The Significance of Brahmin Teachers and Rituals in Ancient South Asia
- The Brahmin teachers in ancient South Asia were considered very special individuals who had the ability to call upon the deities for sacrifice. They were mentioned in the Vedic books called the Upanishads, where they talked about the Ultimate Supreme Being known as Brahman. Many religious people believed that Brahman was present in all of creation and that knowledge of Brahman could lead to enlightenment and liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth.
- To be reincarnated as a human or to reach the level of Brahman, one not only had to be good but also had to purify oneself through special rituals. These rituals included bathing in sacred rivers, singing hymns to the deities, giving alms to the poor and charitable organizations, and taking care of old and weak beings. Pilgrimages to sacred places and the devotion to meditation were also common practices.
- Many of these sacred places were located along the banks of India's Ganga River. The river was seen as a beautiful deity, carrying within it the essence of rare herbs and elements. The people of ancient South Asia believed that every inch of land touched by the Ganga River became holy.
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お願いします!続き A person who could call the deities to sacrifice was a very special person indeed.These were the Brahmin teachers.In the Vedic books called the Upanishads,they teach and talk bbout the Ultimate Supreme Being,called Brahman.Many religious people believed that the Ultimate Supreme Being pervaded all of creation.According to the Upanishads,“The finest essence here－that constitutes the self of this whole world; that is the truth; that is the self.And that's how you are....”Knowledge of Brahman made one enlightened and stopped the endless cycle of death and rebirth.But even if you were a Brahmin,there were no guarantees that you would be enlightened. Being good was not enough to be reincarnated as a human,never mind to reach the level of Brahman.You also had to purify yourself through special lituals.People tried to wash away the sins that they committed during their life through rituals such as bathing in sacred rivers,singing hymns to the deities,giving alms to the poor and to charitable organizatioms,and taking care of old and weak animals as well as people.They gave away all their wealth,devoted themselves to meditation, and made pilgrimages to sacred places. Many of these sacred places were found along the shores of India's Ganga River.Just as the Indus Valley civilization grew from the life-giving waters of the Indus and Saraswati Rivers,so the Brahmanical religion grew up along the banks of the Ganga River.The people of ancient South Asia thought of the river as a beautiful deity.According to the Ramayama,“[The]Ganga[river is]flowing along the valley,coming down from the Himalayas,carrying within her the essence of rare herbs and elements found on her way.She courses through many a kingdom,and every inch of the ground she touches becomes holy.”
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捧げものに神を呼ぶことができる人は、本当に非常に特別な人でした。 これらは、バラモンの先生でした。 ウパニシャドと呼ばれているベーダの本の中で、彼らは教え、ブラフマンと呼ばれる最高神について話します。多くの敬虔な人々は、最高神が万物に行き渡っていると信じていました。ウパニシャドによると、「現世の最も優れた本質 ― それはこの全世界の自我を構成する; それは真理である;それは自我である。 そして、その様にあなたは存在する ....」ブラフマンについて知ると、人は悟りを開き、死と再生の果てしない輪廻が止まりました。 しかし、たとえあなたがバラモンであったとしても、あなたが悟りを開く保証はありませんでした。 善であることは人間として生まれ変わるのに十分ではありませんでしたし、決してバラモンのレベルに達する精神でもありませんでした。あなたは、さらに、特別の儀式によってあなた自身を浄化しなければなりませんでした。人々は、儀式によって生涯で犯した罪を洗い流そうとしました、例えば、聖なる川で沐浴したり、神に賛歌を歌ったり、貧しい人々や慈善団体に施し物をしたり、人々ばかりでなく年を取って弱くなった動物の世話をしたりしたのです。彼らはすべての富を手放し、瞑想に専念し、聖地へ巡礼しました。 これらの聖地の多くは、インドのガンガ川の岸に沿って見つかりました。 インダス文明がインダス川とサラスワティー川の命を与える水から発達したのと丁度同じように、ブラフマンの宗教もガンガ川の岸に沿って発達しました。古代の南アジアの人々は、川を美しい神とみなしました。 ラーマヤーナによれば、「ガンガ川は渓谷に沿って流れ、ヒマラヤ山脈より下り、その中に途中で見つかる珍しいハーブのエキスや元素を運ぶ。川は多くの王国を流れ、川が触れる土地の隅から隅までが神聖になる。」
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お願いします! Imagine you could watch the history of the world as a super-fast movie shot from outer space.If you were watching the South Asian subcontinent,things would look about the same from about 3000 to 2000 BCE with cities,villages,and crops sprinkled throughout the Indus Valley.But about 2000 BCE,the scene would start to change dramatically.Some of the old settlements along what used to be the Saraswati River would disappear as the once-great river dried up.Then you would see spaces opening up in the jungles along the Yamuna and Ganga River valley as new communities moved in.These communities cut down and burned trees to make room for towns,cities,and fields of summer crops watered by the monsoon,such as rice and millet. We know a lot more about these new communities than we do about the Harappans because we have their scriptures,called the Vedas.The Vedas are a collection of hymns,narratives,and religious instructions in the Sanskrit language.Sanskrit was not written down at first ,and the Vedas were only passed on through memorizatiom.How much can you memorize? Could you memorize a poem? A story? How about a whole book? How about memorizing a whole book by repeating back what your teacher tells you,without having words to look at? How about a whole lot of books? The Vedas were so important that students spent 10,15, or even 20 years studying and memorizing them so that they would not be lost from generation to generation.Young boys who belonged to a class of people called Brahmin had to learn the alphabet of the sacred language of Sanskrit before they could begin to learn the hundreds of sacred texts in the Vedas.
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お願いします!続き Then the priests recited prayers to purify Kumar and the other boys who were sitting quietly in a row next to the fire altar.The boys dropped butter and small animal and human figurines made of wheat flour into the sacred fire.The priests sprinkled purified water over the heads of each boy,and then carefully draped the sacred cotton thread over their left shoulders,around their bodies,and under their right arms.This sacred thread was a symbol of the boys' second birth as Brahmin students.(Kshatriya and Vaishya boys could also receive the sacred thread,but they had to wait until they were older.) After receiving the sacred thread,Kumar and his friends moved into the house of a learned priest who tutored them for several yearr.A student's life was very hard.Students collected firewood for fire sacrifices and everyday cooking,helped build fire altars,and learned to make the sacred fire.Most of the time,they memorized the Vedas,carefully pronouncing each sound exactly right to call the deities to sacrifices. Many young boys were not as lucky as Kumar,or even as lucky as the Shudras,the peasants.The Vedic peoples did not have nice things to say about the Dasa,a group of people who spoke a different language that did not sound at all like Sanskrit. The Dasa had probably lived in the region for hundreds of years.Their ancestors in the Indus Valley were the Harappans who had named the rivers and mountains,and had built the cities that now lay abandoned.Although at first the Rig Vedic culture seemed to sweep over the northern plains,many eaqlier traditions of the Harappans lived on and reemerged in later times.
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お願いします!続き Back among mere mortals,the Brahmin men were taught the sacred scriptures and conducted sacrifices. And that was the main job they were born to do. In early Vedic times,every kind of responsibility was delegated to a particular group,or varna.For example,people of the Kshatriya group owned land,fought wars,and ran the government.The members of the Vaishya varna became craftsmen and traders.The Shudra group worked the land,swept the streets,emptied the latrines,and collected garbage and dumped it outside the city.Although at first it was possible for people to move from one varna to another,changing places was discouraged,and after about 1000 BCE,it was not allowed at all. Based on what varna you were born into,your career was decided for you.Any say you had in the matter was narrowed even further by whether you were a boy or a girl.Brahmin boys learned the rituals and scriptures that their fathers,brothers,and uncles did.Brahmin girls and women fed and clothed their families and cared for the young,the elderly,and the sick.They also performed religious rituals,especially the daily worship of the female deity who protects the home and family.Many aspects of women's worship was not part of the early Vedic scriptures－it was handed down from mother to daughter from very ancient times. We don't know very much about women and men from the lower classes,because the records we have,the Vedas,the Mahabharata,and the Ramayana,are about the upper classes.Many scholars believe that the need to earn a living meant that men and women worked together more equally among the other classes than they did among the Brahmins.Non-Brahmin women were allowed and even encouraged to get an education and sometimes were trained in warfare.
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お願いします!続き But the sea captain's voyage proves that the people of the Indus Valley could have been the source of some of the goods the Mesopotamians bought from “Meluhha.”What about blue lapis lazuli and tin (which they mixed with copper to make bronze),which are not found along either the Indus River or the coast of the Arabian Sea? It turns out that Indus River merchants followed more than one trade route.According to the later Ramayana,an Indian poem by Valmiki,“With the end of the rainy season,nature's traffic resumed on land,air,and water.”At the end of October,after the rains were over and the rivers had gone down to tgeir normal levels,a second group of Indus merchants packedtheir goods into flat-bottomed riverboats and headed north.Their journey upriver was frustratingly slow at first,as men and oxen walking along the banks strained to pull the riverboats against the current.Some ancient clay models of flat-bottomed riverboats have a hole in the center.This hole would have been used for either a mast or a pulling pole.A pulling pole is made by setting up a long pole with a rope tied to the top so that it does not get caught on bushes and trees along the edge of the river.People walk along the river edge pulling the boat,a painfully slow and difficult process that is called“walking”a boat up the river. The boats would have been even harder to pull laden with grain,butter,oil,and dried fish.Their cargo also included lightweight luxuries such as finely woven cotton,shell bangles,carved ivory gaming pieces for board games,strands of blue-green glazed faience beads,and the exquisite long carnelian beads.Inlaid furniture and painted pottery were packed carefully into woven baskets so that they could be loaded onto pack oxen or carried by porters.
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お願いします!続き As a child,Kumar learned to recite the names of his male ancestors beginning with his father and going back many generations.He was proud of his father's family line,but he was also proud that his mother belonged to the second most important class:the Kshatriya,who were the warriors and politicians.(During Vedic times,people from different varna could marry,but in later periods this practice was discouraged and eventually banned.) Kumar walked to the river for his bath with other boys.Some of them may have been from the Kshatriya or Vaishya class.Their fathers were warriors,landowners,merchants,or important community leaders.On the road they passed another group of boys who were driving oxen pulling a heavy plow to the fields.These boys were from the lowest class,the Shudra.Shudras worked the land and butcheredanimals or made leather harnesses.Eventually,because the work that they did was considered unclean,they were not allowed to learn the sacred hymns and prayers calked mantras. As a Brahmin,Kumar's job was to keep the world from ending by making sacrifices to the deities,which he could only do if he was pure.This was the Brahmins' sacred duty,not just eor themselves,but for everyone in the community,including the Kshatriyas,Vaishyas,and even the Shudras.It was an important responsibility.
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お願いします!!続き Say you were a merchant from Oman,in what is now known as the Middle East,come to Harappa to trade alabaster vases and fine woolen cloth for shell bangles and stone beads.The first thing you would have noticed was what wasn't there－no great temples or monuments,like the ones you had seen in the cities of Mesopotamia and Persia.You probably would have thought Harappa a poor place,without the grandeur of home.But hen you would have noticed the tidy,neat streets.Even as a stranger in a strange city,you didn't have to leave extra time in case you got lost in the maze of streets every time you went to the market.The streets were straight and predictable,and quieter than you were used to.Houses weren't open to the stredt,so you didn't hear every word that people were saying inside as you walked by.Instead,the main doorway of eabh house was located along a side street and had an entryway that screened the inside from curious eyes.The windows opened onto the courtyard at its center. You'd have noticed that the city smelled better than most cities you visited.Major streets had built-in garbage bins.Each block of houses had a private well and bathrooms with drains.The small drains leading from the bathing areas and toilets emptied hnto slightly larger drains in the side streets that flowed into huge covered sewer in the main streets,big enough for people to climb inside and clean.These big city sewers emptied outside of the city wall into gullies and were washed out every year by the rains.
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お願いします!!続き But as a pilgrim,you would probably have been most interested in the large building that today is called the Great Bath.You would go first into a small bathing area that was supplied with a well.You'd take off your outer clothes,which were dusty from your journey,and wash yourself.Once you were clean,you would move on into a large courtyard.You might walk along the roofed edges of the courtyard to better admire the sacred pool in the center.When you were ready for the bath that would clean your spirit as well as yourbody,you would walk into the large pool by one of the two wide stairways that led down into the healing water. Travelers from both Mohenjo Daro and Harappa probably would have felt least at home in Dholavira,the third major city of the Indus.Dholavira,located in what is now the modern country of India,was on an island in an inland bay far to the south of Mohenjo Daro.The farming was not good in the areas around Dholavira－the climate was too dry－so most people supported themselves by herding,fishing,and trading.To collect and store enough rainwater,the people of Dholavira built stone tanks or reservoirs that stretched over more than a third of their city. Dry Dholavira may not have had much mud,but it had lots of stone.Most of its houses and drains were made of sandstone blocks.Dholavira was the grandest of the cities,with huge walls and ceremonial gates separating the quarters was even topped by an inscription of ten symbols,each one a little more than a foot tall. Dholavira's magnificent gates couldn't change the fact that,in general,the people of the Indus Valley cities did not choose to build huge monuments to a king or religious ruler.Their cities were simple and workaday,without unnecessary flourishes or great pieces of monumental art.But towering high bbove the plain,with gleaming red-brick gateways and light gray mud-brick walls,they still must have been a commanding sight.
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お願いします (4) Artists almost never signed their work. The art was not about the artist. Artists were not innovators, they were craftsmen, and as you can tell from their Middle Kingdom titles, they were more closely related to scribes than to the "artist" types we think of today. That's not to say Egyptian artists weren't talented. Oe sculptor created two life-size sculptures of a high priest and his princess wife that were so realistic they scared off tomb robbers. The stone eyes implanted in the statues appeared to watch the thieves, and frightened them so badly that they dropped their tools and ran. (5) Perhaps what contributed to the tomb robbers' fear was the Egyptian belief that art had magic. Often you will see crocodiles, hippos, and snakes drawn with spears sticking out of them. If a crocodile suddenly came to life right next to you, you would probably appreciate the spear. And since these murals were one day going to become a reality, it's nice that the banquet scene has plates piled high with delicious food. (6) It must have been the attention to rules that led Egyptian artists to discover the "sacred ratio." The proportions in the sacred ratio repeat throughout the natural world. Plants, flowers, and trees grow in the sacred ratio. Sunflowers, pinecones, and the nautilus shell spiral according to the sacred ratio. The earth and the moon measure, and the galaxies spin―all to this sacred proportion. Egyptian artists drew the human body according to the sacred ratio, in the same way modern artists do today.
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お願いします! “All creatures from Brahma to the small insect have to face the result of their deeds,”said the Vedic deity Vishnu. If you were a student who never practiced your Vedas,or a farmer who let your land go to seed,or a craftsman who sold leaky pots,your parents or your wife or your customers would probably get angry with you.But that's not all.What Vishnu meant was that you could pay in your next life for not meeting your duties in this one.Your actions had results,which were called karma.Many ancient South Asians believed that most people's souls came back into the world after they died,and not necessarily in a human body. On the other hand,if you were especially good,you could come back as a Brahmin.Brahmins were considered to be the most pure of all human beings.Only they knew the hymns and rituals from the Vedas to call the deities to the fire sacrifice.They knew how to start a fire with a bow drill and,once that fire was started,how to offer sacrificed animals and clarified butter(or“ghee”)to the flames as they chanted special hymns. By around 1000 BCE,the Vedic rituals practiced by Brahmins began to change.Earlier traditions of the Indus civilization and other local beliefs began to creep back into use.The Brahmins began to use Harappan-style conch-shell ladles to pour sacrifices and blow Harappan-style conch shells to call the deities.They began to practice the ancient Harappan discipline of yoga and decorate the floors where they performed rituals with sacred designs called mandalas,made out of powdered conch shells and rice powder.
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お願いします!続き After the discovery of some unburied skeletons on the highest,and therefore latest,street levels at Mohenjo Daro,some scholars assumed that the forts that Indra was destroying were the walled cities of the Indus Valley.But the Late Harappan cities were never destroyed by warfare,and there is no evidence of large groups of people coming from outside South Asia.Historians believe that the mysterious skeletons were people who died from contagious diseases.They were left unburied in abandoned parts of the city so they would not infect the grave diggers. So what happened around 1900 BCE? For many years,historians believed that invaders called Aryans poured into the Indus Valley and,with the help of the horse and bronze or iron weapons,destroyed the Late Harappan civilization. But archaeologists can't find evidence of major warfare,and the body types of the people living in the Indus Valley did not change during this time period.More likely,the disappearing Saraswati River stqained the Late Harappan way of life past the breaking point.Satellite photos of the dried riverbed and excavations along its banks show that the river was huge at one time,almost five miles across.As old ways of living and trade broke down,the people of the Indus Valley began to look around for other ways to stay alive.People from the countryside and highlands who spoke the Indo-Aryan language,people who had known amd traded with the Harappans for many years,became more powerful over time until they could challenge the Harappans' power.
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