Greater Magadha, roughly the eastern part of the Gangetic plain of northern India, has so far been looked upon as deeply indebted to Brahmanical culture. Religions such as Buddhism and Jainism are thought of as derived, in one way or another, from Vedic religion. This belief is defective in various respects. The book argues for the importance and independence of Greater Magadha as a cultural area until a date close to the beginning of the Common Era. In order to correct the incorrect notions, two types of questions are dealt with: questions pertaining to cultural and religious dependencies, and questions relating to chronology. As a result a modified picture arises that also has a bearing on the further development of Indian culture.
JoHANNES BRONICEIORST Ph.D. (1979) University of Poona, doctorate (1980) University of Leiden, is Professor of Sanskrit and Indian studies at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) . He has published extensively on Indian thought in its various manifestations.
The sources for our knowledge of the culture of Greater Magadha before and beside Buddhism and Jainism are extremely limited. However, if we make full use of the sources at our disposal, we may be able to extract enough information from them to justify a number of conclusions.
These sources are primarily of two types: archaeological and literary. The archaeological evidence does not show a clear division between the Doab situated between the Ganges and the Jumna on the one hand, and Greater Magadha on the other, during the time of the Buddha, the Jina, and Patanijali. It does, however, show that such a distinction existed until the middle of the first millennium BCE. Until that time the Doab was characterized by what is called Painted Grey ware,' the area east of the confluence by Black and Red ware. Around the year 500 BCE both Were replaced by Northern Black Polished ware.2 From the literary evidence we learn that this common use of Northern Black Polished ware hid major differences in intellectual and spiritual culture between the two regions.
The literary sources that can be used to study the culture of Greater Magadha are primarily the canonical texts of the two religions that arose in that area, Buddhism and Jainism. The Vedic corpus can be used, too, as can some of the more recent Brahmanical texts that have survived, but to a lesser extent. The fact that much of our information comes in this way from religious texts, has the unavoidable consequence that our knowledge of the culture of Greater Magadha will be top-heavy: there will be much more information about the milieus from which Buddhism and Jainism arose than about other aspects of this culture. This is an element to be kept in mind in what follows. Attempts can, and will, be made to extract information from various sources that concern these other aspects, and it will become clear that Buddhism and Jainism and their ancestors and competitors do not exhaust the culture of Greater Magadha. The results will, however, be limited, and not always certain. Nevertheless, it will be our first task to analyze the canonical texts of Buddhism and Jainism, and discover the fundamental ideology underlying these two religions.
**Contents and Sample Pages**
Hindu (906)
Agriculture (121)
Ancient (1084)
Archaeology (766)
Architecture (550)
Art & Culture (906)
Biography (704)
Buddhist (522)
Cookery (169)
Emperor & Queen (532)
Islam (221)
Jainism (309)
Literary (842)
Mahatma Gandhi (369)
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