Tagged: Prajāpati
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Blanchard - Burning Yourself (2010)
1This paper proposes that the Buddhist teaching of Dependent Arising (paṭicca samuppāda) is structured as a polemic modeled on the Vedic fire rituals of the Buddha's time, particularly the Agnicayana, which were intended to create and perfect an eternal self (ātman) by re-enacting creation myths like that of Prajāpati. The author argues that the Buddha co-opted this familiar ritualistic framework to demonstrate how individuals, through their own habitual psychological "rituals"—such as clinging to feelings (vedanā), craving (taṇhā), and forming views (upādāna)—construct a false and impermanent sense of self. This constructed self, born from ignorance (avijjā), is what undergoes the cycle of "birth" (jāti) and "aging and death" (jarāmaraṇa), which is presented as a metonym for suffering (dukkha). By using this model, the Buddha refutes the Vedic worldview, showing that its methods, when understood as psychological processes, lead not to an eternal, blissful self but to the creation of a transient, suffering identity, a context that, once lost, made the teaching's structure obscure to later generations.
Jurewicz- Playing with Fire (2000)
2In her analysis, Joanna Jurewicz posits that the Buddhist law of dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) is a polemical reinterpretation of Vedic cosmogony, which shares a similar structure and even specific concepts but is stripped of its positive value by the Buddhist doctrine of no-self (anattā). The twelve links of the Buddhist chain are shown to parallel stages of Vedic creation, where concepts like *avidyā* (ignorance) and *saṃskāra* (volition) mirror the Creator's initial state and subsequent will, and later links like *nāmarūpa* (name-and-form) and the sense bases (*ṣaḍāyatana*) map onto the *ātman's* differentiation into the cognized world. The central Vedic metaphor of a creative, divine fire (Agni) is deliberately inverted, with its "thirst" to create becoming the destructive fire of craving (*tṛṣṇā*) and its need for fuel becoming clinging (*upādāna*). By systematically removing the *ātman* as the divine agent, the Buddha reframes the entire desirable Vedic creative process as a meaningless and absurd chain of events that inevitably culminates in suffering through becoming, birth, and death (*bhava, jāti, jarāmaraṇa*).
Bronkhorst, Johannes - Greater Magadha, Brill (2007)
3In *Greater Magadha*, Johannes Bronkhorst posits the existence of a distinct cultural sphere in early India, located east of the traditional Brahmanical heartland, which was the cradle of religious movements such as Buddhism, Jainism, and Ājīvikism. This culture was defined by a unique spiritual ideology centered on the belief in rebirth and karmic retribution, as well as by features like round funerary mounds (stūpas), a distinct medical tradition, and a cyclical conception of time. Bronkhorst argues that these concepts were foreign to the Vedic-Brahmanical culture to its west, which only gradually absorbed them over a long period of cultural interaction. This process is traced through Brahmanical texts that reveal varied reactions - hesitant acceptance and adaptation in the Upaniṣads and the Mahābhārata, long-term disregard by the Mīmāṃsā school, and outright rejection by the Cārvākas, whom he identifies as a Brahmanical school. A central part of the thesis involves a chronological re-evaluation of late-Vedic literature, which Bronkhorst, using evidence from grammarians like Pāṇini, argues is much later than traditionally held and was composed contemporaneously with this cultural amalgamation.