[Advaita-l] Is Ayyappa a Vedic god?

[Venkatesh Murthy]

Namaste

The biggest temple in the world is Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Area is 162.6
hectares. It was a Vishnu temple and then converted into Buddhist worship
centre in 12th Century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angkor_Wat

On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 10:43 AM, Raghav Kumar Dwivedula via Advaita-l <
advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org> wrote:

> Namaste
> It is noteworthy that the earliest 'purest' form of Buddhism did not have
> worship of mUrtis and shrines. The Theravada ( a.k.a soutrAntika,) school
> is the earliest and preserves Buddha's words nearly verbatim. And hundreds
> of years later the mahAyAna Buddhists arise and they plausibly under the
> influence of the cultural and religious milieu of agamic and vedic  India
> started worship and rituals etc. Mantra japam is strongly discouraged in
> the early Buddhism. You get a flavor of this in modern vipassana Buddhist
> methods which strongly  prohibit mantra japam, worship and rituals.  There
> us no concept of an altar or shrine with images . The meditator just faces
> a blank wall in his pagoda cell. That's Theravada for you. To say that
> images of Vishnu etc., are from Buddhism is not credible .
>
>  Its like saying that advaita Vedanta is derived from Buddhism because a
> few gauDapAda kArikas have resemblance to some mAdhyamika buddhust kArikAs.
> Its the other way round.  Advaita Vedanta predates Buddhism. Similarly
> worship of  Vishnu is a much earlier tradition. We have mahAbhArata
> references aplenty about temple worship in pre-buddhistic India. Now if
> temple worship predates the Buddha and early Buddhism did not have mUrtis,
> mantras and altars, why not see the elephant in the room and acknowledge
> the diffusion of agamic ideas into Buddhism rather than contrive it the
> other way round.
>
> We have the authoritative shankara digvijaya giving a more believable
> account of how Adi Shankara *retrieved* the preexisting image of Badri
> Narayana and *re-installed* it in Badrinath. Its a shrine reverting to its
> earlier ancient firm. Its what happens all over the world be it the great
> mosque of Cordoba say,
>
> http://historylists.org/architecture/5-most-impressive-historic-mosques-
> in-spain.html
>
> Or the Ram Lala temple in Ayodhya.
>
> Om
> Raghav
>
>
> On Thu 15 Mar, 2018, 3:33 PM Aditya Kumar via Advaita-l, <
> advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org> wrote:
>
> > Namaste,
> > This is a very interesting link :
> > http://vinu-mythoughts.blogspot.in/2010/09/ayyappa-is-buddha.html
> > It is evident that Buddhism had a strong presence in Southern India
> > similar to SE Asia(Sri Vijaya) and Sri Lanka. The sleeping/reclining
> buddha
> > became Ranga sleeping casually on a serpent, Padmapani became Sarangapani
> > and elsewhere became Dandayudhapani (Palani). Of course, all these are
> only
> > musings.
> >
> >
> >
> >
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-- 
Regards

-Venkatesh