Avestan
Avestan known as Zend, refers to two languages: Old Avestan and Younger Avestan. The languages are known only from their use as the language of Zoroastrian scripture, from which they derive their name. Both are early Iranian languages, a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages within the Indo-European family, its immediate ancestor was the Proto-Iranian language, a sister language to the Proto-Indo-Aryan language, with both having developed from the earlier Proto-Indo-Iranian. As such, Old Avestan is quite close in grammar and lexicon with Vedic Sanskrit, the oldest preserved Indo-Aryan language; the Avestan text corpus was composed in ancient Arachosia, Aria and Margiana, corresponding to the entirety of present-day Afghanistan, parts of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The Yaz culture of Bactria-Margiana has been regarded as a archaeological reflection of the early "Eastern Iranian" culture described in the Avesta. Avestan's status as a sacred language has ensured its continuing use for new compositions long after the language ceased to be a living language.
"Avestan, associated with northeastern Iran, Old Persian, which belongs to the southwest, together constitute what is called Old Iranian." Scholars traditionally classify Iranian languages as "old", "middle" and "new" according to their age, as "eastern" or "western" according to geography, within this framework Avestan is classified as Eastern Old Iranian. But the east-west distinction is of limited meaning for Avestan, as the linguistic developments that distinguish Eastern from Western Iranian had not yet occurred. Avestan does not display some typical Western Iranian innovations visible in Old Persian, so in this sense, "eastern" only means "non-western". Old Avestan is related to Old Persian and agrees morphologically with Vedic Sanskrit; the old ancestor dialect of Pashto was close to the language of the Gathas. The Avestan language is attested in two forms, known as "Old Avestan" and "Younger Avestan". Younger Avestan did not evolve from Old Avestan; every Avestan text, regardless of whether composed in Old or Younger Avestan, underwent several transformations.
Karl Hoffmann traced the following stages for Avestan. In chronological order: The natural language of the composers of the Gathas, the Yasna Haptanghaiti, the four sacred prayers. Changes precipitated by slow chanting Changes to Old Avestan due to transmission by native speakers of Younger Avestan The natural language of the scribes who wrote grammatically correct Younger Avestan texts Deliberate changes introduced through "standardization" Changes introduced by transfer to regions where Avestan was not spoken Adaptions/translations of portions of texts from other regions Composition of ungrammatical late Avestan texts Phonetic notation of the Avestan texts in the Sasanian archetype Post-Sasanian deterioration of the written transmission due to incorrect pronunciation Errors and corruptions introduced during copyingMany phonetic features cannot be ascribed with certainty to a particular stage since there may be more than one possibility; every phonetic form that can be ascribed to the Sasanian archetype on the basis of critical assessment of the manuscript evidence must have gone through the stages mentioned above so that "Old Avestan" and "Young Avestan" mean no more than "Old Avestan and Young Avestan of the Sasanian period."
The script used for writing Avestan developed during the 3rd or 4th century AD. By the language had been extinct for many centuries, remained in use only as a liturgical language of the Avesta canon; as is still the case today, the liturgies were recited by rote. The script devised to render Avestan was natively known as Din dabireh "religion writing", it is written right-to-left. Among the 53 characters are about 30 letters that are – through the addition of various loops and flourishes – variations of the 13 graphemes of the cursive Pahlavi script, known from the post-Sassanian texts of Zoroastrian tradition; these symbols, like those of all the Pahlavi scripts, are in turn based on Aramaic script symbols. Avestan incorporates several letters from other writing systems, most notably the vowels, which are derived from Greek minuscules. A few letters were free inventions, as were the symbols used for punctuation; the Avestan alphabet has one letter that has no corresponding sound in the Avestan language.
The Avestan script is alphabetic, the large number of letters suggests that its design was due to the need to render the orally recited texts with high phonetic precision. The correct enunciation of the liturgies was considered necessary for the prayers to be effective; the Zoroastrians of India, who represent one of the largest surviving Zoroastrian communities worldwide transcribe Avestan in Brahmi-based scripts. This is a recent development first seen in the ca. 12th century texts of Neryosang Dhaval and other Parsi Sanskritist theologians of that era, which are contemporary with the oldest surviving manuscripts in Avestan script. Today, Avestan is most typeset in the Gujarati script; some Avestan letters with no corresponding symbol are synthesized with additional diacritical marks, for example, the /z/ in zaraϑuštra is written with j with a dot below. Aves
Hittites
The Hittites were an Anatolian people who played an important role in establishing an empire centered on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia around 1600 BC. This empire reached its height during the mid-14th century BC under Suppiluliuma I, when it encompassed an area that included most of Anatolia as well as parts of the northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia. Between the 15th and 13th centuries BC, the Empire of Hattusa, conventionally called the Hittite Empire, came into conflict with the Egyptian Empire, Middle Assyrian Empire and the empire of the Mitanni for control of the Near East; the Assyrians emerged as the dominant power and annexed much of the Hittite empire, while the remainder was sacked by Phrygian newcomers to the region. After c. 1180 BC, during the Bronze Age collapse, the Hittites splintered into several independent "Neo-Hittite" city-states, some of which survived until the 8th century BC before succumbing to the Neo-Assyrian Empire. The Hittite language was a distinct member of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family, along with the related Luwian language, is the oldest attested Indo-European language.
Hittites referred to their native language as nešili "in the language of Nesa" but called their native land as Kingdom of Hattusa. The conventional name "Hittites" is due to their initial identification with the Biblical Hittites in 19th century archaeology. Despite their use of the name Hattusa for their state, the Hittites should be distinguished from the Hattians, an earlier people who inhabited the region of Hattusa and spoke an unrelated language known as Hattic; the history of the Hittite civilization is known from cuneiform texts found in the area of their kingdom, from diplomatic and commercial correspondence found in various archives in Assyria, Babylonia and the Middle East, the decipherment of, a key event in the history of Indo-European linguistics. The Hittite military made successful use of chariots, although belonging to the Bronze Age, the Hittites were the forerunners of the Iron Age, developing the manufacture of iron artifacts from as early as the 18th century BC; the Hittites were the first of the Indo-European people to make use of iron.
Due to the widespread availability of iron ore, this allowed them to create weapons that were much stronger and cheaper. The Hittite empire fell victim to the Bronze Age Collapse around the beginning of the 12th century BC. Ethnic Hittite dynasties survived in small kingdoms scattered around modern Syria and Israel. Lacking a unifying continuity, their descendants are scattered and have merged into the modern populations of the Levant and Mesopotamia. During the 1920s, interest in the Hittites increased with the founding of the modern Republic of Turkey and attracted the attention of Turkish archaeologists such as Halet Çambel and Tahsin Özgüç. During this period, the new field of Hittitology influenced the naming of institutions, such as the state-owned Etibank, the foundation of the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara, located 200 kilometers west of the Hittite capital and housing the most comprehensive exhibition of Hittite art and artifacts in the world. Before the archeological discoveries that revealed the Hittite civilization, the only source of information about the Hittites had been the Old Testament.
Francis William Newman expressed the critical view, common in the early 19th century, that, "no Hittite king could have compared in power to the King of Judah...". As the discoveries in the second half of the 19th century revealed the scale of the Hittite kingdom, Archibald Sayce asserted that, rather than being compared to Judah, the Anatolian civilization " worthy of comparison to the divided Kingdom of Egypt", was "infinitely more powerful than that of Judah". Sayce and other scholars noted that Judah and the Hittites were never enemies in the Hebrew texts. Uriah the Hittite was a captain in King David's army and counted as one of his "mighty men" in 1 Chronicles 11. French scholar Charles Texier found the first Hittite ruins in 1834 but did not identify them as Hittite; the first archaeological evidence for the Hittites appeared in tablets found at the karum of Kanesh, containing records of trade between Assyrian merchants and a certain "land of Hatti". Some names in the tablets were neither Hattic nor Assyrian, but Indo-European.
The script on a monument at Boğazkale by a "People of Hattusas" discovered by William Wright in 1884 was found to match peculiar hieroglyphic scripts from Aleppo and Hama in Northern Syria. In 1887, excavations at Amarna in Egypt uncovered the diplomatic correspondence of Pharaoh Amenhotep III and his son, Akhenaten. Two of the letters from a "kingdom of Kheta"—apparently located in the same general region as the Mesopotamian references to "land of Hatti"—were written in standard Akkadian cuneiform, but in an unknown language. Shortly after this, Sayce proposed that Hatti or Khatti in Anatolia was identical with the "kingdom of Kheta" mentioned in these Egyptian texts, as well as with the biblical Hittites. Others, such as Max Müller, agreed that Khatti was Kheta, but proposed connecting it with Biblical Kittim rather than with the Biblical Hittites. Sayce's identification came to be accepted over the course of the early 20th century.
Rigveda
The Rigveda is an ancient Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns along with associated commentaries on liturgy and mystical exegesis. It is one of the four sacred canonical texts of Hinduism known as the Vedas; the core text, known as the Rigveda Samhita, is a collection of 1,028 hymns in about 10,600 verses, organized into ten books. In the eight books that were composed the earliest, the hymns are praise of specific deities; the younger books in part deal with philosophical or speculative questions, with the virtue of dāna in society and with other metaphysical issues in their hymns. The oldest layers of the Rigveda Samhita are among the oldest extant texts in any Indo-European language of similar age as certain Hittite texts. Philological and linguistic evidence indicates that the bulk of the Rigveda Samhita was composed in the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent, most between c. 1500 and 1200 BC, although a wider approximation of c. 1700–1100 BC has been given. The initial codification of the Rigveda took place during the early Kuru kingdom.
Some of its verses continue to be recited during Hindu rites of passage celebrations and prayers, making it the world's oldest religious text in continued use. The associated material has been preserved from two shakhas or "schools", known as Śākalya and Bāṣkala; the school-specific commentaries are known as Brahmanas Aranyakas, Upanishads. The text maṇḍalas, of varying age and length; the text originates as oral literature, "books" may be a misleading term, the individual mandalas are, much rather, standalone collections of hymns that were intended to be memorized by the members of various groups of priests. This is true of the "family books", mandalas 2–7, which form the oldest part of the Rigveda and account for 38 per cent of the entire text, they are called "family books" because each of them is attributed to an individual rishi, was transmitted within the lineage of this rishi's family, or of his students. The hymns within each of the family books are arranged in collections each dealing with a particular deity: Agni comes first, Indra comes second, so on.
They are arranged by decreasing number of hymns within each section. Within each such collection, the hymns are arranged in descending order of the number of stanzas per hymn. If two hymns in the same collection have equal numbers of stanzas they are arranged so that the number of syllables in the metre are in descending order; the second to seventh mandalas have a uniform format. The eighth and ninth mandalas, comprising hymns of mixed age, account for 9 %, respectively; the ninth mandala is dedicated to Soma and the Soma ritual. The hymns in the ninth mandala are arranged by their length; the first and the tenth mandalas are the youngest. Some of the hymns in mandalas 8, 1 and 10 may still belong to an earlier period and may be as old as the material in the family books; the first mandala has a unique arrangement not found in the other nine mandalas. The first 84 hymns of the tenth mandala have a structure different than the remaining hymns in it; each mandala consists of sūktas intended for various rituals.
The sūktas in turn consist of individual stanzas called ṛc, which are further analysed into units of verse called pada. The meters most used in the ṛcas are the gayatri, anushtubh and jagati; the trishtubh meter and gayatri meter dominate in the Rigveda. For pedagogical convenience, each mandala is divided into equal sections of several sūktas, called anuvāka, which modern publishers omit. Another scheme divides the entire text over the 10 mandalas into adhyāya and varga; some publishers give both classifications in a single edition. The most common numbering scheme is by book and stanza. E.g. the first verse is in three times eight syllables: 1.1.1a agním ī́ḷe puróhitaṃ 1b yajñásya deváṃ ṛtvíjam 1c hótāraṃ ratna-dhā́tamam "Agni I invoke, the house-priest / the god, minister of sacrifice / the presiding priest, bestower of wealth." Tradition associates a rishi with each ṛc of the Rigveda. Most sūktas are attributed to single composers; the "family books" are so-called. In all, 10 families of rishis account for more than 95 per cent of the ṛcs.
The original text is close to but not identical to the extant Samhitapatha, but metrical and other observations allow reconstruction of the original text from the extant one, as printed in the Harvard Oriental Series, vol. 50. The surviving form of the Rigveda is based on an early Iron Age collection that established the core'family books' and a redaction, co
Hurrians
The Hurrians were a people of the Bronze Age Near East. They spoke a Hurro-Urartian language lived in Anatolia and Northern Mesopotamia; the largest and most influential Hurrian nation was the kingdom of Mitanni, the Mitanni being Indo-Iranian speakers who formed a ruling class over the Hurrians. The population of the Indo-European-speaking Hittite Empire in Anatolia included a large population of Hurrians, there is significant Hurrian influence in Hittite mythology. By the Early Iron Age, the Hurrians had been assimilated with other peoples, their remnants were subdued by a related people. According to a hypothesis by I. M. Diakonoff and S. Starostin, the Hurrian and Urartian languages shared a common ancestor and were related to the Northeast Caucasian languages; the present-day Armenians are an amalgam of the Indo-European groups with the Hurrians and Urartians. The Hurrians spoke an ergative, agglutinative language conventionally called Hurrian, unrelated to neighbouring Semitic or Indo-European languages, may have been a language isolate.
The Iron Age Urartian language is related to or a direct descendant of Hurrian. Several notable Russian linguists, such as S. A. Starostin and V. V. Ivanov, have claimed that Hurrian and Hattic were related to the Northeast Caucasian languages. From the 21st century BCE to the late 18th century BCE, Assyria controlled colonies in Anatolia, the Hurrians, like the Hattians or Lullubis, adopted the Assyrian Akkadian cuneiform script for their own language about 2000 BCE. Texts in the Hurrian language in cuneiform have been found at Hattusa, Ugarit, as well as in one of the longest of the Amarna letters, written by King Tushratta of Mitanni to Pharaoh Amenhotep III, it was the only long Hurrian text known until a multi-tablet collection of literature in Hurrian with a Hittite translation was discovered at Hattusa in 1983. Hurrian names occur sporadically in northwestern Mesopotamia and the area of Kirkuk in modern Iraq by the Middle Bronze Age, their presence was attested at Nuzi and other sites.
They infiltrated and occupied a broad arc of fertile farmland stretching from the Khabur River valley in the west to the foothills of the Zagros Mountains in the east. I. J. Gelb and E. A. Speiser believed East Semitic speaking Assyrians/Subarians had been the linguistic and ethnic substratum of northern Mesopotamia since earliest times, while Hurrians were late arrivals; the Khabur River valley became the heart of the Hurrian lands for a millennium. The first known Hurrian kingdom emerged around the city of Urkesh during the third millennium BCE. There is evidence that they were allied with the east Semitic Akkadian Empire of Mesopotamia, indicating they had a firm hold on the area by the reign of Naram-Sin of Akkad; this region hosted other rich cultures. The city-state of Urkesh had some powerful neighbors. At some point in the early second millennium BCE, the Northwest Semitic speaking Amorite kingdom of Mari to the south subdued Urkesh and made it a vassal state. In the continuous power struggles over Mesopotamia, another Amorite dynasty had usurped the throne of the Old Assyrian Empire, which had controlled colonies in Hurrian and Hittite regions of eastern Anatolia since the 21st century BCE.
The Assyrians made themselves masters over Mari and much of north east Amurru in the late 19th and early 18th centuries BCE. Shubat-Enlil, was made the capital of this Old Assyrian empire by Shamshi Adad I at the expense of the earlier capital of Assur; the Hurrians migrated further west in this period. By 1725 BCE they are found in parts of northern Syria, such as Alalakh; the mixed Amorite–Hurrian kingdom of Yamhad is recorded as struggling for this area with the early Hittite king Hattusilis I around 1600 BCE. Hurrians settled in the coastal region of Adaniya in the country of Kizzuwatna, southern Anatolia. Yamhad weakened vis-a-vis the powerful Hittites, but this opened Anatolia for Hurrian cultural influences; the Hittites were influenced by both the Hurrian and Hattian cultures over the course of several centuries. The Indo-European Hittites continued expanding south after the defeat of Yamhad; the army of the Hittite king Mursili I sacked the city. The destruction of the Babylonian kingdom, the presence of unambitious or isolationist kings in Assyria, as well as the destruction of the kingdom of Yamhad, helped the rise of another Hurrian dynasty.
The first ruler was a legendary king called Kirta who founded the kingdom of Mitanni around 1500 BCE. Mitanni grew from the region around the Khabur valley and was the most powerful kingdom of the Near East in c. 1475–1365 BCE, after which it was eclipsed and destroyed by the Middle Assyrian Empire. Some theonyms, proper names and other terminology of the Mitanni exhibit an Indo-Aryan superstrate, suggesting that an Indo-Aryan elite imposed itself over the Hurrian population in the course of the Indo-Aryan expansion. Another Hurrian kingdom benefited from the demise of Babylonian power in the sixteenth century BCE. Hurrians had inhabited the region northeast around the modern Kirkuk; this was the kingdom of Arrapha. Excavations at Yorgan Tepe, ancient Nuzi, proved this to be one of the most important sites for our knowledge about the Hurrians. Hurrian kings such as Ithi-Teshup and Ithiya ruled over Arrapha, yet by th
Manichaeism
Manichaeism was a major religion founded by the Iranian prophet Mani in the Sasanian Empire. Manichaeism taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, an evil, material world of darkness. Through an ongoing process that takes place in human history, light is removed from the world of matter and returned to the world of light, whence it came, its beliefs were based on Gnosticism. Manichaeism was successful and spread far through the Aramaic-speaking regions, it thrived between the third and seventh centuries, at its height was one of the most widespread religions in the world. Manichaean churches and scriptures existed as far east as China and as far west as the Roman Empire, it was the main rival to Christianity before the spread of Islam in the competition to replace classical paganism. Manichaeism survived longer in the east than in the west, it appears to have faded away after the 14th century in south China, contemporary to the decline of the Church of the East in Ming China.
While most of Manichaeism's original writings have been lost, numerous translations and fragmentary texts have survived. An adherent of Manichaeism was called a Manichaean or Manichean, or Manichee in older sources. Mani was an Iranian born in 216 near Seleucia-Ctesiphon in the Parthian Empire. According to the Cologne Mani-Codex, Mani's parents were members of the Jewish Christian Gnostic sect known as the Elcesaites. Mani composed seven works, six of which were written in the Syriac language, a late variety of Aramaic; the seventh, the Shabuhragan, was written by Mani in Middle Persian and presented by him to the Sasanian emperor, Shapur I. Although there is no proof Shapur I was a Manichaean, he tolerated the spread of Manichaeism and refrained from persecuting it within his empire's boundaries. According to one tradition, it was Mani himself who invented the unique version of the Syriac script known as the Manichaean alphabet, used in all of the Manichaean works written within the Sasanian Empire, whether they were in Syriac or Middle Persian, for most of the works written within the Uyghur Khaganate.
The primary language of Babylon at that time was Eastern Middle Aramaic, which included three main dialects: Jewish Babylonian Aramaic and Syriac, the language of Mani, as well as of the Syriac Christians. While Manichaeism was spreading, existing religions such as Zoroastrianism were still popular and Christianity was gaining social and political influence. Although having fewer adherents, Manichaeism won the support of many high-ranking political figures. With the assistance of the Sasanian Empire, Mani began missionary expeditions. After failing to win the favour of the next generation of Persian royalty, incurring the disapproval of the Zoroastrian clergy, Mani is reported to have died in prison awaiting execution by the Persian Emperor Bahram I; the date of his death is estimated at 276–277. Mani believed that the teachings of Gautama Buddha and Jesus were incomplete, that his revelations were for the entire world, calling his teachings the "Religion of Light". Manichaean writings indicate that Mani received revelations when he was 12 and again when he was 24, over this time period he grew dissatisfied with the Elcesaite sect he was born into.
Mani began preaching at an early age and was influenced by contemporary Babylonian-Aramaic movements such as Mandaeism, Aramaic translations of Jewish apocalyptic writings similar to those found at Qumran, by the Syriac dualist-gnostic writer Bardaisan. With the discovery of the Mani-Codex, it became clear that he was raised in a Jewish-Christian baptism sect, the Elcesaites, was influenced by their writings, as well. According to biographies preserved by Ibn al-Nadim and the Persian polymath al-Biruni, he received a revelation as a youth from a spirit, whom he would call his Twin, his Syzygos, his Double, his Protective Angel or Divine Self, it taught. His divine Twin or true Self brought Mani to self-realization, he claimed to be the Paraclete of the Truth. Manichaeism's views on Jesus are described by historians: Jesus in Manichaeism possessed three separate identities: Jesus the Luminous, Jesus the Messiah and Jesus patibilis; as Jesus the Luminous... his primary role was as supreme revealer and guide and it was he who woke Adam from his slumber and revealed to him the divine origins of his soul and its painful captivity by the body and mixture with matter.
Jesus the Messiah was a historical being, the prophet of the Jews and the forerunner of Mani. However, the Manichaeans believed, he never experienced human birth as notions of physical conception and birth filled the Manichaeans with horror and the Christian doctrine of virgin birth was regarded as obscene. Since he was the light of the world, where was this light, they asked, when he was in the womb of the Virgin? Jesus the Messiah was bor
Maitreya
Maitreya, Metteyya, is regarded as a future Buddha of this world in Buddhist eschatology. In some Buddhist literature, such as the Amitabha Sutra and the Lotus Sutra, he is referred to as Ajita. According to Buddhist tradition, Maitreya is a bodhisattva who will appear on Earth in the future, achieve complete enlightenment, teach the pure dharma. According to scriptures, Maitreya will be a successor to Gautama Buddha; the prophecy of the arrival of Maitreya refers to a time in the future when the dharma will have been forgotten by most on the terrestrial world. Maitreya has been adopted for his millenarian role by many non-Buddhist religions in the past, such as the White Lotus, as well as by modern new religious movements, such as Yiguandao; the name Maitreya is derived from the Sanskrit word maitrī "loving-kindness", in turn derived from the noun mitra "friend". The Pali form Metteyya is mentioned in the Cakkavatti-Sīhanāda Sutta of the Pāli Canon, in chapter 28 of the Buddhavamsa. Most of the Buddha's sermons are presented as having been presented in answer to a question, or in some other appropriate context, but this sutta has a beginning and ending in which the Buddha is talking to monks about something different.
This leads scholar Richard Gombrich to conclude that either the whole sutta is apocryphal or that it has at least been tampered with. In the Greco-Buddhist art of Gandhara, in the first centuries CE in northern India, Maitreya was the most popular figure to be represented along with Gautama Buddha. In 4th to 6th-century China, "Buddhist artisans used the names Shakyamuni and Maitreya interchangeably... indicating both that the distinction between the two had not yet been drawn and that their respective iconographies had not yet been set". An example is the stone sculpture found in the Qingzhou cache dedicated to Maitreya in 529 CE as recorded in the inscription; the religious belief of Maitreya developed around the same time as that of Amitābha, as early as the 3rd century CE. One mention of the prophecy of Maitreya is in the Maitreyavyākaraṇa, it implies that he is a teacher of meditative trance sādhanā and states that gods and other beings: Will lose their doubts, the torrents of their cravings will be cut off: free from all misery they will manage to cross the ocean of becoming.
No longer will they regard anything as their own, they will have no possession, no gold or silver, no home, no relatives! But they will lead the holy life of oneness under Maitreya's guidance, they will have torn the net of the passions, they will manage to enter into trances, theirs will be an abundance of joy and happiness, for they will lead a holy life under Maitreya's guidance. Maitreya is pictured seated, with either both feet on the ground or crossed at the ankles, on a throne, waiting for his time, he is dressed in the clothes of either a Indian royalty. As a bodhisattva, he would be standing and dressed in jewels, he wears a small stupa in his headdress that represents the stupa with relics of Gautama Buddha to help him identify it when his turn comes to lay claim to his succession and can be holding a dharmachakra resting on a lotus. A khata is always tied around his waist as a girdle. In the Greco-Buddhist art of Gandhara, Maitreya is represented as a northern Indian nobleman, holding a kumbha in his left hand.
Sometimes this is a "wisdom urn". He is flanked by the brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu; the Maitreyasamiti was an extensive Buddhist play in pre-Islamic Central Asia. The Maitreyavyakarana in Central Asia and the Anagatavamsa of South India mention him. Maitreya resides in the Tuṣita Heaven, said to be reachable through meditation. Gautama Buddha lived here before he was born into the world as all bodhisattvas live in the Tuṣita Heaven before they descend to the human realm to become Buddhas. Although all bodhisattvas are destined to become Buddhas, the concept of a bodhisattva differs in Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism. In Theravada Buddhism, a bodhisattva is one, striving for full enlightenment, whereas in Mahayana Buddhism, a bodhisattva is one who has reached a advanced state of grace or enlightenment but holds back from entering nirvana so that he may help others. In Mahayana Buddhism, Buddhas preside over pure lands, such as Amitābha over Sukhavati. Once Maitreya becomes a buddha, he will rule over the Ketumati pure land, an earthly paradise sometimes associated with the city of Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, India.
In Theravada Buddhism, Buddhas are born as unenlightened humans, are not rulers of any paradise or pure land. Maitreya's arising would be no different from the arising of Gautama Buddha, as he achieved full enlightenment as a human being and died, entering parinibbana. In Mahayana schools, Maitreya is traditionally said to have revealed the Five Treatises of Maitreya through Asanga; these texts are the basis of the Yogacara tradition and constitute the majority of the third turning within the Three Turnings of the Wheel of Dharma. According to Buddhist tradition, each kalpa has 1,000 Buddhas; the previous kalpa was the vyuhakalpa, the present kalpa is called the bhadrakalpa. The Seven Buddhas of Antiquity are seven Buddhas which bridge the vyuhakalpa and the bhadrakalpa: Vipassī Sikhī Vessabhū (the 1000th and final Buddha of the vyuhak
Human bonding
Human bonding is the process of development of a close, interpersonal relationship between two or more people. It most takes place between family members or friends, but can develop among groups, such as sporting teams and whenever people spend time together. Bonding is a mutual, interactive process, is different from simple liking, it is the process of nurturing social connection. Bonding refers to the process of attachment that develops between romantic or platonic partners, close friends, or parents and children; this bond is characterized by emotions such as trust. Any two people who spend time together may form a bond. Male bonding refers to the establishment of relationships between men through shared activities; the term female bonding refers to the formation of close personal relationships between women. Cross-sex friendships refers to personal relationships between women. In the 4th century BC, the Greek philosopher Plato argued that love directs the bonds of human society. In his Symposium, one of the narrators in the dialog, states that love goes far beyond simple attraction to human beauty.
He states that it occurs throughout the animal and plant kingdoms, as well as throughout the universe. Love directs everything, in the realm of the gods as well as that of humans. Eryximachus reasons that when various opposing elements such as wet and dry are "animated by the proper species of Love, they are in harmony with one another... But when the sort of Love, crude and impulsive controls the seasons, he brings death and destruction"; because it is love that guides the relations between these sets of opposites throughout existence, in every case it is the higher form of love that brings harmony and cleaves toward the good, whereas the impulsive vulgar love creates disharmony. Plato concludes; when love "is directed, in temperance and justice, towards the good, whether in heaven or on earth: happiness and good fortune, the bonds of human society, concord with the gods above—all these are among his gifts". In the 1660s, the Dutch philosopher Spinoza wrote, in his Ethics of Human Bondage or the Strength of the Emotions, that the term bondage relates to the human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions.
That is, according to Spinoza, "when a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune." In 1809 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in his classic novella Elective Affinities, wrote of the "marriage tie," and by analogy shows how strong marriage unions are similar in character to that by which the particles of quicksilver find a unity together through the process of chemical affinity. Humans in passionate relationships, according to Goethe, are analogous to reactive substances in a chemical equation; the term pair bond originated in 1940 in reference to mated pairs of birds. Whilst some form of monogamy may characterize around 90% of bird species, in mammals long-term pairing is rare, at around 3%; the incidence of monogamy in primate species is low in contrast with polygyny, the most common pattern. However, regardless of mating patterns, primate life is characterized by long-lasting social relationships formed in the context of living in durable social groups, any such durable relationship is characterized by some degree of bonding.
Whilst the'naturalness' of monogamy in humans is debated, durable monogamous or polygamous relationships will be accompanied by affectional or emotional bonding. According to limerence theory, posited in 1979 by psychologist Dorothy Tennov, a certain percentage of couples may go through what is called a limerent reaction, in which one or both of the pair may experience a state of passion mixed with continuous intrusive thinking, fear of rejection, hope. Hence, with all human romantic relationships, one of three varieties of bonds may form, defined over a set duration of time, in relation to the experience or non-experience of limerence: Affectional bond: define relationships in which neither partner is limerent. Limerent–Nonlimerent bond: define relationships in which one partner is limerent. Limerent–Limerent bond: define relationships in which both partners are limerent; the constitution of these bonds may vary over the course of the relationship, in ways that may either increase or decrease the intensity of the limerence.
A characteristic of this delineation made by Tennov, is that based on her research and interviews with over 500 people, all human bonded relationships can be divided into three varieties being defined by the amount of limerence or non-limerence each partner contributes to the relationship. In 1958, British developmental psychologist John Bowlby published the paper "the Nature of the Child's Tie to his Mother," in which the precursory concepts of "attachment theory" were developed; this included the development of the concept of the affectional bond, sometimes referred to as the emotional bond, based on the universal tendency for humans to attach, i.e. to seek closeness to another person and to feel secure when that person is present. Attachment theory has some of its origins in the observation of and experiments with animals, but is based on observations of children who had missed typical experiences of adult care. Much of the early research on attachment in humans was done by his associates.
Bowlby proposed that babies have an inbuilt need from birth to make emotional attachments, i.e. bonds
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