Asian Civilizations Review (Extra Credit Quiz)

• Gautama Buddha (India's religious leader, born 563 B.C.) and Confucius (China's philosopher, born 551 B.C.) are two men whose influence upon Asian life has endured strong for over 2,500 years; the fact that they lived around the same time is considered one of history's major coincidences.
• During this period, many other things were happening, for example:
• The prophet Ezequiel was setting the bases of monotheism for the Jews.
• Reforms which would lead to the Golden Age were being made in Athens.
• Romulus and Remus were beginning the village which would later be Rome.
• Buddha and Confucius' influences have caused Indian and Chinese civilizations to be more consistent than Western civilization.
• Buddhism and Hinduism are enduring influences in India.
• People that come from India are Indians, those who practice Hinduism are Hindus.
• Confucianism is an enduring influence in China.
• The Indian subcontinent was overrun by Aryans (Indo-European invaders from the north) beginning around 1500 B.C.
• City states were ruled by rajahs (minor kings).
• For hundreds of years, there was peace.
• The caste system began as rules to prevent intermarriage between Aryans and the people they had conquered; even though it brought order to Indian society, people of lower Varnas (castes, groups) were hopeless because they couldn't rise a level, this harmed society.  The 5 Varnas (groups) into which Indian society can be broken down is:
• Brahmins: the highest caste, scholars and priests
• Kshatriya: warriors, rulers, and landlords; eventually surpassed the Brahmins
• Vaisya: merchants
• Sudra: manual laborers
• Pariahs (or Untouchables): Weren't even considered a caste; it was thought touching them made you impure and their shadow could contaminate you.
• As society became more complex, eventually, some 3,000 hereditary castes developed.
• Each had a fixed social position.
• Each had rules about eating, marriage, labor and worship.
• People could not eat or drink with a lower caste person.
• People could only work at those occupations allowed for their caste.
• Life's unclean tasks, such as cleaning latrines and digging graves, fall to those born into one of the hundreds of Untouchable castes.  They face a lifetime of discrimination and brutality, prejudice that endured even though Untouchability is officially banned by the Indian constitution.
• In the presentation, we see a picture of members of the Untouchable Dhobi caste beating the impurities out of clothes on the banks of the Yamuna River in Delhi.
• Technically discrimination regarding caste status isn't allowed in modern India; however, the remains of the system can be seen in the way Indians move through and interact with their society.
• Many people of lower caste face legal barriers and difficulty when they try to enter Indian politics.
• The definition of discrimination by law is narrower than that of the dictionary.
• Hinduism is the religion of the majority of people in India and Nepal; it also exists significantly outside the subcontinent, amassing over 900 million followers throughout the world.
• Hindus acknowledge that God is the supreme, universal soul and Brahman is the universe and everything in it.
• It's a pantheistic religion: It equates God with the universe.
• The religion is populated with innumerable gods and goddesses, allowing individuals to create an infinite number of ways to worship based on family tradition, community and regional practices, and other considerations.
• Hindus consider themselves monotheistic since all the gods are aspects of the one true god.
• They believe individual souls (atman) are immortal; they can't be created nor destroyed.  Hindus believe in reincarnation and that actions of a soul while residing in a body determine its next life.
• The process of the movement of the atman from one body to another is known as transmigration.
• The kind of body the soul inhabits next is determined by karma (actions accumulated in previous lives).
• Moksha is liberation: the soul's release from the cycle of death and rebirth.  It occurs when the soul unites with Brahman by realizing its true nature (several paths can lead to this realization and unity: the path of duty, the path of knowledge, and the path of devotion, which is an unconditional surrender to God).
• The Hindu Trinity is made up of Brahma, the Creator; Vishnu, the Preserver; and Shiva, the Destroyer.
• Brahma is the first member of the Hindu Trinity, known as "the Creator" because he periodically creates everything in the universe.
• The word periodically refers to the Hindu belief that time is cyclical; everything in the universe (except Brahman and certain Hindy scriptures) is created, maintained for a certain amount of time, and then destroyed in order to be renewed in ideal form again.
• Vishnu maintains the order and harmony of the universe (preserves it), which is periodically created by Brahma and periodically destroyed by Shiva to prepare for the next creation.
• Shiva is responsible for destroying the universe in order to prepare for its renewal at the end of each cycle of time; his destructive power is regenerative (it's the necessary step that makes renewal possible).
• Lord Ganapati, also known as Ganesha, is Shiva's first son.  He has an elephant head and occupies a very special place in Hindus' hearts because he is considered the Remover of Obstacles.  Most Hindu homes have a picture or statue of him, and some small replicas of him may be seen in cars.