Dating Hindu texts

[Suraj]

I was inspired to start this thread after the discussion with Agnideva on Yoga Vasista. Agniveda says it is believed the Yoga Vasista was composed in the 6th century CE. Yet, this text is suppose to be the discourses between Lord Rama and the sage Vasishta, which is many many millenias before. Yet, of one reads it, it's reads as authentic and very detailed to have been fabricated.

How could the author(presumably anonymous?) have known what the discourses between Lord Rama and Sage Vasishta were. Was it passed down through oral communication?
Whether it was compiled in 6th Century CE or BCE, it was still before the time of Lord Rama, so the same questions hold.

This would be true for all Hindus text from the vedic and pre vedic period, such as the Vedas, Upanishads, Mahabharata, Ramayana, Bhagvad Gita. They were all compiled long after the events had happened, so how could they be recalled so vividly by just memory and oral traditions?

Even if I try and recall what happened last week, I have great difficulty. So how did these people who inscribed the knowledge of the Vedas recall stuff that happened thousands of years ago and how can I be sure that it's authentic?

As information is passed down through the ages, you would expect it to be become distorted and diluted greatly.

Is there something I am missing here? Is there a possibility that there were actually written records from the vedic time? Is there any other evidence that would support their authenticity.

 

[Agnideva]

Namaste Suraj,

Once again you’ve asked an excellent question. Unfortunately, I am not sure that I can answer it adequately because I myself am searching for these answers, but I will try .

What I can tell you is that a majority of Hindu texts are written as discourses. All the Agamas are discourses, many of the Upanishads are discourses, all the Gitas are discourses, the Puranas are all discourses, the epics are discourses. Many times there are discourses within discourses within discourses! Only the central portion of the Vedas and some sutras are probably free from discourse. When texts are written as discourses between two eminent personalities, it takes away the focus from the actual author and places more emphasis on the content of the text. Notice that those who are having the discourse are always well-known and already famous personalities: be it Sage Vasishtha and Lord Rama, or someone else.

How could the author (presumably anonymous?) have known what the discourses between Lord Rama and Sage Vasishta were. Was it passed down through oral communication?

There are three opinions on this subject:

1. The author of the text may have come to a realization of a discourse that happened long ago and wrote about it. Traditionally, this would be called a divine vision.

2. The author may be part of a long lineage that extends to remote antiquity, and the text represents the oral transmission of a discourse that happened long ago. This is quite likely, I believe, because Hinduism has always been an oral tradition passed down from master to disciple.

3. The author of a text wrote a magnificent piece of work, but to gain authenticity and official recognition attributed it to an already well-known personality.

Yet, this text is suppose to be the discourses between Lord Rama and the sage Vasishta, which is many many millenias before. Yet, of one reads it, it's reads as authentic and very detailed to have been fabricated.

The way I see it, it doesn’t matter whether Sage Vasistha and Lord Rama actually had this dialog. What’s more important is what we can take and learn from it. Traditionally, of course, it is believed that this dialog was actually had between Lord Rama and Sage Vasistha. Otherwise, one may ask, how can some author come up with 32,000 verses of the Yoga Vasistha?

Whether it was compiled in 6th Century CE or BCE ... the same questions hold.

Exactly!

What I find really interesting and significant is that most authors of ancient Hindu texts never bothered to leave their names or dates. It would be a safe assumption I think to say that the teaching was more important to them than self-glory or the date. Hinduism, as you know, is not a religion based on history. This is not to say there is no history; there’s plenty of history. What I mean is that it is not based on some historical event or personality, but rather on a body of teaching that represents the thought of many many sages, saints, siddhas, etc. We consider the truth realized by these great beings to be of an eternal sort, and hence called it Sanatana Dharma. Another important point about Sanatana Dharma is that although it is full of scriptures, it is not the scripture that is the most important ultimately. Hinduism puts personal experience above the written word. So in that sense also it matters little who wrote a text, when, why, and how.

Having said that, I still think, from a personal interest and academic perspective, that it is important to know when a text was written, and if possible by whom.

In the mean time, I would be most grateful, if you could give me information on the history of the Yoga Vasisthia and why it is believed to be have been composed in 6th CE.

I don’t know much about the Yoga Vasistha or its history to be honest. I do know that is a very important text within Advaita Vedanta and Yoga schools, and is the largest known text about Yoga. It also contains a very important Gita of its own called the Siddha Gita. The Siddha Gita was favored by Sri Ramana Maharishi.


There are various opinions on the date of the Yoga Vasistha, like everything else in Hinduism . Some believe it is a 9th century text, other say 5th or 6th century. In the Hindu timeline published by Hinduism Today in the 1990s (http://ompage.net/Text/hindutimeline.htm), the Yoga Vasistha is dated circa 750 CE. Most scholars agree that the Yoga Vasistha contains Advaita Vedanta teaching from pre-Shankaran, but post-Buddhist, times. Here are two sites that speak of the date of Yoga Vasistha:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12571369&dopt=Abstract
http://www.sunyaprajna.com/Advaita/MindVasistha.html

They were all compiled long after the events had happened, so how could they be recalled so vividly by just memory and oral traditions?

Again, we just don’t know, or at least I most certainly don’t .

The history of the Ramayana and Mahabharata has been fairly well researched. I’ve read that the first and last chapters of the Ramayana are interpolations to Sage Valmiki’s original work. As for the Mahabharata, it appears it was written in three stages. The first text known as Jaya was 8800 verses long and is attributed to Sage Vyasa (~400 BCE). The second version was called Jaya Bharata and contained 20000-30000 verses. The final version called Mahabharata of 100000 verses, as we know it today, came to be around the 4th century CE. So, the epics certainly were works in progress. The same goes for the Puranas, which were written between 300-1500 CE or so.

As information is passed down through the ages, you would expect it to be become distorted and diluted greatly.

Yes most certainly it can. Also, each person that passes down the information adds his own twist to it. This is how history becomes mythology.

Is there something I am missing here? Is there a possibility that there were actually written records from the vedic time? Is there any other evidence that would support their authenticity.

Yes, the possibility is most certainly there that written records did exist. Just because records did not survive, does not mean that records were not there. The earliest manuscripts of the Vedas available today, I believe, are from the 8th century CE, so does that mean that Vedas did not exist before then? Of course not!

To answer your overall question as to how Hindu scriptures are dated, I have heard of several ways in which this is done, in the absence of internal dates. (1) Examine of the language and linguistics to assign it a period; (2) date texts according to astronomical references within it; (3) look for mention or lack thereof of that text or its events/teachings among other texts whose dates are known; (4) look for references to technology or implements, whose invention or use has been assigned a date. Obviously, none of these methods are perfect.

OM Shanti,
A.