Every country,
religion, always had people who cleverly faked things to imply that they are
actually very ancient and tried to take advantage of that. Most of the time, it
is almost impossible to prove the genuineness of such an artifact.
Recently, I
came across a bunch of ‘supposedly ancient Indian scriptures’ each claiming to
be part of ancient Vedic literature (2000 B.C.). Some of them talked about Yoga
which is one of my fields of interest. Many of the ideas discussed in these
scriptures seemed to have lot in common with the ideas propagated by many
modern Yoga Gurus, though none of these find mention in the generally accepted
Yoga bible “The Yoga sutra” by Patanjali. I could see many telltale marks of
intentional fabrication, though it is very difficult to pin them down.
While a
western scholar would labor hard to fix historical credibility of any purported
ancient scripture, most traditional Indians give no importance to historicity
and their judgments are guided by faith alone. But such an approach has its own
associated long term adverse consequences.
What is the
right approach? Yes, historicity is important. But since it is almost impossible
to judge in many cases, we probably have to take a via media. There are other
factors that can help in accepting or rejecting such documents. (See my earlier post on how we should look at such documents.) After all, old is not always
gold!
