Talk:Ganesha beyond Hinduism

Thank you for starting a page on this interesting topic. It will be a good addition. I notice that so far you have only provided a couple of links to web pages as documentation. Would you mind if I add a few book citations, which are considered to be more reliable sources? This would be a good page to expand and use good sources from the beginning. Buddhipriya 20:29, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Title for the article
I think the title should be changed to: Ganesha beyond India. The issue is that most of the reviews of his wide appeal organize their material around discussions of how Hindus outside of India brought Ganesha with them as they continued to practice Hinduism in countries outside of India, while at the same time he became incorporated into other religions that were indiginous to the country where the Hindu migrants were going. The effect of Hindu ex-migration from India was a factor, particularly driven by trade routes. This migration by trade routes is a central theory in Thapan's book on the history of Ganesha. What do you think? Also, there could be other pages for several subtopics such as Ganesha in Buddhism. There is quite a bit just on that. I just did a quick literature review and most of the authors seem to have organized their material by country (or region) unless they focus on the Buddhism angle. Buddhipriya 19:52, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Buddha as Ganesha's Avatar
Another editor added that section and cited an interpretation by Bhaskararaya, using a reference which I had provided on another page. It is interesting to see the citation reappear here, but I am not sure if it is put in proper context for the subject of this page. The Bhaskaraya commentary was intended to serve the needs of the Hindu Ganapatya community, which considers Ganesha to be the Supreme Deity. As such, all other manifestations of the divine are subsumed within him. So by interpreting the name Buddha as referring to an actual avatar, rather than the more general meaning of "Enlightened" Bhaskararaya was making a Hindu claim of assimilationism of the historical Buddha. I am not aware of any Buddhist source which makes this claim but I would be very interested to see if someone else knows of such a thing. Bhaskararaya himself seems to hedge on the claim because he gives the more literal alternate interpretion of the epithet as "his form is enlightment" in the beginning of the commentorial verse, a more general claim than the avatar assertion with which he follows. We don't want to suggest that Buddhists are making this claim. Here is Bhaskaraya's verse, correctly cited in the article, with a stab at translation (someone please provide alternatives, this is an interesting passage):

नित्यबुद्धस्वरूपत्वात् अविद्यावृत्तिनाशनः । "Eternally enlightened in form, he is the Destroyer of the currents of ignorance"

यद्वा जिनावतारत्वाद् बुद्ध इत्यभिधीयते ॥ १५ "Thus taking incarnation he is said to be Buddha"

Buddhipriya 23:03, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Use of web sites as sources
I looked at the following web site which is being used a reference to support the Janus section. The web site does not cite any reliable sources whatsoever and does not meet the Wiki standard as a reliable source. I am unable to find any academic support for the link to Janus in a quick literature search of standard books on Ganesha. Can this link, and similar links to unreferenced web content, be moved here to the talk page so these claims can be examined in a more systematic way?

http://www.niburu.nl/index.php?showarticle.php?articleID=15232

We are trying to improve the quality of sourcing on Hinduism articles and the extensive use of misinformation gotten through this sort of web site is a serious problem. Buddhipriya 17:49, 23 February 2007 (UTC)