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Showing posts from May 31, 2008


Book – Discovering the Vedas: Origins, Mantras, Rituals, Insights by Frits Staal

‘Discovering the Vedas: Origins, Mantras, Rituals, Insights’ by Frits Staal, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and South & Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California at Berkeley . About the book from Penguin flyer Staal extracts concrete information from the Oral Tradition and Archaeology about Vedic people and their language, what they thought and did, and where they went and when. He provides essential information about the Vedas and includes selections and translations. Staal sheds light on mantras and rituals, that contributed to what came to be known as Hinduism. Significant is a modern analysis of what we can learn from the Vedas today: the original forms of the Vedic sciences, as well as the perceptive wisdom of the composers of the Vedas. The author puts Vedic civilization in a global perspective through a wide-ranging comparison with other Indic philosophies and religions, primarily Buddhism For Staal, originally a logician, the voyage of discovering