I have been brought up in a childhood surrounded by fair amount spirituality and as a matter of fact I for a period went to an oriental school where the uniform for a white shirt and Dhothi what with its huge insistence on sanskrit and learning of the vedas. Despite being honoured by the then Governor for the immaculate recitation of vedas and many such motivations, my tryst with spirituality seemed to have ended there. Then came a more westernised life in thinking and everything in the world was in mind except my past; in fact our Indian past. Three decades later by sheer boredom I looked into the books and text on Vedanta which my brother has been attending classes for, the past 18 odd years.
The first few pages went about a little routinely when suddenly the concept of Prayas and Sreyas was disclosed. Prayas is the materialistic pursuit while Sreyas is the pursuit for actualisation. Let me remind you that these concepts were written and handed down centuries ago and when I say that I mean at least about 4000 years and before. It is no surprise that there is a coincidence with Maslov's theory of needs. where the first parts of the pyramid is all about basic and materialistic needs (Prayas) and the last one is of self actualisation (Sreyas)
More, as I read further down , there is clear evidence that a significant amount of concepts and knowledge rests within our scriptures and more importantly these have been handed over so many generations to reach us and our future by potent knowledge sharing tools. They have been scripted and documented, interpreted and documented, discoursed and listened to, discoursed further and taught verbally , listened to and interpreted, transferred through further through repeatedly sharing the knowledge. Today we are so much in awe of the way wikipedia has managed to bring user generated content and documentation sharing which essentially is a compilation by mulitple authors. Simply put knowledge shared in multiple modes.
The scriptures are not the handed over notes of one individual but several who never had the inclination to proclaim themselves as authors for whatever reason. For the ones who came in late , our greatest epic , The Mahabharatha , though widely credited to Sage Vyasa as the author, is a compilation of and addition to by several contributors and was scripted over several centuries after the great war took place. Archeological dating of the period of the Mahabharatha is around 950 BC . For those who know King Dhirdarashtra and King Pandu, may also know that Vyasa fathered these two Kings. The official date of the compilation of the Mahabharatha is, 400 BC - 300 AD which adds great credence to the argument that Vyasa also has not written the epic alone ( very unlikely he lived over 450-900 years ) but it is a compilation of contributions.
Thus it would be the oldest and may be the first "WIki".
It is highly improbable that such sharing as in the first case and compilations as in the second,would have happened without any networking, interconnected -ness and interactivity.
The above two are instances of what our ancestry and heritage holds for us. It is rather unfortunate in one sense that the western civilisation brags about these as an invention and revolution while we have forgotten or mostly unaware of what pedigree we come from. On the other hand it is fortunate that the western world has woken someone like me and many others I presume ,to revisit a worthwhile past and may be go back to our roots.
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