15.1 The Cultures of South Asia

South and Southeast Asia

Monday

• N&O scavenger hunt

• Review Physical Maps of South and Southeast Asia

• Warm Up

• Read pps. 70 – 75

• Individual Work

Warm up

• Take two minutes and develop a list of natural resources found in NC. Remember that air, water, and soil are natural resources that people sometimes take for granted.

Read

• Pps. 70 - 75

Individual Work

• Make a chart with the column headings "Natural Resources" and "uses". Label the rows "South Asia" and Southeast Asia." Fill in the chart from information in this section

• A=charts are thorough and accurate and demonstrate a firm grasp of the main ideas of the section

• B=charts have at least three examples in each cell• C=charts have at least two examples in each cell • 30 minutes

Tomorrow

• Asian Religions– Hinduism– Buddhism– Confucianism

Tuesday

• N&O Scavenger Hunt

Hinduism

• The word Hindu comes from the river Indus, and it just means the people who live near the Indus river (actually in modern Pakistan).

• The Harappa people who lived near that river about 2500 BC carved images of several different gods on their clay seals. We can't read Harappan writing, so we don’t know what the Harappan people called their gods. But some of these gods look a lot like the later Hindu gods Shiva and Vishnu, so this may be the earliest part of Hinduism.

• The first written evidence of Hinduism that we can read is the Rig Veda, a long poem in Sanskrit probably composed about 1000 BC. People sang or recited the Rig Veda for hundreds of years before it was written down around 300 BC. The Rig Veda is a bunch of hymns (HIMS) (songs for the gods), magic spells, and instructions for what to say when you are sacrificing animals.

Sanskrit

• The Rig Veda mentions many different gods (polytheism). Most of the gods are male, and many of them are sky gods or weather gods like a god of rain, Indra, or like Varuna, the god of the sea. People sacrificed animals to their gods. The Rig Veda also tells us that people sometimes got in touch with the gods by drinking a drug called soma that made them hear the gods talking to them. (We don’t know now what soma was made of). Both Soma and the fire of sacrifice (Agni) were thought of as gods themselves, too.

Indra

Varuna

• About 600 BC, the idea of reincarnation became more and more common among Hindus. Most people began to think that after you died you would be reborn into another body. If you had been good, you would get a good body, like a princess. If you had been bad, you would come back as a cockroach or a rat.

• Gradually people began to hate the idea that you had to be endlessly reborn in different forms. They wanted to get free of the wheel of rebirth, and just be left alone. People began to think that sacrificing animals was a burden on your karma, or fate, that prevented you from getting free of reincarnation. So animal sacrifice became less popular.

• Around 300 BC, people began to worship new gods, who didn’t need animal sacrifices. These new gods were Vishnu and Shiva. Generally people gave Vishnu and Shiva flowers, incense, prayers, food, or music, but they didn’t kill animals for them. They began to worship Vishnu and Shiva more, and paid less attention to their old gods Indra and Varuna and the others.

Vishnu

Shiva

• Much later, between 400 and 650 AD, at the end of the Gupta period, another new god came into Hinduism. This new god was a Mother Goddess. Cows were sacred to this Mother Goddess, and so Hindus gradually stopped eating beef. Like Vishnu and Shiva, the Mother Goddess had many incarnations and many names. Parvati, Uma, and Annapurna were beautiful goddesses, who brought blessings to people.

Mother Goddess

• But other incarnations were called Kali, Chandi, Durga or Chamunda, and these goddesses were terrible giants with black skin, huge red tongues that stick out, and fierce tusks. These had many arms and each arm held a weapon, and they wore necklaces of skulls or human heads.

Kali

Chandi

Buddhism

• In the 500's BC, during the later part of the Aryan period in India, the idea of reincarnation became very strong among Hindus. Most people believed that after you died, you would be reborn in another form, and then reborn again, and again, forever. But then people started to not like this idea. They didn’t want reincarnation to just go on and on forever. Wasn’t there any way to stop this; to get off the wheel of reincarnation and just be?

Buddha

• A young Indian prince named Siddhartha Gautama Buddha had an idea. He thought that you could get off the wheel of reincarnation if you were good and pure enough. He refused to be a prince anymore, and tried to spend his life being good and pure so he could get off the wheel. Gautama Buddha had many followers during his lifetime, and after he died he had even more. Most of Buddha's followers tried to be good while still living their normal lives - working in the fields or as soldiers, getting married, taking care of their parents and their children. But some of his followers adopted a Jain idea of getting away from the world so they could work full-time on being good and pure. These people were called monks or nuns

• In the 300’s BC, one of the great Mauryan kings, Asoka, became a Buddhist, which helped Buddhism to succeed. Asoka convinced many other Indian people to become Buddhists.

Asoka

• At first, most Buddhists were in India. But soon Buddhism spread to China and other parts of East Asia. By the 600’s AD most of the Buddhists in India had gone back to being Hindus again. They still remembered Buddha, but as one of many Hindu gods.

• In China, on the other hand, Buddhism got stronger and stronger. Soon most of the Buddhists were in China and not India. In China, as in India, most Buddhist people continued to lead more or less ordinary lives, but some Buddhist men and women left their jobs and their families in order to live in Buddhist monasteries as monks or nuns.

ConfucianismConfucius' main interest was to figure out ways for

the government to do a better job of taking care of the people. He lived in China during the 500's BC, under the Eastern Chou dynasty. Confucius Confucius (conn-FYU-shuss) is what English speakers call him now, but when he was a child his name was Kong Qiu. In Chinese, Confucius is Kung Fu Tzu. He was born in 551 BC, and his parents were poor, although his family had once been rich. They had gotten into trouble with the emperor, and he had taken away their money and their land.

Confucius

• Confucius, people say, was a smart and hard-working child, and when he grew up people said he was fair, and polite, and loved to learn things, and so his family sent him to the big city, to Zhou, where the Chou emperor lived, to go to school. While he was in Zhou, Confucius may have gotten to know Lao Zu, who was later on the creator of the philosophy of Taoism

Lao Zu

• When Confucius finished school, he went back to his home in Lu and became a teacher there. When he was 35 years old, he tried to get involved in politics, and maybe get the Duke of Lu to give him some land and money, but when this idea didn't work out Confucius went back to being a teacher. He did work for a while as a city magistrate and then as a chief minister of his city, Lu, when he was about fifty, but when he saw that the Duke of Lu was not doing a good job, Confucius quit and left his city.

• Confucius spent the rest of his life travelling from town to town around China with his students and friends, giving advice to different rulers wherever he went. Often they didn't like his advice: once he was thrown in jail for five days! When he was 67, Confucius went back to Lu and settled down there, and he died there when he was 72 years old.

• Here's an example of a story people told about Confucius:

• Zi Lu, they say, asked Confucius, "When we hear a good idea, should we start to do it right away?" Confucius told him no. "First, you should always ask someone with more experience." Later on, Ran You asked Confucius the same question. But this time Confucius said, "Yes, of course you should do it right away." There was another student who had heard both of these conversations and was very confused. He asked Confucius why he had answered the same question in two different ways?

• "Ran You has a hard time making a decision," Confucius said. "So I encouraged him to be bolder. Zi Lu sometimes decides things too quickly. So I reminded him to be careful. Naturally different people should get different answers. "

Wednesday

• N&O Scavenger Hunt

• Video– Hinduism– Background Information

– Complete video quiz

Caste System

• The first scriptural reference to the caste system is found in the Rig Veda. It speaks of four social orders: the Brahmans or priests; the Kshatriyas or princes, rulers and warriors; the Vashyas, or traders and merchants; and the Shudras, or serfs.

• In modern times, caste has come to be divided not into four groups, but into several thousand linguistic and regional subgroups. One’s caste is acquired by birth and determines what profession one may follow and whom one may marry.

• Much of the idea behind the caste system has to do with a sense or hierarchy and beliefs about purity and pollution. The Brahmans are at the top of the hierarchy and follow the strictest rules, for they must be pure to serve to gods. For example, it is believed that a Brahman may be polluted by contact with one of a lower caste, or even by eating food prepared by one of a lower caste.

• Modern Hind reformers have all taken the view that case is a purely social phenomenon. While the caste system is in fact still strongly tied to religious aspects of Hinduism, the increasing political power of some of the lower casts has helped to improve their social and economic standing.

Membership in the Hindu Faith

• Traditional Hindus believe that one must be born into the faith. Based on the laws of dharma and karma, if on is intended to he a Hindu, one will be born into a Hindu family in order to follow one’s dharma, otherwise it it is not one’s karma to be Hindu. At the same time, the flexibility of modern Hinduism has allowed it to spread from India to other parts of the world.

Hinduism

• http://streaming.discoveryeducation.com/search/assetDetail.cfm?guidAssetID=9690B222-AEDB-4CD7-9D1E-2FA8719D1F19

Thursday

• N&O Scavenger Hunt

• Video– Buddhism

– Complete video quiz

Buddhism

• http://streaming.discoveryeducation.com/search/assetDetail.cfm?guidAssetID=1EE851F4-0FDF-4138-ADD5-7D611E5AAA3C

Friday

• N&O Scavenger Hunt

• Video– China From Past to Present– Crossword puzzle

– Complete video quiz

Confucianism

• http://streaming.discoveryeducation.com/search/assetDetail.cfm?guidAssetID=8D001064-8150-4F80-9F8A-F30B1BA5612B

References

• Kidipede. Hinduism. Retrieved 21 March 2008.

http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/india/religion/hinduism.htm

• Kidipede. Buddhism. Retrieved 21 March 2008 http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/india/religion/buddhism.htm

• Kidipede.Confucianism. Retrieved 21 March 2008

http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/china/philosophy/confucius2.htm

References

Ancient Lights Education Media (2004)United Streaming. China: From Past to Present. Part One: Geography, Traditional Religions, and Beliefs.

Delphi Productions (2000) United StreamingBuddhism

Delphi Productions (2001) United StreamingHinduism.