[Advaita-l] Is Ayyappa a Vedic god?

[Aditya Kumar]

 Namaste,
Thank you for providing the gist of Theravada Buddhism so succinctly. I was repeatedly trying to find such information about Theravada without having to go through a lot of content. Nevertheless, it is obvious that all Buddhists have places of worship and some sort of icon/symbol/deity. Buddhism by the very nature of its sect/cult/religion was more relevant in socio-political scene rather than a purely spiritual/religious one. Whether the Buddhists believed in Vedas or not, whether they had their own take on the Upanishads based solely on personal experience and logic, they didn't follow the the caste system and the ashrama dharma. Abandoning samsara because it is terrifying is a rajasika tyaga according the Vedas. A Vaidika cannot abandon the samsara simply because it is dreadful, he has to follow the caste system and stages like Brahmacharya, grihastha etc. 
So Buddhism was egalitarian compared to sanatana dharma. A Buddhist can one day get up from the bed and decide to become a monk. Any person male or female can become a monk. Temples, rules etc were no concern as long as it was politically antagonistic to the orthodox religion of the Vaidikas which enjoyed good patronage in India. Today we have such egalitarian values within the Hindu religion and we can't discount the fact that these ideologies didn't merge from alien sects. 
    On Friday, 16 March, 2018, 10:44:23 AM IST, Raghav Kumar Dwivedula via Advaita-l <advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org> wrote:  
 
 Namaste
It is noteworthy that the earliest 'purest' form of Buddhism did not have
worship of mUrtis and shrines. The Theravada ( a.k.a soutrAntika,) school
is the earliest and preserves Buddha's words nearly verbatim. And hundreds
of years later the mahAyAna Buddhists arise and they plausibly under the
influence of the cultural and religious milieu of agamic and vedic  India
started worship and rituals etc. Mantra japam is strongly discouraged in
the early Buddhism. You get a flavor of this in modern vipassana Buddhist
methods which strongly  prohibit mantra japam, worship and rituals.  There
us no concept of an altar or shrine with images . The meditator just faces
a blank wall in his pagoda cell. That's Theravada for you. To say that
images of Vishnu etc., are from Buddhism is not credible .

 Its like saying that advaita Vedanta is derived from Buddhism because a
few gauDapAda kArikas have resemblance to some mAdhyamika buddhust kArikAs.
Its the other way round.  Advaita Vedanta predates Buddhism. Similarly
worship of  Vishnu is a much earlier tradition. We have mahAbhArata
references aplenty about temple worship in pre-buddhistic India. Now if
temple worship predates the Buddha and early Buddhism did not have mUrtis,
mantras and altars, why not see the elephant in the room and acknowledge
the diffusion of agamic ideas into Buddhism rather than contrive it the
other way round.

We have the authoritative shankara digvijaya giving a more believable
account of how Adi Shankara *retrieved* the preexisting image of Badri
Narayana and *re-installed* it in Badrinath. Its a shrine reverting to its
earlier ancient firm. Its what happens all over the world be it the great
mosque of Cordoba say,

http://historylists.org/architecture/5-most-impressive-historic-mosques-in-spain.html

Or the Ram Lala temple in Ayodhya.

Om
Raghav


On Thu 15 Mar, 2018, 3:33 PM Aditya Kumar via Advaita-l, <
advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org> wrote:

> Namaste,
> This is a very interesting link :
> http://vinu-mythoughts.blogspot.in/2010/09/ayyappa-is-buddha.html
> It is evident that Buddhism had a strong presence in Southern India
> similar to SE Asia(Sri Vijaya) and Sri Lanka. The sleeping/reclining buddha
> became Ranga sleeping casually on a serpent, Padmapani became Sarangapani
> and elsewhere became Dandayudhapani (Palani). Of course, all these are only
> musings.
>
>
>
>
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