(Mohammad) Revelation means something different in this culture.
Right?
And it's important to us—
So what I understand, and brother you can correct me
is that the origin of the Vedic scriptures
are based on rishis, or religious individuals that
that looked within themselves and meditated
and heard within themselves whispers,
which they then articulated.
(Adnan) Correct
(Mohammad) And which then eventually became the scriptures.
Now, there is no source that I can find unless
somebody—of when this happened or how it happened.
(Adnan) Yes
There is an estimated date that Vedas
were put together around 1500BC and
There are four types:
the Rigveda, the Samaveda, the Yajurveda and Artharvaveda.
These are the main scriptures
of the Hindu philosophies, right?
And Hinduism is also called amazingly Vedic religion.
Okay
It is called a collection of Vedic religions, right?
Referring to the scripture, right?
And also there are other scriptures as well
that were written, that were put together later on.
Hindus belief that the Vedas transcend all time
and don't have a beginning or an end, right?
This is what the belief is.
There is no beginning and there is no end to the Vedas.
There is no doubt that Vedas
are put together by humans.
And after their meditations
and their mystical experiences,
they put down their thoughts
or their ideas, their philosophies into writing,
and these writings became sacred.
Very similar to what happened to the
Christian writings in the New Testament, right.
Initially, the New Testament was put
down as memoirs of the Apostles, right?
If you look at the New Testament books,
writings of Paul and the gospels
in the first and the second century,
mostly they were known as—
these writings were known as
the memoirs of the apostles.
It was only in the third century where
some church fathers started to refer to
the books of the New Testament as Scripture.
Scripture prior to the third century was,
strictly speaking, the Old Testament,
not the writings of the New Testament.
The writing of the New Testament are called the Memoirs, right?
Later on they were given that higher
status of scripture by later church fathers.
And I'm not making this up, by the way.
This can be seen in any book
on the history of the New Testament, right?
Likewise, these books are put down
by rishis, by mystics, by thinkers.
In some cases, completely anonymous.
We have no idea as to who put down
these scriptures for the Hindus,
The origin is very difficult to trace.
And they were copied.
And we find the same problem with the Vedas as well.
When it comes to the
textual differences, there are many.
There are many between the copy.
(Hashim) Adnan, don't the Hindus normally say that?
They don't really say there is something
like an origin of Hinduism,
because—I think Brother Abid might be able to—
(Abid) I think it's very important to understand that
First of all, if you look at Hinduism
and I tend to refer to it as a civilization
rather than necessarily a faith,
and it has become tied in with
what is in the Indian subcontinent,
but it is not limited to it
because the influence of Indian civilization.
And that encompasses the sciences,
it encompasses the Ideologies, it encompasses the
religious beliefs and religious ideas.
And they were exported out into for example,
Indonesia, what is present in Burma, Thailand and so forth.
You see it's evidence of that,
and it still continues today.
So going back to the origin story, the Vedas
are referred to as both heard and remembered.
Now, that actually alludes to an oral tradition.
Once upon a time when you did not have
paper to capture your scriptures, transcribe them,
or you did not want, even if you carried them on
parchments and vellum and so on, the fact was
that as you are migrating and moving,
they are very easy to lose
or often they got destroyed.
So traditionally, in lots of cultures, their beliefs,
intrinsic beliefs, were often captured
in form of poetry.
In form of what in this case
we are referring to as Vedas.
They were sung, they were heard.
That's why it refers to it as recital, right?
They were heard and they were remembered mostly.
Now—
(Adnan) These are poetical collections and hymns.
(Abid) Like, this is the—
and it's the same thing.
Yeah, exactly! The word I was coming to was hymns.
In the case of tradition, if you look at
the Christian traditions, they refer to as hymns.
If you look at the tradition with the Indo,
Indo-Iranians, they refer to them as Gathas.
And there are about 17 of those,
quite some of them, quite uh
obviously, quite lengthy.
And the ideas on those are very similar
to what you have in the Sanskrit Vedas.
Sanskrit and early Persian were cognitive languages.
They are mutually understood.
In fact, if you want to research early Persian,
you have to rely upon Sanskrit.