Wednesday, September 23, 2009

"Aryans" of Asia: Kalash, Buddhist History


Blonde Kalash girls, left by Aryan invaders? (stormfront.org; indiamike.com)


Kalash girls [imranthetrekker (chitralguy)/flickr], women celebrating milk festival (BBC).

(WQ) Aryan has come to mean spiritually "worthy" or "noble" in Buddhism. But in ancient India it referred to widespread legends of northern invaders who brought their culture and Vedic religion to the Indus Valley with superior technology that seems to have come out of the blue. Alexander the Great, the Greeks, the Arabs, and others before them came in as maurading waves, plundering and occupying the fertile Punjab and the Gangetic plains. Eventually, Buddhism was wiped out. But originally Buddhism had some of its strongest support in modern day Afghanistan.



In numerous sutras the Buddha refers to himself as being part of the Solar race, a mythical lineage tracing itself back to Surya (the Sun God, who sent his emissary Manu "the law-giver"), who figures so powerfully in ancient Egyptian and modern Abrahamic traditions (see smritis). All of this is part of ancient pre-Buddhist Indian lore. The swastika -- an ancient and venerable Vedic, Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist symbol -- represents the sun. The Nazis appropriated the mythology and incorporated it into their propaganda to serve very unskillful political ambitions of world domination.




The Buddha, his son Rahula, and Ananda were all said to be potential "world monarchs," who bore the marks of great men (lakkhana). A world monarch is a righteous king who could rule not the planet, if one reads carefully, but the entire known world, that is, the continent extending in all directions, bounded by the sea. If China and Mongolia were known, it would include all of Asia, near east and far east. Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophists had brought these ancient legends back to the West. They were known throughout Siberia, India, and other parts of Asia, which at one time included the cradle of Western civilization, ancient Greece.

The Taliban brought Afghanistan's forgotten history into sharp relief by attempting to obliterate the largest standing Buddha figure in the world. Ancient Chinese historians had already documented how well establish the Afghani Sangha was, how numerous their buildings, how grand their statuary. At that time, the area was "India." The borders have changed, as has the dominant religion. Zorastrianism, Christianity, and Islam have all usurped legends and locations of great spiritual significance.



History and geography have shifted east to Nepal and Southeast Asia, where Buddhism continues to be the dominant religion or, as it is often called, "the light of Asia." But according to historian and independent scholar Ranajit Pal, the widespread belief that the Buddha was born in Nepal is clearly mistaken, the result of historical fabrications and forgeries.

Are they the original Aryans? Descended from Alexander the Great, strange tribes of white people reside in far northern Pakistan, formerly India, near Kashmir. They have definite Caucasian features, and their culture and religious practices are distinct from Islamic neighbors on all sides. They are the (Nordic-appearing) Kalash.



Gautama Buddha and Nepal

Text: Ranajit Pal

"Buddhism literally throbs with the history and geography of India. The archaeological finds from Sanchi, Ajanta, Bharhut, Amaravati, Mathura, and the Gandhara area (now in Pakistan and Afghanistan) firmly link India with the rise of Buddhism....there is much more to the history of early Buddhism than meets the eye. In fact, Buddhist history is a strange mix of facts and fiction that baffles the discerning reader.

"Historians such as H. C. Raychaudhuri and R. Thapar boldly affirm that Gautama belonged to the Nepal area, but sadly there is no firm archaeological basis at all for this conjecture. Early India [known as Bharat then Jambudvipa] was far wider than British India, and it is in this 'India' that Buddhism was born.

"Nepal is a beautiful country, but a careful study reveals that Gautama of Nepal is a nauseating fraud. Absolutely nothing in the literature, art, history, or archaeology of early Nepal has the faintest hint of Buddhism. The British researcher T. A. Phelps has exposed the widespread forgeries of...Dr. A. Führer, who moved pillars and other relics and produced fake inscriptions to locate Gautama's birthplace in Nepal. Gotama was a prince but after he was abandoned in the wilderness of the Terai by Führer, his history went to pieces. C. Humphreys points to the stark archaeological scenario in Nepal...

"The renowned Belgian scholar E. Conze also flatly dismisses the fanciful text-based accounts: 'To the modern historian, Buddhism is a phenomenon which must exasperate him at every point and we can only say in extenuation that this religion was not founded for the benefit of the historians. Not only is there an almost complete absence of hard facts about its history in India; not only is the date, authorship and geographical provenance of the overwhelming majority of the documents almost entirely unknown...' "


Was Tibet a theocratic Shangri-La with a god-king? Or was it an Aryan stronghold destroyed by Communist China? This National Geographic documentary explores Tibet in the popular imagination and explores other views, such as its relationship to Nazi Germany, using archival footage.

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