Aira -Raya-Rai-Ray

[Guest guest]

i have earlier told (repeating if it may have been missed) that the kalingiyas have in their rock edict dt. c2nd BC in the Hatigumpha inscription-last line, Bhubaneswar (erstwhile Ekamra) indicates "Aira" as the title of emperor Kharavela.

 

Kharavela ? = Khara + v/bela = mid noon in Prakrit and as well in Odiya lingua. The ethos of the conclusion of the edits is ~ Aira was as alike the mid noon glowing Sun ! = all are metaphors.

 

Kudepasisri alias Vakradeva Kharagola's son 1st BC, had the prefix - Airasa - Manchapuri cave inscription.

 

conjecture herefater)~ Aira possibly phylologically decomposed into Raya and then again inflorenced as Rai-Bahadur and then also as Rai and Rai-Saheb and funally as Ray- Raisina, !!

 

Rai = medini = earth/terestial domian ...Arya/Raya ..the lord of the Earth OR lord on the earth.

 

Dr. Deepak Bhattacharya

 

 

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kishore patnaik

Tuesday, October 07, 2008 8:22 PM

Re: Re: Difference between Puloman and Pulomavi

 

 

 

Thank you for the post, very patiently explained. I know what kind of head aches you have to face to post such a long message. All your understanding is correct if you simply look at only PIE and IIr linguistics. In fact, I had long discussions over this and scores of linguists tried to explain to me their stand on Arya. Need less to mention, I am not convinced about the derivation of the meanings. The very primitive meaning seems to be 'stranger' or perhaps, "guest; Chronologically where this stands I don;t know but I remember that this is the most primitive meaning we can think of Arya. Some of the schools try to distinguish between lingusitc Arya ("Aryan" as used in , say, Indo Aryan languages) with the word Arya. While Arya could be mentioning a "respectable" person, (used as an address, equivalent to "sir" in English. If I were to be writing a letter in Telugu to President of Zambia, still my letter will start with "Arya"!), there is absolutely no doubt that this must be a later attestation, used in late epics such as Ramayan and Mbh. However, I do not remember seeing this attestation in any of the classical works, though I remember someone mentioning that Sakuntala calls Dushyant an "Arya" , In fact, if I get myself to believe wikipedia, it mentions the meaning of Arya from Amara kosa, certainly a late (and standard) Dictionary on Sanskrit, as a Respectable person. In the same breath, it mentions that Iranian cognate Airya also means the same.[if Arya is a PIE or atleast IIr word, then how come the word across the countries came to develope the same kind meaning over the centuries, especially in the absence of a parellel Varna system in Iran? In other words, it is only possible that the word Arya is autochthonous to India with its primitive meanings such as stranger, our guy, guest, agriculturist and so on and Iran borrowed the word, along with a corpus of other linguistic elements, in the late 10 th C. Apparently, the word Arya has come to mean a respectable person by then and hence, the chronology of what all you have written has to be advanced by centuries. My two cents. Kishore patnaik

On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 3:48 PM, Koenraad Elst <koenraad.elst (AT) telenet (DOT) be> wrote:

 

 

 

 

, "Kishore patnaik"

<kishorepatnaik09 wrote:> > Aryans do not specify a race. It points more to culture than to race.<"Arya"/"Airiia"/Ara", from PIE to Vedic, Avestan c.q. Hittite, means "fellow tribesman", "one of us". It is not racial in the modern sense (unlike in the 19th-century understanding, when "race" had all the meanings of "jati", from "family" to "the human race" and all genetic groupings in between, apart from non-genetic groupings like "the Muslim race"), but it is ethnic.In the Vedas, the Pauravas referred to themselvces and to their own creation, the Vedas and the Vedic culture, as "Arya". Later, in the time between Krishna and the Buddha, when the Vedas became the standard for people across India, most of them non-Pauravas, and the Paurava identity dissolved, "Arya" came to mean "Vedic" and everything connoted by "Vedic", including later accretions to Veda-based tradition that were not extant in the original Vedas (prudishness, vegetarianism, belief in reincarnation, perhaps cow worship). It retained this meaning in post-Buddha centuries in circles ideologically attached to the Hinduism developed in the post-Vedic age and symbolized by Krishna and the Gita. Thus, as the Vedic tradition became more casteist, caste observation was deemed an essential part of being Arya, viz. in the Manu Smrti. However, meanwhile, "Arya" had acquired a vaguer meaning as well, expanding from "Vedic" specifically to "civilized, noble" generally. When the Buddha used the term in his Catvari-Arya-Satyanai and his Arya-Ashtangika-Marga, he may have meant it in this general sense (that's how most modern translators understand it) but equally possibly, he may have meant that his teaching was essentially Vedic. The Vedas were already a distant memory then, incorporated into totally un-Vedic teachings, such as the Mimansa (Islamic avant la lettre) doctrine that the Vedas had been divinely revealed or were even eternal, an incrustration that must have been conspicuous even to non-scholars like prince Siddhartha Gautama. While the Vedas had already been dusted over, they certainly had the aura of higher truth, so the Buddha,without knowing much about their exact contents, confidently asserted the authenticity of his own teaching by linking it to the original and authetic authority of the Vedas, as against the mediocre and contrived understanding and application given to the Vedas by contemporaneous Brahmins.

> Truly speaking, we (at least me) only intuitively understand this> word and as such, the sociologists have failed to define it> accurately.<Not only the sociologists. Many devout Hindus have tried to incorporate the Vedic notion of "Arya" into their non-Vedic Puranic belief system or more recently even into borrowed modern liberalism (the Vedas as egalitarian and feminist, Swami Agnivesh's "Vedic socialism"). Thus, they claim that "Arya" means "good" (or more trendily, "spiritual") and Anarya means "bad" ("unspiritual"). In reality, it simply means "Paurava" and "non-Paurava", and in both you find people who by objective standards are good or bad, spiritual or non-spiritual.

> For e.g., Asuric Brahmins such as Bhrigu followed Vedic rites (as did> Vritra and Ravana) but Rakasasas did not follow the same. We> understand from texts that there is cultural difference between Asuras> (more civilized) and Raksasas, the Daityas often pointing to the kings> of these tribes. Yet, Asuric Brahmins were as opposed to Indra as were> Raksasas.<As soon as "Asura" acquires an ethnic connotation in the late-Rg-Vedic period, it refers to Iranians, Ahura-worshippers. Later, like "Yavana" and "Mleccha", it loses its specific ethnic meaning and comes to mean "foreigners" or "barbarians" in general. Of course, the first big job will now be to make you understand this chronological difference: the word did not have the same meaning at every point in history. Asura-priests, if meaning post-Sudas and esp. post-Rjashva Iranians, would be not merely without Indra, as many non-Paurava and non-IE peoples would have been, but even anti-Indra. The Zoroastrians rejected Indra, threw him out of their pantheon at one point and turned him into a devil.

> On the other hand, the historical times saw "Aryans" such as> Buddha rejecting Vedic Rituals.<Like all Hindus on this list, the Buddha probably attributed to the Vedas his own beliefs. He often speaks of the "true Brahmin" contrasting him with the Brahmins he encountered, apparently positing as the "true Brahmin"'s doctrinal basis a "true Veda" different from the so-called Vedic traditions of his own age. Therefore he could reject the "Vedic" rituals he saw around him, of which he, hazily but correctly, surmised they were something different from what the idealized original Vedas must have meant. If we moderns place ourselves in his position, we would say that at any rate, the Buddha was right to reject rituals, even true and original Vedic rituals, because the latter's purpose was wholly different from his own. The Vedic rituals were not "spiritual", they were quite worldly, serving to enhance people's worldly success, whereas the Buddha rejected the world and spurned worldly success as but a temporary sweetener keeping us attached to the predominantly miserable world. This is hard to explain to modern Hindus, who are in their doctrinal professings crypto-Buddhists, believing in a wheel of reincarnation tying us to this vale of tears from which me must escape,-- a wholly un-Vedic notion which they constantly try to impute to the Vedas.

> Btw, Ravana was addressed as Aryans a> couple of times by his wife Mandodari in Valmiki Ramayan. Thus, these> Asuras can not be denoted as Non Aryan or non Vedic. > "Thus" here presupposes that the terms concerned can only have one meaning. Again, as ever, a Hindutva lack of logic and/or a lack of historicity. If taken in its later ethical meaning, perhaps Ravana could be judged "Anarya". But in its Gita-age meaning of "Vedic", Ravana was an "Arya", a Brahmin of the Pulastya lineage practising Vedic rituals. And in its original PIE and Rg-Vedic meaning of "Paurava", whether Ravana was an "Arya" only depends on whether the Pulastya clan belonged to the Paurava tribe.

> Vipracitti is certainly Daitya and a vedic seer(as mentioned in Br Up)> . RV attests that mother of Vrtra is also Diti and she was felled by> Indra. Here, Vrtra was certainly not a son of Kasyapa whereas Indra was. > Look at this, 21-st-century people arguing history but using scirptural arguments. And this in a childlike manner, taking these Puranic names at face value, not understanding that, among other things, they may have symbolic meanings, personalizing astronomical or ethical or other ideas, or that two names may refer to the same character (Manu's father was Surya, but it was "also" Vivasvat), or that one name may refer to different people, in different ages or traditions of writing, or even simultaneously. When you read the very first PIE theorists, they are so funny because they try their hand at the embryonic historical and philological method yet also still thinking in Biblical terms, with the "Aryans" being descendents of Jafeth, son of Flood survivor Noah, the Asuras being the Assyrians etc. You people are still in that stage, mixing modern archaeology etc. with literalist reading of the Itihasa-Purana. It's really quite comical.Cheers,KE

> The basic definition, as I understand it, of Asuric Brahmins go to the> listing of Navabrahmas. We can broadly vivisect them into asuric> Brahmins (Bhrigu, Vasistha, Agastya, Pulastya, Pulaha etc) and non> Asuric Brahmins (Angiras, Narada etc). > > As always, Kasyapa is a general Janata group - perhaps created for> 'adjustment of ambiguity' (The word Kasyapa itself means a tortoise,> adjusting itself to two kinds of living environs,land and water) and> thus created space for both Devas and Asuras. >