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Useless to argue with Christian and Islamic fears, about what Vedas are

Christianity and ISlam both fear hinduism so much that they will keep troubling you till eternity if you say something good about hinduism. So much so that on one hand they will try to say that Vedas are not for hindus only and on the other they will try to deteriorate hindu philosophy. As both Christianity and Islam have hardly anything significant to offer, they hate hindu philosophy so much that they want to tell hindus they are not hindus or that they are aryans who came from some other place. Who cares? It is in India that they created the whole stuff and become hindus or Sanatatan dharmi or whatever. It is in India that they created their sanskrit language. Is it so difficult to understand for these religion-biased people? Most of the hindu related topics on wiki-pedia are infested with such trolls and idiots.

The above unsigned comment was added by 24.6.237.22 via this edit: Buddhipriya 04:39, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

Vedic dating

There is a serious problem with the entire sections on Misplaced Pages on Hinduism or Indian History. Let me just focus on Hinduism for now.

The Vedas are arguably the oldest surviving scriptures that are still used. Most Indologists agree that an oral tradition existed long before some of them were written down only during the second century BCE. There has been religious scholarship on the Vedas for several thousand years, including commentaries contained in the Upanishads and later Sruti texts like the Brahmanas. Religious scholars like Shankaracharya (8th century AD) and Ramanujacharya (11th century AD) have even written commentaries (Bhashya) on these commentaries. All of these religious scholars rejected the need to date the Vedas as they were considered timeless.

However,for more than a hundred years, European colonial and Christian religious interests and related scholarship have attempted to ascribe a date for the Vedas, looking at them purely as Sanskrit literature viewed from a linguistic or Indo-European sense, and have created controversies based on speculative dates. These dates ignore millenia of religious scholarship on the Vedas and deprecate more recent archaeological, astronomical and population genetics evidence. Even the linguistic evidence is suspect because Sanskrit as a language was codified by the Grammarian Panini long after the advent of the Vedas. Further, the Vedas have been oral texts for a specific purpose; their precise meters and specified octave complexity are intended to deliver sound vibrations that convey meaning and context to persons in a meditative state, for assistance in realizing eternal truths. Considering that these are only religious texts, any attempt to date them outside of religious scholarship or the Indian cultural and historical context and related scholarship has no value, and therefore no date for the Vedas can be ascribed.

The above unsigned comment was added by User:Hulagu in this edit: Buddhipriya 01:16, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for expressing your point of view on these matters. You are quite right that there are many debates on the subject of dating. Please read Misplaced Pages:Verifiability which explains that content on Misplaced Pages must be based on citation to what would be considered WP:RS for purposes of the article. So a first step to resolving content disputes is often to agree upon what sources would be considered WP:RS. If there are any specific books that you would like to suggest be added to the mix, please give citation information for them here so other editors can comment on whether or not those sources seem like WP:RS or not. Removal of material that is already in the article and cited by WP:RS that have previously been considered acceptable can be construed as vandalism, so please don't remove such material in the future as you did in this deletion: Also note that edit wars are discouraged. Please take controversial material to the talk page. Buddhipriya 01:22, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

I object to the removal of sourced material in the following edit which cut WP:RS and replaced them with a reference that appears to be WP:FRINGE material : . A sample of the scholarship by S. Kalyanaraman on "Indo-European Linguistics (IEL), a belief system; reclaiming history of bharatiya languages" is available here: . Examination of the references used there shows a heavy use of self-published web sites and even Misplaced Pages articles as sources, which does not inspire confidence. Even Misplaced Pages does not allow the use of Misplaced Pages articles as WP:RS. I ask other editors for their opinion on this material, and I call for the restoration of the sourced material that was cut. Buddhipriya 04:11, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

Buddhipriya, I don't believe you examined the source properly, or you wouldn't make this statement. There are several dozen references from peer reviewed material and books, some of which are now noted on Hinduism notice board. The reference I put in was not as an original reference, since the Kalyanaraman piece was just a collection of these texts and references. I can send you the complete document by mail or if you will show me how to, attach it on Wiki for review. Also, sourced material from authors with proven bias on this subject like Michael Witzel and his like cannot be on Misplaced Pages.

I am sensing that I am wasting my time your like, since you seem pretty entrenched in your biased views and representation on these pages. I suspect these topics are going to require arbitration and appointment of neutral, unbiased administrators. Hulagu 01:55, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

S. Kalyanaraman promotes "Proto-vedic Continuity Theory", a theory the content of which has never been very clear. It has no acceptance at all by professional linguists as far as I am aware, but if you can find evidence that unbiassed linguists take this theory seriously, we should like to see it. Te fact that he footnotes some legitimate sources, does not make his theory legitimate. Anyone can add footnotes to whatever they want to say. Paul B 14:37, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

Use of standard References section

I have changed the layout of the References to comply with Misplaced Pages:Guide_to_layout, which specifies that the Reference section is a list of works actually cited in Notes. I think it is important that we raise the bar in terms of reference quality and citation methods for this article, and getting the critical apparatus set up per layout guidelines is a housekeeping step. Once the References section exists, works that are repeated cited ("op. cit") can be mentioned in short form with authorname and page number, relying on the References detail. For further information on this see: WP:CITE. Buddhipriya 17:34, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

It is good to see support for improving the reference system, but I do not like the Harvard referencing templates and would like to remove them. The templates are hard to use unless you are experienced with them, which makes maintenance of the article more difficult. In particular, the use of named reference to create separate reference tags for every page reference is very difficult to maintain. Buddhipriya 21:43, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

Sorry about that. Do as you please. JFD 21:54, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

I would suggest that we leave the Harvard tags that you have added in place, as they are fine, but that the named tags be removed. Generally it is good to use one system or another for citations, and once the article has standardized, it is good to discuss them on the talk page. But in this case we are trying to introduce more order where there was little before, and so any move toward a system is good to discuss with multiple editors. I feel strongly about the name tags, but it would be interesting to see if we can get more support for the Harvard method. Buddhipriya 21:58, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

We seem to be rushing so fast to restore each other's edits that we have a novel sort of edit conflict (one that I wish we should see more of) :) I think you should restore the Harvard templates that you added, as removal of the naming is the issue that I feel most strongly about. I suggest that you fall back to the last version you made, and then we can examine the naming tags as a separate pass. To prevent edit conflicts I will leave the article alone for a while so you can stabilize it as you think best. Buddhipriya 22:06, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

In the current version of the article, all sources listed under "References" use Template:Citation and the article itself is Harvard-referenced until the "Etymology" section. Have at it! JFD 22:14, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

I think it will be interesting to just leave things as you have set them up for now pending input from other editors. I am trying to warm up to the templates, but I admit I am concerned about maintenance of them. Technically, I think that the actual Harvard referencing system would display the citations in the article text directly, as opposed to using footnotes. That practice seems unpopular, and I do not support it. My practice has been to put the same information as a Harvard reference into an unnamed footnote, which gets the result, but avoids the problem that if you have multiple citations to the same named footnote, if you later change one of them, others may have collateral damage. That becomes a nightmare if you have an article with multiple editors, most of whom will not have a clue what citation system is going on. I have posted a comment on the talk page for the Harvard referencing to see if there is some workaround for the named references issue (on other articles where they have been used, it becomes rather complicated to make changes accurately, a problem which is mentioned from time to time on the talk page. There is no rush, so I would suggest that we not expand their use pending more input. If I can't see how to get around the named references, then I would urge that aspect be eliminated. Buddhipriya 04:20, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

I created two versions of the article: one with all Harvard referencing and one with no Harvard referencing. See which one you like better. JFD 13:18, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for this effort, which gives a very clear example of the difference. One minor comment about terminology is that "Harvard references" are defined as: "Under the Harvard referencing system, a book is cited in the text in parentheses, after the section, sentence, or paragraph for which the book was used as a source, using the surname of the author and the year of publication only, with the parentheses closing before the period, as in (Author 2005)." In other words, they are actually inline references rather than references which are implemented via raised superscripts. The ambiguity of the term seems to be that the templates to carry the information normally carries in a Harvard reference can also be used within a raised superscript (implemented in Misplaced Pages as a "ref" tag) which is what the demonstration does. The Harvard reference example you have done is very clear, and my concern is that since almost no editors on Misplaced Pages use this system, mainenance of them will be close to impossible. The other related issue is the use of named references, that is, a ref tag which has a name. The problem with maintenance of these is that since multiple citations in the article wind up being linked to one item, if any of them change, the potential exists to create errors in the others. Misplaced Pages there are few editors who take a holistic approach to articles, and therefore I have seen various problems with synchronization of named citations over time as multiple editors with limited insight into the overall articles and the referencing systems change things here and there with no concern for the linkages. For these reasons, I continue to prefer the use of non-named references. It appears that the example you have put together using the Harvard templates has no named references in it. Is that correct? If so, that part of the issue is off the table. It will be interesting to see if we can get other editors to express an opinion on this matter. Again, thank you so much for the effort you are putting in to improve the reference structure for the article. Buddhipriya 19:37, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

That's correct; the all-Harvard-referenced version contains no named ref tags. The all-Harvard version has the primary advantage of using the Harvard citation template (one click takes you to a full citation) and doesn't really require any more maintenance than unnamed ref tags without. It's not the end of the world if some references use Harvard citation templates and some don't; they won't interfere with each other. JFD 21:40, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

I'm going to switch over to the all-Harvard version. If maintenance becomes difficult, I will switch back. JFD 22:26, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

BIASED PRESENTATION OF MATERIAL ON HINDUISM AND INDIA ON WIKIPEDIA

Discussion moved to the Hinduism notice board.Bakaman 23:31, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

5 Vedas not 4 Vedas

There are various discussions about the veda being 5 and not 4.... The vedas are not talking about these.. Should we consider added details about those... these are mentioned by Verses of Vemana. There are many discussions about this.. http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/vov/vov11.htm

There is a mention about Pranav Veda.. any details ???

I found the narration about the 5 (five) Vedas in the following book

• Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Poona
• By Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute
• Published 1928
• The Institute Original from the University of California

"Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute" This is the place in Pune where all the ancient copies of the Vedas are kept. The topic needs to be importantly mentioned. BalanceRestored 09:46, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Click to check the vedic verses and the clear citation of the 5 vedas http://books.google.com/books?id=oeMvAAAAIAAJ&q=%22five+vedas%22&dq=%22five+vedas%22&pgis=1 BalanceRestored 10:18, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

BalanceRestored, please consult the many highly regarded books published on the Vedas (see for example this list of references), and don't base your edits to this well-developed article based on two line snippets on google books.
For your information, "Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute" is a journal publication of Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, and any reference to it will require citation of the exact article title along with the authors. Also it is highly recommended incumbent that one read (and understand) any academic article completely and in its correct context before adding content from it. 19:13, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Your explanation is insufficient and vague, kindly quote with page numbers of the reference books you have read actually and with the exact narration. Also quote from where the narrations are taken. There are different versions about the numbers 5 or 4, and we will need to take the appropriate one only. Misplaced Pages is not a place for common belief I suppose. It is an encyclopedia. Also do you have any explanation about the material mentioned by Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute. Again it is very apparent from your explanation that you have not read your self the reference books. Also you have not signed the above explanation. BalanceRestored 05:37, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

See: Merriam Webster Dictionary

Now can you provide the title and authors for the Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute reference you cited ? Abecedare 05:44, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

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