Okay thank you very much VijayVan!

Even though danastuti is the praise of donors, basically poets are happy they have been compensated with income

@Santosh : what is the fate of this Vedic Hinduism?

Hi Santosh

VH has not gone anywhere and it lives directly and through it’s influence till date.
Just few days back, Tamraparani Pushkaram ended in the southern tip of the country. Worship of rivers started with Nadi Stuti in the vedas and Tamraparani is also celebrated with millions participating, vedic and other Hindu chants , etc. These great Pushkarams are reminiscent of Srauta rituals i.e. public ceremonies in which the whole population participated
The ritual structure of vedic yagnas i.e. god/goddess are invited , given food, boons asked for (and hopefully received) and given send-off is repeated in any modern day puja . Any Hindu sect seeks ultimate recognition and legitimacy by calling itself ‘vedic’ and how vedic gods and rishis are part of the sect’s mythos. At a thought level like Vedanta , Vedas and Smiritis are the ultimate pramana .
If you look around , many habits and mangalam/ amangalam (auspicious/inauspocious) complexes can be traced to vedic hinduism.
Vedic Hinduism’s idea of nature and landscape based religiosity is still largely the case. That’s why rivers, mountains, ponds , and even animals are given religious significance. The idea of Dharma is a continuation of ‘rta’ in early vedic times ; this idea of ‘rta’ as the governing force of the universe has been downgraded in favour of Dharma ; this happened in Upanishadic time itself .
There are still shakas of vedic chanting i.e. brahmin families entrusted with keeping alive some portions of the vedas , even though their number of dwindling . Many shakas have been lost since the practitioners stopped practicing for whatever reason.

There is Dhanastuti i.e. celebration of wealth. That is why Hindus have never shied away from wealth unlike west asian Abrahamic religions which were ambivalent to money.

The Supreme Court of India has to make sure that all institutions–religious or otherwise– are not going against fundamental rights. They found that restricting women’s access to the temple is gender discrimination. Of course, this conflicts with traditional beliefs about purity etc and those issues are also important. But the Indian constitution must be supreme in a secular democracy.

The Indian Supreme Court has also become involved in the religious affairs of Muslims, most recently in the triple talaaq issue. If you are making the argument that the court doesn’t have the right to get involved in religious issues then there should be no problem with a Muslim man giving his wife a divorce through instant triple talaaq. Of course, there are Muslim countries (such as Pakistan) where this practice is not legal. The point is that fundamental rights take precedence over religious beliefs. At least, that seems to be the thinking of the Supreme Court.

Pranjal, is the same true of all synagogues, mosques, churches, zorastrian/Buddhist/Jain/Sikh/Toaist/Bon places of worship? Do you believe that all religions should be treated identically?

I just wanted to request you to forgive me if the last sentence of my comment above came across as particularly rash and mocking and hurtful towards you. I never had any such intention quite certainly (I would have told you if that was the case and then apologised) and I had only good will in mind; but it is probable that my stupid joke was in poor taste and hurt you (to write in exhaustive detail, I do personally evaluate mainstream scholarship (or my choice of Pramanas you can say) as higher compared to more alternative ways of doing it and do take refuge in the mainstream scholarship but I certainly don’t believe that everyone should believe the same, so that was majorly intended as a little harmless quip only and not at all as mocking), in which case, please forgive me.

Hello AnAn,

Thank you very much for the reply. I’m frankly not in the mood to read and appreciate your comment in entirety because my mind got quite rocked because of the other topic (you will know more about it when the comment that I wrote just a while ago will get approved by the software shortly (hopefully)) and so please let me just note that by secular I meant something like a view held by some person, whether hypothetical or real, who is not an apauruSeyatvavAdin (sorry for any bad Sanskrit there lol). And then let me sign off for today by saying that you seem to be very suspiciously close to at least one particular section of the mainstream thought when you say that the Buddha influenced Hinduism very much lol.

I just wanted to note that I have made quite a big mistake in my first post: boy did I not know about the quite strong opposition to this ruling from the Hindus of Kerala when I wrote that post. It turned out that the logic that I remembered and reproduced in there I took from just one individual on Quora, the very well-known Balaji Viswanathan (see his answer at http://qr.ae/TUh1JH and the comments to that answer also, importantly of people named Vineet Menon and the other well-known Kiron Krishnan). There are other views which I took note of, now. It appears that there are quite a few types of Dharma Shasta (who is apparently himself a type of Shasta) and some Dharma Shasta temples have him with consorts (and these allow women of all ages) and some like the Sabarimala don’t. So that is one incorrect, or at least very certainly incomplete, characterisation earlier, by Mr Viswanathan and me, in my view.

The above little comment thread exchange between Mr Viswanathan and Mr Krishnan is actually very interesting. Mr Krishnan identifies the heart of the problem all at once correctly (like did several other commentators on Brown Pundits itself on an earlier post, I remember) and asks “Why should all traditions in Hinduism conform to the so-called monochromatic version dictated by great reformer progressive gurus?” His response might be that they should not and I don’t personally know the answer or am too cowardly to take any stance, but my emphasis is on the fact that this is indeed the heart of the issue. Best exemplified by the fact that the same Ayyappan and Aiyanar (Ta-Ma names for the deity called Shri Dharma Shasta; again note that there are internal differences between Ayyappan and Aiyanar) combo deities are worshipped in different formats in different places and people who do something in one temple don’t do that thing at another temple but a slightly different thing. Universalist Enlightenment’s clash with a mind-boggling Diversity and importantly, a diversity the entities of which constitute its structure are all as irreconcilable with each other as four and six.

In another answer (http://qr.ae/TUh1VD) to the question, another person called Krishna asks “Why only men priests in Triplicane or in Tirumala? (Discrimination of women)” in the following context (again quoting him): “There are thousand other restrictions and practices followed in thousands of places of worship. I think Law can’t enter everywhere. Why only men priests in Triplicane or in Tirumala? (Discrimination of women)…” While I am probably incapable of thinking through this very properly and evaluate if the comparison of this with the case at hand be made (my personal inclination, at least an initial one, is that they are indeed very similar), but I majorly want to use this to illustrate the grand complexity mentioned in the last paragraph. One can instantly observe here that a near-opposite of the situation at Triplicane or Tirumala as presented by Mr Krishna most definitely exists somewhere in India, such as the female priests at several village mother-goddess temples in some places in south India like one close to my home in Hyderabad. So it can be noted here that on the broad and general level, there is no discrimination (or is, but in low amounts) against women speaking with respect to the problem of representation in this priest profession as women priests most certainly exist, but when taken up individually, there is discrimination against women in one case and discrimination against men in another (though it can perhaps be plausibly argued that a hypothetical change of the gender of the priest one fine day for no apparent reason can be much more easily effected in the mother-goddess-temple case than in the Triplicane-Tirumala case)! I don’t know about a lot of these things to any large degree but I’m inclined to think that it’s better that the Universalist aspect of Enlightenment and the Diversity-Internal Irreconcilability aspect of Tradition should talk to each other more and know more sincerely about each other and this may make the trajectory of history perhaps more smooth and let the collective spirit of the people face as minimal a damage as possible.

Haha, I’m done with this topic for now. So much stress for a gODa-mIda-pilli type (‘cat on the wall’) guy like me. My little depressed world was rocked like anything with this one lol.

We can discuss this offline.

Brighu is one of the most important elements of eastern philosophy.

Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita 10.25:
“maharsinam bhrgur aham”
[Of] Maha rishis Brighu I am

Brighu is this star in the big dipper:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eta_Ursae_Majoris
Brighu I think also refers to an aspect of mystical experience. I look forward to neuroscience studies of the brain and nervous system when someone meditatively absorbs in Brighu.

Brighu is ancient. Brighu is a Sapta rishi from a previous day of Brahma or from more than 6 1/2 billion years ago. “He” doesn’t have gender as we understand it. A mind son or manas putra of Brahma. Brighu is mystery. Brighu partly represents the degree to which everything is pre-destined or the degree to which humans lack free will. Modern neuroscience is finding evidence for the same thing. However in eastern philosophy a human can develop free will. This is the purpose of all religion, spirituality, mental health practice, practices to increase intelligence and all the rest.

Brighu is similar to the Dalai Lama in the sense that he keeps being born again and again across many eons of time. And human beings in the present can be inspired by Brighu. But Brighu is never born a human. Much of the ancient Hindu/Buddhist/Jain science comes from Brighu. For example building and operating temples. Specific rituals. Manu smriti (which keeps being rewritten for each epoch of time)

Many books can be written about Brighu. I could write a series of articles about Brighu. I have been fascinated by Brighu since I was a child.

For Mahabharata shippers . . . one of Karna’s most powerful weapons was Bhargava Astra . . . a weapon of mass destruction for which the Pandavas had no answer. Bhargava Astra was given to Karna by Brighu’s great grandson Parashurama. It possessed the power of Brighu . . . whatever that is.

Another tidbit. Many of the most important people in eastern philosophy are Brighu’s wives (in many of Brighu’s life times he married a wife), children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. In fact many of them are as great or greater than Brighu. Each of them deserves their own book.

Collectively the Bhargavas were extremely influential across all the ancient stories.