreya or a future Buddha ; the second of the Arhats or saints of the present (Jaina) Avasarpin2i , a descendant of Ikshva1ku ; the attendant of Suvidhi (who is the ninth of those Arhats) ; (%{As}) m. pl. a class of deified beings in the first Manvantara.

2 ajIta mfn. ( %{jyA} , usually %{jina}) , not faded , not faint AV. TS. , &c.

So, next to its plain meaning (which I'm going to assume is how its used in the YV TS until/if I ever bother checking each instance against some translation, if claimants choose to ever call upon numbered shlokas), it also happens to be the name of Vishnu, of Shiva and of a saptarShi etc etc.

And, more interestingly, both Buddhism and Jainism also stake a claim on the word as a name: as a Buddha and a Jain Arhat. <- So which one of the two do Hindus need to pretend is being referenced in the Vedam, again? The expected future Buddha or the past teerthankara?



Again: Jains just seemed to have looked for words (words they ignorantly claim uniquely for themselves) in the Vedam and got all excited when the (Vedic Skt words) turned up. "But gee, what are the chances that Vedic Skt words are going to turn up in the Vedic Skt texts known as the Vedas?"

And about the whole "The meaning is not clear" or "The meaning is not certain" thing seen again in *both* the Ajita and Vrishabha claims above: <- Not that poor excuse again for people not doing their homework, but just blindly claiming away.





This larger context of the article's section on Ajitanatha:

The second Tirthankara is Ajitanatha, born in Ayodhya. The Yajurveda mentions the name of Ajitanatha3 but the meaning is not clear. His younger brother according to Jain traditions was Sagara who became the second Chakravarti. He (=Sagara, not Ajitanatha) is known from the traditions of both Hinduism and Jainism as found in their respective Purans. From the Hindu source, he is known to have many sons. One of them was Bhagiratha who brought the Ganges. From the Jain account, it is clear that Sagara in his last days adopted the life of asceticism from Ajitanatha and retired from the worldly life.4 Ajitanatha seems to be as real a person as Sagara.

Sounds rather like yet another case of Jains weaving their backprojected teerthankaras into famous very ancient Vedic families (mythical or historical is irrelevant at this point) - which don't know of any Jains - all in order to insert them into an established (pre-existing Hindu) backdrop/setting. As also happened with Jains conflating Neminatha into Krishna's family, whereas the MBh/HV naturally doesn't even know of him.

Sagara is not "known to both traditions". Sagara is Hindu religion, who merely got cloned into Jainism later. Matches the Jainising of the ikShvaku dynasty. And the Jain tack-on to Sagara's setting in their works even Jainises an important Vedic Hindu (i.e. Sagara) by declaring that he converted to Jainism later in life/adopted an implied Jain ascetism, rather than that he could simply go for the typically pre-existing Hindu kind of asceticism that several Vedic kings tended to proceed to in their old age/retirement (as seen in MBh etc).

Wasn't even Bhagiratha (and Sagara of course) already ancient Vedic ancestors/persons/memory even by the time of the MBh? But naturally they'd need to be that ancient in order for Jainism to place Ajita as 2nd teerthankara - that is, at a time well before Neminatha, which latter the Jains placed in the MBh context.



Actually, here is MW again:

1 bhagIratha m. (prob. fr. %{bhagin} + %{ratha} , `" having a glorious chariot "')N. of an ancient king (son of Dili1pa and great-grandfather of Sagara , king of Ayodhya1 [744,2] ; he brought down the sacred Gan3ga1 from heaven to earth and then conducted this river to the ocean in order to purify the ashes of his ancestoes , the 60 ,000 sons of Sagara ; cf. IW. 322) MBh. R. Pur. &c. ; N. of sev. authors (also with %{Thakkura} and %{megha} ; cf. %{bhagin}) Cat. ; of an architect of recent date Inscr. ; of a mountain S3atr.

But I especially like the article's plea for the Jain teerthankara Ajitanatha to be accepted "as real as" (tentatively assuming) Sagara was. <= And that is the whole reason that Jainism tied all these people into Hindu religio-history in the first place: to plead to Hindus to accept the historicity* of Jain characters that Jains had woven into Hindu religio-history. (I.e. Jain works using the pre-existing Hindu religio-history as backdrop for their theology, thus backprojecting their theology.) Elsewhere in the same article they evict Vedic Hindus as alien oppressors, but now they need the very same to plead for the historicity of their Jain characters. Good grief.

It just underlines that they have no - and clearly never had - proof of historicity (or a greater ancientry) without latching onto a pre-existing religion outside their own.



(* As the appeal is actually to Hindus even now in that section of the article. I mean, they can hardly be appealing to the west to accept Ajitanatha "as real as Sagara", when I doubt the west would bother entertaining the historicity of Sagara in the first place - complete with "60,000 sons" and all. It is only Hindus who might consider Sagara historical/ancestral/whatever. And so this plea by the Jain author can't be directed anywhere else but at Hindus. The gall.)

All of these requests to "Accept Ajitanatha as Sagara's brother", "Accept Neminatha as Krishna's cousin" or "Rishabha-Adinatha is to be equated with Shiva-Adinatha"* etc etc are for the benefit of Jainism alone, i.e. they're requests for external acknowledgement.

* The JMF claims that last with reference to some alleged shlokas in the Shiva Purana. These shlokas supposedly conveniently summarise the major events of Rishabha's life, starting from his birth to his parents. While I've not confirmed whether the shlokas are actually there in the text, it does seem to be in direct and absurd conflict with the rest of the Shiva PuraNa, since IIRC Hindus refer to this very text as one of the authoritative sources for how Shiva is specifically never born (he just appears). Clearly, if the alleged convenient shlokas on the Jain teerthankara can indeed be found in the text in its current state, whoever forged it into there in the first place didn't seem to know this little bit of info about Shiva, before trying to conflate the two... <= Which looks very much to imply that it can't be a Shaiva (or actually any other kind of Hindu) that put those shlokas in there...



There are many cases of absurdities and inconsistencies and anachronisms forged into various old Hindu texts, especially those Hindu texts that still got expanded in later times. The forgeries by non-Hindus (as opposed to later expansions/inclusions by Hindus) can usually be easily identified by their presence being convenient only to Buddhism and/or Jainism. Both the later Hindu (valid) contributions and the non-Hindu (invalid) "insertions" in Hindu texts are deemed "interpolations" by outsiders.



There are countless examples, but this topic doesn't really have an ending. Will conclude that people are very mistaken if they think they can peddle more than one Indic theology at a time. A lot of it is mutually exclusive. Particularly because the others represent replacement theologies and cosmologies for Hindu's own. It is only their initial plea that you accept the "historicity" of their theology and the equal validity of their (cloned, Bauddified/Jainised) cosmologies. Next, Hindus will be asked to acknowledge that theirs are "equally ancient" as Vedic religion, and from there to recognise that Vedic religion borrowed its own Vedic principles and elements from these later others, before finally declaring that these others actually are the original, more ancient, native religion etc.

So I don't see why Hindu sites should be parroting inane and false Jain (and elsewhere Buddhist) statements mangling Hindu religio-history - which statements are even lifted from articles that are for the rest anti-Vedic, i.e. anti-Hindu, and are moreover past being mere Jain/Buddhist theology and even well into the realm of AIT-derived post-AIT speculation. I don't understand how today's Hindus - well, the angelsk-speaking/reading kind - got to be so...gullible and ignorant of their own religion, compounded by an inability/unwillingness to verify others' claims on their religion. They are ready to believe anything (anything *else* that is).



I'm so tired of all the incessant lies being peddled. Who are they kidding? And then the ridiculous pretence that "Satya" was supposedly a principle that Jainism innovated and had to transmit to the Vedic religion (or "compassion" and "logic" etc by Buddhism). Yeah. *Right*.

But the real moral perhaps is why it's important (past and present) for Hindus to keep the Vedas away from non-Hindus. All the latter do is mangle it in their own favour, even to stab Hindus with. And - as befits opportunism - in more 'benign' moments they pretend to have an equal claim on the religion of the Vedic Rishis, for being "fellow Indic traditions". Bad deal. No thanks.





[color="#0000FF"](The only relevant thing to read is the linked article in 1/6 - or the excerpts posted in 1/6 to 6/6 - and then can draw conclusions for oneself.)[/color]