Arya Samaj

« Arya Samaj The Arya Samaj ( ārya -sam āj , ‘The Association of Nobles' ) is a Hindu reform movement founded in 1875 by Swami Dayanand Saraswati (1824-83).

Based on the supposition that the true religion of India was put forth in the ancient Vedas, rather than in later epics and cycles of myths, the principal aim of the Arya Samaj is to purge modern Hinduism of beliefs and practices associated with the devotional and mythic literature of India. Condemning the hereditary caste system and dismissing the practice of using icons and idols in worship, the society favoured a more rationalistic, humanistic and nationalistic form of Hinduism as India entered the modern era. The Arya Samaj, a prominent Hindu reform movement, was founded in the nineteenth century by Swami Dayanand Saraswati.

Also known as Mul Shankar and nicknamed ‘the Luther of India' , Dayanand was born in 1824 into a Brahmanical family of Gujarat.

As a boy he always doubted the divinity of idols of Hindu gods.

The death of his sister turned him to pondering the problems of life and death.

Consequently, he ran away from home and wandered for many years in search of a guru.

At last in Mathura he found a blind teacher named Swami Brijanand, who taught him the philosophical interpretations of the Vedas, the most ancient collection of sacred writings in India. Through his study of the Vedas, Swami Dayanand became convinced that selfish and ignorant priests had pervaded the Hindu religion during the post-Vedic period.

Part of the reason for this corruption, he believed, were the Pur ā˳as , the eighteen collections of myths and legends of gods and heroes that form the basis of most devotional forms of Hinduism in the medieval and modern periods.

These texts, which had informally acquired the status of sacred scripture and the contents of which had become much more familiar to most Hindus than the Vedas, were, Dayanand believed, full of false teachings.

Linking priestly corruption with these (for him, apocryphal) Pur ā˳as , and seeing both priestly and textual corruption as the source of contemporary social problems, Dayanand began in 1863 to preach his doctrines publicly.

Twelve years later, in 1875, he established the Arya Samaj ( ārya -sam āj , ‘The Association of Nobles' ) in Bombay. Dayanand regarded the Vedas as eternal and infallible and laid down his own interpretations of them in a book entitled Saty ārth Prak āś .

He considered the Vedas to be the inspired word of God and the fount of all knowledge. He rejected all later religious thought on the grounds of its conflict with the Vedas.

Thus, unlike most traditional Hindu thinkers, Dayanand repudiated the authority of the post-Vedic texts, such as the Purā˳as , and regarded the epics, the Rām āya ʔa and the Mah ābh ārata , as literary treasures and nothing more.

His total dependence on the Vedas and their infallibility gives his teachings an orthodox colouring, for in orthodox Hindu thought, scriptural infallibility means that human reason is subordinate to sacred texts.

Despite this appearance of orthodoxy, Dayanand 's approach in fact has rationalistic and humanistic leanings, because the Vedas, though revealed, are to. »