“Exhibits for Mayapur” (SB 3.29.6)
Thompson shares a set of conceptual models for museum exhibits designed for the Mayapura Prabhupada Avenue Project, a preliminary initiative meant to complement the massive Temple of the Vedic Planetarium. Thompson describes how concepts such as these tend to demonstrate the authenticity of classic Vedic culture. In addition, he discusses a number of intriguing examples illustrating parallels between the yuga cycles described in the Markandaya and Vayu Puranas, and contemporary accounts of human development from the Stone Age to the present.
TRANSCRIPT: Srimad-Bhagavatam, Canto 3, Chapter 29, Text 6. “Exhibits for Mayapur.” Alachua – December 19, 1997 / (084)
[Text 6]
Śrī Maitreya said: Oh, best among the Kurus, the great sage Kapila, moved by great compassion and pleased by the words of His glorious mother, spoke as follows.
Purport by Śrīla Prabhupāda:
Lord Kapila was very satisfied by the request of His glorious mother because she was thinking not only in terms of her personal salvation but in terms of all the fallen conditioned souls. The Lord is always compassionate towards the fallen souls of this material world, and therefore He comes Himself or sends His confidential servants to deliver them. Since He is perpetually compassionate towards them, if some of His devotees also become compassionate towards them, He is very pleased with the devotees. In Bhagavad-gītā it is clearly stated that persons who are trying to elevate the condition of the fallen souls by preaching the conclusion of Bhagavad-gītā – namely, full surrender unto the Personality of Godhead – are very dear to Him. Thus when the Lord saw that His beloved mother was very compassionate towards the fallen souls, He was pleased, and He also became compassionate towards her.
om ajñāna-timirāndhasya
jñānāñjana-śalākayā
cakṣur unmīlitaṁ yena
tasmai śrī-gurave namaḥ
śrī-caitanya-mano-'bhīṣṭaṁ sthāpitaṁ yena bhū-tale
svayaṁ rūpaḥ kadā mahyaṁ dadāti sva-padāntikam
So, the translation again:
Śrī Maitreya said: Oh, best among the Kurus, the great sage Kapila, moved by great compassion and pleased by the words of His glorious mother, spoke as follows.
So, Śrīla Prabhupāda points out in the purport that Kṛṣṇa is very compassionate to the fallen souls and He appreciates it when devotees also adopt this compassionate attitude. So for that reason, we engage in preaching efforts to save the fallen souls. So one aspect of this is the work involving the Bhaktivedanta Institute and the relation between science and Kṛṣṇa Consciousness. So as usual, I thought I'd say a little bit about that.
We've been working on some exhibits for the Mayapur project. Of course, the main temple in Mayapur is projected for still about 15 years into the future. So, that's a very long-term plan. However, there is a more immediate prototype exhibition which is being planned for an area called Prabhupāda Avenue, which extends from the Prabhupāda Samādhi in the direction where the main temple is going to be.
So, along that Prabhupāda Avenue it is planned that there will be different exhibitions. And tentatively the plan is that some of these are going to open by the year 2001. Of course that means 2001 plus some increment. But, one of the plans for that is to have a museum dealing with archaeological aspects establishing the reality of the Vedic civilization. So, I thought I'd mention a few things briefly about that.
The basic idea behind that exhibition is, of course, to show the reality of the Vedic civilization. That is the setting in which the pastimes of Kṛṣṇa take place. And of course, in the world of modern scholarship, there is some doubt as to whether such a civilization ever really existed. The scholars of course, as much as possible, try to date everything in India as recently as possible and to deny the historicity of various stories found in the Vedic literature. Nonetheless, there are interesting points that can be made indicating the scope of the Vedic civilization based on archeology.
[4:56]
So, this exhibition is going to start by, first of all, emphasizing that the concept of the Stone Age and the development of civilization starting from the Stone Age and progressing towards what we regard as modern, advanced, civilized society is also there in the Vedic literature. But in the Vedic literature, a different perspective is given on this topic.
Of course, we've all heard of the idea that in the Satya-yuga people lived without any material development – economic development – and they were primarily dedicated to meditation. Practically everyone on the planet was an advanced yogi in the Satya-yuga. It turns out that there is more detailed information in some of the Purāṇas such as the Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa and the Vāyu Purāṇa indicating the nature of the Satya-yuga and explaining the transition to what we tend to regard as a civilization.
It's described that, first of all, the race of human beings in the Satya-yuga was created by Brahmā, not surprisingly. So, you have a picture of creation rather than evolution, but people indeed lived without any material development. So it would appear that they were like primitive people. However, they also did not need economic development because nature provided all food stocks for them. And so they simply engaged in meditation, and they lived for very long periods of time. And it's described that towards the end of Satya-yuga, this entire race, in the natural course of events, died out. So, that was Satya-yuga.
In Tretā-yuga there was another creation by Brahmā. So, it's interesting that you have distinct races. So, you could say we're not actually descended linearly from the Satya-yuga people, which I thought was an interesting point. In Tretā-yuga, things started out pretty much the way they were in Satya-yuga. It describes that people were subsisting on fruits provided by trees. So it sounds like a familiar story, but after some time they became more passionate and a number of things began to take place.
First of all, they began having more children. Previously, it was described that people would have an average of two children, which meant the population wouldn't increase. It remains stable, but now people began having more children and they became covetous. It's said they began putting fences around the trees in order to create the idea of private property. And inevitably they began fighting. So, things proceeded for a while.
What happened was that nature began to withdraw her bounty at this point. The climate deteriorated, and the trees began to die off, and now things became more difficult for the people. And so they began to create fortifications in order to defend their property because now they divided the world up into different parcels of private property. So, things became worse and worse. People developed dwellings of different kinds. This was necessary because the climate was deteriorating. So, they began to live in villages with walls around them. And, they began developing various methods of fighting and so on.
So, finally it came to a point where there was widespread starvation, and the trees were thoroughly dying out along with other forms of vegetation that the people had been subsisting on. And so Brahmā created food grains and introduced principles of agriculture. So, now people began living by agriculture. They took up plowing and various planting of seeds and so on and so forth. And so you had the beginning of towns and cities with the population being supported by agricultural development. And all of this took place within the Tretā-yuga.
I thought it was an interesting story because in one sense it's very close to the story which the anthropologists tell about the origin of agriculture in civilization, but the perspective is different. Namely that this was actually due to a fall down in the consciousness of the people, in which they created this idea of private property and then began fighting over it. And then suddenly things became much scarcer than they had been before.
[10:27]
It's also interesting that there's an analogy there to the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible. Of course, there the story deals with just two people, whereas here we're talking about populations of people. But it's still a similar story because initially you have Adam and Eve living in the Garden of Eden and everything is in a state of paradise. But then when they make their big mistake and eat the fruit of the wrong tree, they're turned out into the cruel world, and they have to live by the sweat of their brow through agriculture, interestingly enough.
So, in this exhibition will have a series of dioramas illustrating these developments and showing the parallel between the Vedic conception and the ideas of the anthropologists, showing that there is compatibility there, but also giving a different perspective from the Vedic point of view.
In addition, there will be a series of exhibits indicating the reality of the Vedic civilization and giving archaeological evidence. One interesting item is something called the Vedic Head. This is a metal sculpture that was discovered, apparently in New Delhi back in, I think, the 1950s. It's made of bronze and it looks for all the world, like a sculpture of Bhīma. It's a very massive kṣatriya-like head, very realistic sculpture also. The interesting thing about it is that this sculpture has been carbon dated to 3700 BC. And that's a little bit unusual. According to the prevailing views of modern scholarship, in India the oldest civilization is the so called Indus Valley civilization characterized by sites such as Harappa and Mohenjo-daro and so forth. And customarily they have dated that back to about 2300 BC. Although I've noted some dates have been pushed back a little bit recently to around 3000 BC.
Of course, as a matter of perspective, the traditional date that we follow for the time of the Mahābhārata and Kṛṣṇa's pastimes in the Battle of Kurukṣetra is 3100 BC – that's the traditional period. That's why Śrīla Prabhupāda always said 5,000 years ago Kṛṣṇa's pastimes took place. But this civilization in the Indus Valley seems to date back pretty much to that time. But in the area of the Ganges, they don't date civilization back that far. So, it's interesting to see this sculpture turning up. The people who have it spent, I guess, a couple of million dollars having it tested in various ways; and the results were quite interesting. Several different tests were made to determine the age of the object, and they all basically agree, and they put it back in the period of about 3-4000 years BC.
It's practically as realistic as the more advanced sculptures of the classical Greek period, interestingly enough. And apparently somebody did an analysis – the hairstyle is characteristic of the school of the Vedic sage Vasiṣṭha, curiously enough. So, those are some of the details. So, that's one thing that we would want to show in this exhibition.
Of course we couldn't show the original, that is in the possession of a private foundation somewhere. But the idea would be that if we could get permission to get photographs from all different angles, a sculptor such as Locana or somebody like that could reproduce the sculpture so that it looked exactly like the original. So that's one example.
[15:01]
There are quite a few different sections of the exhibition. There's going to be an exhibition discussing the yuga cycle. Of course, as we know, according to the Vedic literature, time goes in cycles called yugas, coming to 4,320,000 years.
It's interesting that it turns out there is archaeological evidence supporting this cycle. I was rather surprised to find that. But the basic time unit of the yuga cycle is the period of Kali-yuga, which is 432,000 years. It turns out that in the theory of the ice ages and of ancient world climate, there's a theory created by a man named Milankovitch, which uses astronomical cycles to explain the timing of the ice ages. It turns out that one of the cycles that they study is 430,000 years. And this cycle is shown in the fossil record. For example, in the Gulf coast of the United States along Mississippi and Louisiana, that area, if you dig down through the strata of the earth, you can find that the ocean was rising and retreating in a cyclic fashion over millions of years. And the period for one cycle of rising and retreating of the ocean was 430,000 years. So, there seems to be some evidence for the yuga system then in geology.
We'll have a number of presentations concerning archeology in India. In recent years, some interesting discoveries have been made in relation to this Indus Valley civilization. It turns out that... of course the Indus valley is in what is now Pakistan. And there are a number of sites along that river, which is called the Indus or Sindhu. Actually the word Hindu comes from the mispronunciation of that river's name. Because in Sanskrit it is Sindhu, but people in Iran would pronounce the "S" as an "H". And so they said Hindu. And then of course people further west in Greece dropped the "H", so they said Indu or India. So that's how the history of the word works out.
Anyway, it turns out that between Pakistan and India proper, there's what is called the Rajasthani desert. And it's a very unpopulated area at the present time. However, evidence has been gathered indicating that the ancient Sarasvatī River used to flow through the Rajasthan desert. So, it used to be there were three very large river complexes in India, namely, the Indus, the Sarasvatī, and the Ganges. Whereas now there are only two.
A large number of archaeological sites have been found along the bed of the old Sarasvatī River in the Rajasthan desert. Apparently there are about 1200 sites of ancient cities along that area. So it looks like this is a very rich area for investigating the ancient Vedic civilization. The Vedas per se, such as Ṛg Veda and so on, make repeated references to this Sarasvatī River. So, it would appear that a lot of the people in the Vedic civilization were living in that region.
Another topic of course, is Dvārakā. The archeologist S. R. Rao discovered ruins in the ocean off the coast of Dvārakā in India. So this is an interesting piece of evidence. He dates these ruins to around 1500 BC and he thinks that this is Kṛṣṇa's Dvārakā. Of course it's convenient for him to say so since he's the discoverer of that site.
[19:53]
However, the indications are that over the last several thousand years, actually since the end of the last ice age, sea levels have gradually been rising. And in particular they have been rising in this area of Dvārakā. So it would appear that what Rao has discovered is in fact the equivalent of the present city of Dvārakā as it was in 1500 BC. The sea levels were lower and so the city was further out in the bay. Gradually over time, the sea levels have been working inward and as the buildings were destroyed by the ocean, people built new buildings further inland.
In fact, you can trace the Kṛṣṇa Temple there in… Dvārakā apparently dates back to around, I think, 1200 or so AD. But before that there was one dating to about 900 AD, which is beneath the earth now closer to the ocean. And then as you keep digging down, you find earlier and earlier temples. So it is quite possible that what Rao discovered is an earlier form of the pilgrimage city of Dvārakā. In that case, ruins of Kṛṣṇa's Dvārakā would be further out in the ocean. So, it'd be interesting to investigate that. So, those are a few of the things that will be there in this exhibition.
There are quite a few other items. For example, there's substantial evidence for communication between India and the new world. Mainly this dates to the more recent centuries as far as anyone can tell, which is to be expected because of course most archeological finds will be the more recent things, since things tend to get destroyed over long periods of time. But there's extensive evidence indicating connections for example, between Mexico and India. For example, there's a game that was played by the Aztecs in Mexico, which corresponds almost exactly to the game played in India, which was the one in which Mahārāja Yudhiṣṭhira lost his kingdom. But, somebody made a list of about, I think, 60 different specific parallels between the Aztec game and the game played in India. Also, a very realistic figurine of Ganesh was found in some of the Aztec Ruins in India and so forth. So, there are quite a few examples like that.
You can also find very strong parallels between some of the Central American temple architecture and temple architecture in Cambodia, which is Indian of course, because there was colonization from India into the region of what was called Indochina, which of course is why it's called Indochina. It's a region that was sort of under the influence of India and China for many, many centuries. So there's a great deal of evidence there indicating that Indian civilization certainly was quite widespread.
One thing that we ran across, by the way, is something called the Russian Veda. We have a book. Apparently, in Russia there was some manifestation of Vedic culture. I'm still trying to find out more about what the dates are for that. But apparently a book in some old form of Russian existed, which was written on wooden planks and which contained all kinds of stories about Kṛṣṇa. It was almost like Kṛṣṇa Book. We actually have a copy of this. We tried to have a local Russian devotee translate this, but he said it was in a very difficult form of Russian. Apparently it would be like asking somebody to translate Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, or something like that, which is an archaic form of English. So we need to get more information about that.
Actually, as far as Russia and the whole area of Siberia is concerned, there are many rumors circulating about different temples that have been found. For example, a temple of Kurma was found somewhere out near... Was that Vladivostok? I think that was the area. Practically on the Japanese side of Siberia. And, so we still need to get more information on some of these things.
[25:12]
Also interestingly enough, there's something called the Gundestrup cauldron, which was a large silver pot, about this big, which was found in a peat bog in Denmark and which was for many years associated with the ancient Celtic culture in Europe. But, it's covered with base relief sculptures, which turn out to have Vedic motifs. For example, there's a figure of a very powerful man carrying a club and wheel in his hand, and people at a certain point realized: Well, this looks very much like Viṣṇu. Then they began discovering there were lots of other various specific parallels between Vedic themes and the motifs on this Gundestrup cauldron. Well, I'll stop there. Are there any questions or comments? Yeah?
Question: [unclear]
Answer: Oh, well, there are two... Where is the śāstra talking about the Satya-yuga and so forth? In the Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa and the Vāyu Purāṇa there's a lot of material. Yeah.
Q: [unclear]
A: Well, interestingly enough, I have also read in the Bhaviṣya Purāṇa a description that in the Kali-yuga, the short midget-like creatures that are going to be living towards the end of the Kali-yuga are actually a separate race. In other words, they won't just be descended from us. So, apparently different races are created and then annihilated even in the course of the yugas. This was surprising to me also.
Also, it describes that the – this is interesting – the souls of these different people in different yugas come from different planetary systems, predominantly. In the Satya-yuga mainly they were coming from higher planets. In the Tretā-yuga, I think still from above but not so high up. In the Dvapara Yuga it was more earthly planetary systems. In the beginning of the Kali-yuga, it's mixed, interestingly enough. That is, you have people coming from lower planets and higher planets, which explains a little bit about the conditions on the earth today because you have a curious mixture of different types of people on the earth. Some more in the mode of goodness and others who are altogether evil in their outlook. And then towards the end of Kali-yuga, the souls will primarily be coming from lower planetary systems; that's been also mentioned in the Bhaviṣya Purāṇa. Yeah?
Q: [unclear]
A: That's another one of them. Yeah. I've hoped to get more information on that, but I don't at the moment. But yeah, somewhere in Southern Russia, just north of Iran. I understand there's an Agni temple. So, there are a lot of things that need to be dug up. Yeah?
Q: [unclear]
A: The dates? Well, if you want to say 4,320,000 years, then you need to refer to another part of our exhibition dealing with Forbidden Archeology. We have a section on that also. Yes, the anthropologists tend to favor fairly recent dates for everything, especially the origin of civilization. Whereas the Vedic chronology would put things back a lot further. So that's a very controversial topic. So, we already have one book on that. There's also more material. Jaya, all glories to Śrīla Prabhupāda.