Hinduism approaches the world in an ecological sense. Not only humans, but also animals, are conceived as sentient and, therefore, deserving of compassion. The Hindu approach to reality is through jnāna (intuitive understanding) that includes subjective and objective knowledge, value and fact, and consciousness and reality. Jnāna presupposes jijnāsā, a reaching out to understand, that leads to a spark of illumination. Jnāna requires the ethics of the individual as an indispensable condition for knowledge, which thus is not value free. Search for truth is a value orientation.
Historical Background
The history of early Hinduism is tied to the history of India. Its chronological time frame is provided by the archaeological record that has been traced, in an unbroken tradition, to about 8000 B.C.E. Prior to this are records of rock paintings believed to be considerably older. The earliest textual source is the Rigveda, which is a compilation of very ancient material. The astronomical references in the Vedic books recall events of the third or the fourth millennium B.C.E. and earlier. The recent discovery that Sarasvati, the preeminent river of the Rigvedic times, went dry around 1900 B.C.E. due to tectonic upheavals suggests that portions of the Rigveda were written prior to this epoch.
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