The corrupting influence of orientalist indologists

@dvikauglau[...]
1 day ago
Really good talk. Didn't know about etymology of the word Dharma. Also it was traced back to eusebia.
It is extremely important that we teach this to all youngsters. 

@damodar[...]
4 hours ago
It wasn't traced back to eusebia. Eusebia was mentioned as dharma's equivalent.

 

@darkprince2490
0 seconds ago
 @damodaranvt6612  Except that Eusebia is not equivalent to dharma. Dharma has many contexts including one of cosmic duty. While Elst believes in a one true meaning that gets corrupted  (a "philological" stance that he inherited from christianity). It is clear that in this talk he is trying to whitewash the duty/"righteousness" aspect to dharma and paint it in quasi religious terms of piety, and from there as a version of (corrupted) abrahamist religion. Note that an early church father was named Eusebius. This is to make appropriation and then damnation easier. Embrace, extend, extinguish. Elst is an atheist, a stance which he also falsely attributes to hindus.[a]

As someone who is utterly alien to bharata, Elst like all westerners is incapable of understanding bharata or other pagans (ancient greeks) he pretends to support. That much is clear from this talk which is one canard after another.

The traditional derivation of dharma is well known, and is much richer in its explication: entire epics are about dharma. In dharma (the Way), rocks and animals have dharma. the devas have dharma, the Avataras have dharma, Rakshasas have dharma, and even Bhagwan has dharma. Does Elst's motivated pigeonholing (thopna) work here? of course not. But Elst will just hand-waive in his usual fashion - "but that all came later.. as Hindus corrupted their own religion, which they couldn't even understand... hehe." 

Also note that Elst bills himself as a "rationalist" - that is, just like the monotheists, he recognizes no obligations to any preceding culture, only to his own pretensions. That peculiar stance also feeds into his whitewashing of dharma as not having anything to do with duty.

It is also known that Greeks did not have an underlying unifying reality in their metaphysics similar to Tao or Brahman. Elst's canard about Dharma being piety undermines its aspect around balance. It is another LCD (least common denominator) approach meant to stultify the variegatedness of dharma, allowing for its recasting in western ideological/religious terms, and this  setting the eventual grounds for demonstrating its damnation/"error" (eg, in the atheist/"rationalist" context that Elst ultimately considers "true"[b][c]).  

Thus, the dharma yuddha also becomes undermined in Elst's "reading". Was Duryodhana's fault a lack of piety? Our itihaas and traditions has always maintained that it was mahatwakansha .. very roughly hubris.[d]

Dharma is context of Devas refers to duty to the Devas, not to a (state of) piety (which again is Elst indulging in christian anachronism).

Really tired of Elst and his white burden act. Just as every other westerner he loves to interfere, in fact driven to it by an ideological worldview, masked over as "rationalism".

 @darkprince2490
0 seconds ago
teach your kids ramayana and mahabharata - do not teach them indological propaganda.

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[a] Indologists commonly claim a syncretist dynamic operating in ancient bharata whereby local cults were co-opted by a nonlocal (eg Vedic) cult. This view extends from an AIT type colonial framework and the existence of tribes as static operating units (for tribes vs native, refer to Keppens; tribes are ideological units and static, whereas the native is relational). What we state here is that the syncretist view is colonial and that what actually happens is that a centralizing and provincializing dynamic reflective of the believer-nonbeliever distinction is posited onto ancient bharata by indologists/academics. The "rupa" dynamic and the "lila" dynamic discussed by SNB and RM, respectively, and the supposed heathen cults in bharata have always existed in diversity. in fact the diversity, like that of language (Nichols), was far greater in the past. The vaishnava or vedic "cults" did not expand but an understanding of their essential forms was always diffused throughout bharata; just as Adi Sankara's influence spread into an already dharmik domain where the essential forms were implicit/known (and thus was well received), in the same way the diversity of traditions was always constituted in bharata. This version thus does not posit heathen cults as mini-religions/ideologies being spread by influence, but rather convergence of forms in situ, as experienced by a moral community. Thus the moral community of bharata (eg extending to SEAsia, CAsia, Japan, China, Mongolia, etc) contains within it the essential forms of all the extant traditions. It is only when these these heathen traditions are viewed through a western ideological lens that their diversity and common integration appears imposed or artificial. "Explanations" that require the positing of the spread of one cult require recasting these traditions as monotheistic ideologies ie, ontological violence to the heathen traditions existing naturally as a multiplicity of devas (ie, to "polytheism").
[b] it still isn't clear whether Elst is a crypto-christian atheist.
[c] traditions cannot be true or false.
[d] piety (ie, christian piety as the opposite of a state of sin) makes no sense in a heathen world since the value and reality of devas was never under question, nor mankind damned. Elst needs to transform this heathen world into one where there is skepticism/alienation (counterfactually represented as piety) in order to then negate it with his atheism, which he also projects into the ancient space (a "double shot", just to make sure the target is hit). Shraddha, tapasya, puja, prarthana are not piety. Also note that atheist Elst who is otherwise always salivating to remove superstition from our texts under pretense of historicity is eager to transform the texts as pious (christian-like). Both strategies converge to eliminate the Devas from the texts. 

Reference: Sangam Talks video titled "Bhartiya Chaturashram: Historicity And Extrapolation" by Koenraad Elst" published on April 20, 2024