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SYMBOLISM IN THE VEDAS AND ITS CONCEPTUALISATION BY KAREL WERNER University of Durham, England Indian tradition, not surprisingly, claims supramundane origin for its holy scriptures, the Vedas. This view has been duly noted by Western scholars, but it has never been given serious consideration. In fact, it has becn tacitly dismissed by them and the Vedas have been interpreted mostly from a positivistic standpoint and characterized as a primitive or archaic stage in the development of Indian religious thought. Recent advances in the discipline known as History of Religions (sometimes also called "religious science", in German Reli- gionswissenschaft) make such an approach obsolete. Dismissing or ignoring a claim within a religious tradition, like the one made for the Vedas, reveals an implicit conviction of the superiority of the position adopted by the interpreter. Surely, it must be a part of the task of scholarship to interpret, within its conceptual framework, even such a claim in a meaningful way. In India this claim is of course made in the usual religious way: the Vedas are believed to be the product of direct divine revelation. And on the surface it appears, as L. Renou argued 1), that this revelation has
Numen – Brill
Published: Jan 1, 1977
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