A question to all, is it possible that most religions, at their very earliest phase, started off with very limited supernatural elements, then over time accumulated more supernatural concepts? The reason I ask this is because in the Buddhist world at the moment, there is a resurgence of interest in a book within the Nikayas ( in both the Pali Canon and Agama ) known as the Athakavagga ( Book of the Eight ). This book has been somewhat neglected and left to collect dust over the last thousand years. However over the last 80 years researchers from various fields have independently come to the conclusion that these series of poetries likely represent the earliest surviving portion of the Buddhist codex and almost certainly predates a large chunks of the Buddhist canon that we nowadays consider ancient and orthodox. The discovery in the 1980s and 1990s from Ghandara more or less seals this, with some historians quite convinced that the Athakavagga if not the oldest teaching can be ranked amongst the oldest. In fact there are some people who thinks that Athakavagga could have been written down long prior to all the other scriptures given the almost verbatim nature of this book between the surviving three early Buddhist codices plus it is a book with a commentary within the Nikaya ( other scriptures have no commentaries within scripture ). What is interesting is the Athakavagga is almost devoid of supernatural concepts. The book describes Nirvana in fact in a non rebirth sense, there is no sense that death results in an afterlife and there is no mention of the six worlds ( except an exultation of the Gods but this is like saying, Good God, not really talking about God but an exultation ). My question is do people here think that maybe most religions started off with very little supernatural elements and was mostly humanistic, before gathering more supernatural elements over time?
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 10:26:03 +0000
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