Skandha 1 - Yajur Veda Australasia - Resources

18 Cosmic History versus Modern World HistoryIt is with this Pauranika view of Cosmic History of cyclic development, that the modernconceptions of world history based on a linear conception comes into confrontation. Witharchaeology as its principal means of information, it is said on the basis of stray pieces ofevidence elaborated by imagination and guesswork that the human species (Homo sapiens)must have existed as socially significant beings, at least for some thirty thousand yearsagainst a long background of a thousand million years of progressive evolution from thelowest forms of life. From the evidence of stone, bone and metallic implements, and fromspecimens of pottery, cave dwellings, rock and bone carvings, etc., it is inferred that manmust have passed through various stages of civilisation from the stone age to the metal ageduring this long period of more than thirty thousand years. It is only by about six or seventhousand years back that we get relics of anything like civilisation from the findings inEgypt and Assyria. The Purāṇas would, however, trace human civilisation to two billionyears back when Svāyambhuva Manu ruled.Based on the cyclic conception of time, the Puranic history is thus of much wider scopethan the modern conceptions of it. Human history is a small segment of Cosmic History forthe Purāṇas. Besides, the total view of time and the place of man in it varies very much inboth the views. The current notion of history is based on the linear conception of timewhereas the Puranic conception of time, as already stated, is cyclic. This has already beendiscussed in the theory of Kalpas and Yugas, one of the implications of the Yuga theorybeing that it totally destroys the modern notion that what comes earlier is necessarilyprimitive, and that what comes later is an advancement, an evolution. Starting from theperfect age of Krita, degradation reaches its nadir in Kali Yuga, according to the Puranas.Then by the action of the Divine Incarnation, there is again an upward trend, and KritaYuga begins. This is quite unlike the modern conception of evolution in which fromprimitive animal-like condition man has grown to the modern civilised state. Through theevidence of archaeology, modern savants think that they are able to unravel the gradualdevelopment of man for the past thirty thousand years and of human society for the past tenthousand years. Undoubtedly much of imagination and guesswork have gone into theinterpretation of the evidence supplied by archaeology.In the Puranic conception of history there is no attempt to base its theory on proofs of thekind that modern historians have in view. The accounts contained in them are traditionalwritings, without any clear and non-controversial ideas of their authorship, age andhistorical context. They have come down to us from a distant past. Modern historians donot attach historical value to them, though some would find considerable human historyreflected in them. There are some scholars today who try to make history of Puranicaccounts and find fault with modern historians for not taking the Pauranika accounts ashistory. As the scope of Puranic history is cosmic, and as it is not based on the kind ofproofs demanded by modern historians, the narratives of the Purāṇas cannot be broughtinto the modern scheme of history. But this does not in anyway mitigate their relevancy.The modern historians have to say about man only from six or seven thousand years agowhen they find traces of Egyptian and Assyrian civilisations. Chronology, as Wells says,begins only from about 800 B.C., after the establishment of the era of the first Olympiad(776 B.C.) and the founding of Rome (753 B.C.). What we have got before that period aresome fossils, some implements of stone and metals, and other forms of relics, and on thisthe human history earlier to the past six thousand years have been fabricated by guesswork.It is only of a truncated human history based on a linear conception of time, without anyidea of when and where the line started, and what was before that beginning, and where itleads us to. There is nothing more thoughtless than to be satisfied completely with it in