Does there exist anywhere on SuttaCentral an essay or the like that lists and characterizes the maze of terms / ideas like:
Vedas / Vedic religion / Vedism
Upanishads
Brahmanism
Brahminism
Brahma
Brahman
Brahmin
etc.
And the interrelationships among these – the “big picture”, so to speak?
I’ve felt a need for something like this, partly stemming from the discussion in the recent thread:
Rebirth & reincarnation in the Brahman Vedas](Rebirth & reincarnation in the Brahman Vedas), but don’t want to divert that thread.
An often cited classic which gives a big picture is Witzel & Jamison “Vedic Hinduism”. If you don’t know it yet, find it here:
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/VedicHinduism.htm
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It’s a good paper but it would be preferable to get the pdf version at Academia as the diacritics come out better.
https://www.academia.edu/18428665/Vedic_Hinduism
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Gabriel & Dhammanando Thanks for the links.
The copy from Academia.edu indeed shows the fonts better, and has footnotes, which I prefer, rather than end-notes as in the other version.
BUT when copy-pasting text from the Academia copy into my notes, the editor (OpenOffice word processor) crashes, e.g. on the words “s’ikSâ” and “jyotiSa” (on page 15 in the Academia copy; the quoted spellings here copied from the Harvard copy), specifically the “s” with a dot beneath (which shows up in the other copy as "S”) – and this letter just happens to appear in the word ‘Upanishads’, so I’ve got to pay attention when copying text. Weird.
So having both around is useful – the one for reading, the other for copying extracts.
