[Advaita-l] Atharvashiras Upanishad Lecture PART 1

[jaldhar at braincells.com]

On Mon, 29 Mar 2021, Keshava Mahadeva via Advaita-l wrote:

> practiced by everybody including demigods like Brahma, Vishnu & Indra.
> _______________________________________________

Good work with the videos from what I have heard so far.  I will be 
listening to all of them carefully and will possibly have more to say then 
but one note for the time being:  The usage of the word "demigod" for 
Devas is misleading.  In Western culture demigod refered to people 
like e.g. Hercules who were the offsprings of divine entities and humans. 
This makes no sense in the Indian context.  Devas are "Gods" there is 
nothing "Demi" about them. As far as I know, the usage was coined or 
popularized by Prabhupada of ISKCON to distinguish Devas from Vishnu 
Bhagavan.  It seems it is being used the same way here to distinguish 
Devas from Shiva Bhagavan.  That's fine but as not all Sanskrit terms will 
map cleanly onto English equivalents perhaps to avoid confusion it is 
better to just leave it untranslated as Deva just as other words such as 
yoga or karma are used in English untranslated.


-- 
Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar at braincells.com>