NAQT: Religious Texts
Terms
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- Hadith
- Diary of muslim figures, usually Muhammad; matn - text of original oral law, and isnad - list of authorities who have passed down oral law; points muslims toward Sunna (practice of the prophet)
- Talmud
- "instruction"; Jewish oral and written law; Mishnah (laws), and Gemara (commentary on laws); Two versions of Gemera, Palestinian and Babylonian; finished about 600
- I Ching
- Book of Changes; 1500 and 100 BC; Fuxi derived its eight trigrams from turtle shells; trigrams are broken (yin) or unbroken (yang) lines; reading randomly one can learn about stuff; almost burned by Shi Huangdi
- Bhagavad-Gita
- Sanskrit for "Song of God"; book six of Mahabharata; 100s AD; Arjuna asks his driver Krishna (Vishnu) about suffering from war; Krishna replies to love god and do right without thinking of self
- Book of Mormon
- 1830; Joseph Smith; Prophet Moroni revealed location to Smith; inscribed on thin gold plates; history of Hebrews who migrated America around 600 BC, and then split into Lamanites (Amerindians) and civlized Nephites (God's chosen people, killed by Lamanites in 421)
- Upanishads
- "Vedanta", last part of the vedas; means "to sit down close"; 900-500 BC; early ideas, like connecting individual soul (atman) with universal soul (Brahman), and moksha, spiritual release, by meditation and ascetism
- Analects
- Compiled by Confucius's disciples in 400sBC; basic ideas like ren(benevolence) and (li) proper conduct; one of "Four Books" used to train ancient Chinese civil servants
- Apocrypha
- Important to Catholics and Orthodox, but not Protestants and Jews; books of Bible outside of accepted canon; Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), and Baruch
- Vedas
- Rig(prayers in verse), Sama (melodies), Yajur (prose prayers), and Atharva (spells); each contains a Brahmana (interpretation); Aranyakas (treatise on meditation) throughout; Upanishads; Sanskrit; 1500-1200 BC; sacrifices to Gods; karma, Vishnu and Shiva are minor, until Upanashads; Indra (thunder god), Varuna (cosmic order), and Agni(fire) are major
- Dao de Jing
- Laozi; written in warring states period of Zhou Dynasty; allow natural order to take precedent (fatalsim); Daoism
- Avesta
- Sacred scripture of Zoroastrianism; Gathas (Zoroaster's poems), Visparat (homages to spiritual leaders), Vendidad (legal & medical doctrine), Yashts (important hymns), and Khurda (lesser hymns); compiled by Sassanids between 200 and 640; eternal struggle between good (Ahura Mazda/Ormuzd) and evil(Angra Mainyu / Ahriman)
- Qur'an
- "recitation"; 114 suras, all but first arranged in descending order of length; Told by Gabriel in 610; formalized and written by Uthman (3rd caliph) in 650s after many of his oral reciters were killed