Talk:Yama in world religions

Yama

Yama ("Twin" or "Death") is the twin and counterpart (or dual) of Yamantaka ("Defeater of Death"). According to tradition, Yama (Death) was overdoing his role, and depopulating the earth. So, the "Compassionate Lord" (Shiva as Avalokiteshvara) assumed a form more terrible than Death; descended to Hell, and defeated and killed Lord Death himself. This Hindu myth is an instance of the worldwide myth of the dying-ressurecting god, of whom Jesus Christ is apparently a further instance. Other well-known instances comprise: Osiris, Tammuz, Attis, Adonis, Tlaloc, Kronus, and so forth.

Yamantaka originates within Buddhism, possibly derived from a Siva-cult in Udyana, brought to Nalanda in 9thCE. Yamantaka was not the twin of Yama. The myth of Yamantaka that may be referred to is probably not Hindu, as it deals with Yama's conversion (to Buddhism) and enlightenment, and it does not transpire as it is portrayed above. The actual myth says that, Yamantaka goes down to the realm of Yama (not hell), and defeats Yama and his followers who were then liberated by his power; they were not killed, but subdued; so this story is not cognate with the Osiris-myths. (20040302)

Picture caption?

Anyone else think it needs to be changed? I can't make head or tail of what it's saying... elvenscout742 09:44, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Uncommented pull by Lord Surya

"He is one of the most ancient mythological beings in the world and in parallel forms or another has also been found all over Eurasia. He is known as Yima by Zoroastrians, Jimmu in Japanese legend, and might be in origin cognate with Ymir of Norse legend."

Surya, why did you pull this? Do you think that Yama is exclusively Hindu? I do not wish an edit war here, but Yama is not exclusive to Hinduism, and the article is already pretty much Hindu POV. You want to accomodate Yama from other traditions, or disambiguate? (20040302 12:40, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC))

Well, he was first record in the Vedas. Without Hinduism, he wouldn't have transfered over to Buddhism. --Dangerous-Boy 05:01, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm no expert of mythology, but I'm fairly certain that in Japan he's known as Enma or Emma-o. I'll need to go and check this stuff out and see what else there is. Sweetfreek 00:55, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I agree. The Japanese one is a Chinese, Buddhist type figure, FYI. I would like to see some evidence to back up the claim that he is cognate with Jimmu Tennō, though. elvenscout742 09:51, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The etymological connections between Vedic Yama and Avestan Yima (>Persian Jamshid) are solid, though very ancient and divergent. There would not appear to be any connection, etymological or otherwise, between Ymir (where the "y" is a fronted "u", reflecting something like *umyos) and Yama (*yemos), or Yama and Jimmu (which is even more fanciful, considering the lack of any contact between Indo-European culture and Japan before the arrival of Buddhism). Yenluo, Emma-o, etc. are borrowings of the name of Yama from Buddhist tradition. I will remove the references to Ymir and Jimmu for lack of factual basis. RandomCritic 05:05, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

I was able to trace where the claimed (though dubious) etymological connection between Ymir and Yama came from, so I have restored a paragraph about Ymir, on a slightly sounder linguistic footing. RandomCritic 15:02, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Yama = Yima?

Yama and Yima seem to have little in common, other than three letters of their name. One is a god of the dead, the other is a mortal king and Noah-analogue. Can anybody provide any evidence that they might refer to the same being? --Spudtater 03:08, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

Yama is also the first mortal man and the first man to die. (20040302)

Vedic Yama is the son of Vivasvat. Avestan Yima is the son of Vivanghvat. Connect the dots. :) RandomCritic 07:48, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

I agree. However, there's a faction here that doesn't like to do that (20040302)

Merged

I merged Emma-o into this article. Emma-o was 90% fancruft, anyway, so very little new information has been added. If people want to purge the cruft from "In media", by all means have at it. — Amcaja 15:07, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Yama and Yanluo

We had three articles extant, Yama, Yanluo, and Yan Luo (Chinese mythology). I have merged the latter two, since they obviously had the exact same referent. There is some difference of opinion about merging Yama and Yanluo. (There is clearly no constituency for merging Yima and Yama, or Yama and Jamshid.) Since there is in any case a divergence between the Hindu Yama and the Buddhist Yama, and this article is mostly about the Hindu Yama, I suggest splitting off the Buddhist sections and merging Yanluo with them, leaving the main Yama article to be about the Hindu deity.RandomCritic 06:10, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

I feel it would be better to turn this into a general Yama page, and split off Yama (Hinduism) and Yama (Buddhism) from it, for refined articles. After all, there is a lot about Yama which is not specifically Hindu. This method has been used elsewhere (e.g. karma) (20040302)

This makes sense in principle, but as a practical matter, the large number of links going to "Yama" which are intended to link specifically to the Hindu god Yama makes this a difficult proposition -- they'd all have to be (ideally) revised to point to Yama (Hinduism).RandomCritic 12:39, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Ah - well things normally balance out when that happens. What happens if one actually moves this page to "Yama (Hinduism)", and then creates a new page "Yama" ? Or is a move actually a new page, with a redirect? (20040302)

If you move the page to "Yama (Hinduism)", then "Yama" becomes a redirect to "Yama (Hinduism)" and all of the history and discussion of "Yama" ends up at "Yama (Hinduism)". You can't create a new "Yama" page because there already will be one redirecting to "Yama (Hinduism)"; and if you edit that to be a survey article, it is still the target of all the links to "Yama".

There's probably a way, with bots or something similar, to find all of the existing links to "Yama" and change them to "Yama (Hinduism)" without going through each page one by one; but that would miss the handful of pages that ought to link directly to a generic Yama page. Either way, I don't know how to do it.RandomCritic 21:34, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

Ok - well, there is a what links here link in the navigation, which probably does all that is necessary. I still feel it's pretty sensible to spawn off a Yama (Hinduism) article. (20040302)

Yama and Yama (Hinduism)

I have executed the move to split Yama and Yama (Hinduism). I corrected most of the links, including those that wanted to refer to Yamas; generic links still point to the central article. As I have made about 60 changes, it's likely to draw some attention. (20040302 00:23, 8 May 2006 (UTC))

Good job! I think I've taken care of the balance of the links.RandomCritic 19:37, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

The picture

Would it be possible to find a picture of the Hindu Yama for this page instead of a picture of the Tibetan one? RandomCritic 12:39, 6 May 2006 (UTC) The Picture of Yama in Tibet looks like Mahakala, not Yama. Yama is usually brown and bull-headed - often holding the wheel of life. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kbaillie (talk • contribs) 16:28, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

okami

the main protagonist in ookami was yami not yama. The ultimate samurai (talk) 22:46, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Yama (Buddhism) & the issue of twin death-gods

There's no need to re-invent the wheel on this one:

D.P.P.N. by Gunapala_Piyasena_Malalasekera already wrote a concise "encyclopedia" entry on Yama in canonical Theravada Buddhist sources:

http://www.palikanon.com/namen/y/yama.htm

It seems to me slightly odd that the article currently mentions exclusively etymological arguments for Yama being twofold, rather than actual myths/texts that describe him/them as two persons ("twins" or otherwise). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.24.90.89 (talk) 20:47, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Yama and Yudhishthira

Yama and Dharma are the same, right? Yama is the lord of death, and for dispensing justice and truth, Yama is also called Dharma.

Then, in the article, why is there NO mention of Yudhishthira from The Mahabharata being the son of Yama?

Thanks 59.184.183.47 (talk) 18:49, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

Since when are they the same? Dharma is a concept, Yama is a deity. 42.60.220.184 (talk) 06:05, 20 August 2015 (UTC)

Version Incompatability

"God of sound and version"? This makes no sense. "Version" is not a noun which can stand on its own; it is not a "thing" the way sound is a "thing". You have "a" version "of" something else. The author of this phrase was likely a non-native English speaker. Can someone translate? 152.130.14.7 (talk) 14:05, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

I have reverted this edit. Please see [1]. JimRenge (talk) 14:53, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

I have just seen this, and I rather like it (not that it's suitable for WP). (etymonline):″Version, 1580s, "a translation, that which is rendered from another language," from Middle French 'version', from Medieval Latin versionem (nominative versio) "a turning, a translation," from past participle stem of Latin vertere "to turn, turn back, be turned; convert, transform, translate; be changed" (from PIE root *wer- (2) "to turn, bend"). Also with a Middle English sense of "destruction.". So, in some way, Yama is indeed a god of version. (20040302 (talk) 07:04, 20 November 2018 (UTC))

Finno-Ugric thing removed

I've removed the section at the end that stipulates Yama was taken into Finno-Ugric and Hungarian mythologies. This is terrible, old-fashioned research of the type that tries to connect completely different deities and cultures just because they sound alike. Yama has nothing to do with the Juma/Jumala of the Finno-Ugric peoples, for whom that's just the generic name of the highest deity (in modern Finnish, "Jumala" still means "God"). These languages are not related to Sanskrit and the name/deity has nothing whatsoever to do with Yama. Whoever wrote the book cited knows nothing about these mythologies; it's as ridiculous as the old Kalma=Kali error (another connection that doesn't exist).--Snowgrouse (talk) 18:21, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

@Snowgrouse: There is always a danger in ridiculing the ignorance of others - and it is rather unnecessary even in the cases where one has vastly superior knowledge compared to the other.

In this case, I am not an expert, but an interested amateur. I have looked at various treatises of Uralic and of Finno-Ugrian linguistic history, and they seem to agree on some points. They of course agree that the Finno-Ugrian languages are not of Indo-European origin (and most of them agree that their closest relatives are the Samoyedic languages, while others suggest other groupings within the Uralic languages). However, they also agree that they have borrowed a tangible part of their vocabulary from Indo-European languages, and among others from some rather early form of Iranian, or from Proto-Indo-Iranian or even from Proto-Indo-European. These old theories are not abandoned by more modern linguists; instead, they are used not only to gain knowledge about Uralic developments, but also about Indo-European features and origin.

Our article Proto-Uralic homeland hypotheses give numerous references to this type of use, e.g., <ref>Koivulehto, Jorma 1991: Koivulehto, Jorma 1991: Uralische Evidenz für die Laryngaltheorie. Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-Historische Klasse. Sitzungsberichte, 566. Band. Wien 1991.</ref>, where the title indicates that the reconstructions of the acknowledgedly borrowed old Indo-European lonewords in Uralic languages support the existence of certain laryngals in Proto-Indo-European, and the on line reference to Häkkinen, Jaakko 2012: Uralic evidence for the Indo-European homeland, which I recommend you.

Note, that Häkkinen mentions that the Uralic languages borrowed the term Asura to a reconstructed word *asira, meaning "lord, prince" or "hero". Since the sense of the loan word was positive, it should have been borrowed from a word for "god" rather than one for "demon". Thus it should either be a rather early borrowing, or borrowed from the Iranian branch of the Aryan language family.

Conclusions: It is not very smart to reject a suggested etymology of Jumala from Yama on the ground that this is ridiculous since the Finno-Ugrian languages did not derive from Sanskrit. The suggestion is in line with established opinions about some early contacts and borrowings between these distinct language group speakers. It is not more ridiculous than the well-established derivation of the common Finno-Ugric word for a hundred from a satem language. Therefore, the suggestion you removed should be accepted or rejected on its own merits, not as being obviously ridiculous.

On the other hand, "its own merits" may not be very great. I followed the reference you removed together with the text. The argument was rather short, and the author had even not discovered her typo in the Finnish word jumala (god), whence I suspect that she does not know any Finnish. She refers to I. M. Steblin-Kamensky, and I think that if we want to discuss the suggested etymology seriously, then we should try to find and read that source instead.

However, without doing that, a weaker form of the note should be left in the article. I therefore am going to restore the section, and just relativise it a little.

Oh, and by the way, I suppose that when you write Finno-Ugric and Hungarian mythologies, you just were a bit hasty, since Hungarian in itself is classified as one of the Finno-Ugric languages. JoergenB (talk) 16:20, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

I'm astonished anyone would even turn this into an argument and imply I was being rude for removing it; that's how absurd the statement is. As to your theories of early contact, a few loanwords regarding numbers do not a multi-language, multi-tribe, multi-nation religious practice make. It's exactly because the statement is sweepingly racist and belittling in a Victorian kind of way that it raises my hackles--the source quoted lumps dozens of different languages and peoples, over a vast geographical area, over millenia, into merely folks who adopted a Sanskrit death god's cult because the name of their sky god sounds a bit similar. And I'm not even a specialist in Finnish mythology, but I know the very basics--I am talking schoolkid basics from a Finnish perspective, the kind of basic thing we're taught as kids, really simple stuff. (And yes, Hungarian goes under Finno-Ugric; I was referring to the phrasing from before.) But whoever added the statement has not even bothered to investigate the mythologies in question. Juma(la) was the sky god, he was the main god, analogous to the other boss gods in other mythologies (and whose name was given to the Christian god in Finland later on), whereas Yama is more of a specialist death god with very specific duties in East and South Asian mythologies. There's still some worship being given to him by the Mari in their forests, which is vastly different to, say, Finnish Lutherans calling the Biblical Yahweh by the same term. But according to this statement, those same Mari who sacrifice goats in the woods and the same Finns who pray to Yahweh under that name in an ugly white church and Estonian pagans who pour booze to honour the big guy in the sky all participate in a Sanskrit death god cult. See why I call it ridiculous? It's like trying to conflate Yama with, say, Zeus, and saying that the Greeks took Zeus's cult from Yama because there's a tenuous connection with the sky somewhere--hey, Yama is a daeva, and that's cognate with Dyaus/Deus/Zeus! We've got it! Clearly the very same god and the very same cult and all the peoples who ever worshipped him saw him the same way. Because who cares about all those funny little tribes in ancient times and/or in the middle of nowhere, right? All the same.

So when I call it ridiculous, I stand by that, and I am also calling it belittling and ignorant of the cultures in question, in a way that'd be unacceptable and considered racist when discussing any "bigger" nations and mythologies today. But you know what? I'm not even an expert on Finnish mythology the same way someone else here might be, so I'm not armed with the kinds of books that'd be the best thing to cite here. Because if we get into the point where this gets made into an argument--and I really hope it won't get into that--where the Finno-Ugric side would have to try and *disprove* the Yama fringe theory--of course, this side would lose because the theory is so fringe there's probably very little even being written about it. What do you actually want as proof that this is a wacky and dated theory? What would convince you? Because I know my saying "look, I'm Finnish and we learned about this stuff in school and even by schoolkid-level knowledge I know this is bizarre and absurd and bugger-all to do with what we know of Juma(la)" isn't a reliable source. Of course it's not, but I doubt we'll find an academic willing to write an book refuting the Yama theory because someone's dug an old theory up on Wikipedia. Personally I'm baffled that anyone's even taken issue with me having removed a theory as far off as that--even the material you can find on Juma(la) in general (which, admittedly, still has bizarre theories clinging to it as well because it's not been studied enough) should be enough to show why. Will that be enough proof? Just looking up Jumala or Juma?

Because right now, that section does nothing except disseminate a wildly inaccurate theory with no knowledge of Finno-Ugric mythology as truth, and as such, should be removed. Just as my adding the above example of "hey, Zeus is really Yama" into the Zeus article would be deleted, even if I found one old book sharing the crackpot theory.

And if you'll excuse me, I've now got to go and read some medieval Hindu poems where the poet claps his hands at Death because his devotion has saved him from Death, while simultaneously visualising Death as an old Odin-type guy on a cloud who likes bonfires and people getting drunk as skunks in his name.Snowgrouse (talk) 21:22, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

I'll try to answer some of your remarks pointwise:

• The theories of early contacts between ancient Finno-Ugric speakers and ancient Indo-European speakers are not "my" theories. As I stated, I'm an amateur; but I find those theories in modern works by linguistic experts (also Finnish ones, see the references above), which is what we use to call "reliable sources".
• The source from 2007 is not "old". It quotes a publication by this Steblin-Kamensky from 1995, which thus is slightly older. (There is another obvious misprint in the source, writing 1955, but as you can see from the bibliography S.-K. didn't write any quoted article then, but indeed wrote one about Ugaric Yima cult in 1995.)
• I've now checked the given source carefully. It does not suggest that 'jumala' is derived from Sanskrit, and nor that the Proto-Finno-Ugrians turned a Vedic death god to a sky god. The source claims that S.-K. claims that they took over the name and cult of Yima, the ancestor god and legendary first king of the Proto-Iranians; possibly picked up at an arlier stage, before the separation of the Proto-Indo-Aryans into an Indian and an Iranian branch. (Yima is the Avestan name form; the form Yama is attested in other old Iranian languages.) This may be a reason to move the lemma to the Yima subclause, since this is not a suggestion of another independent variant, but rather a "subvariant" of the Yima one. I'll do that.
• I find nothing racist in the idea that our ancestors had other ideas than we have of many things. It is closer to racism to believe that ancient Finno-Ugrians could not pick up ideas from ancient Indo-Europeans, or the other way around. There has been tries to identify languages or language groups with separate kinds of people or "nations", and that often was (at least to some extent) racist. It also is refuted by the fact that people's genetic relationships and the linguistic relationships of their languages do not at all coincide.

However, there could be racism involved, if one believes that there only could have been one-directed flows of ideas (and words), from the "superior" kind of people to the "inferior" one. Is it this kind of theories you fear here? I do not think so. Note, that many linguists seem to think that the Proto-Finno-Ugric word for "a hundred" was picked up from Proto-Indo-Iranian. On the other hand, some linguists have suggested that the Sanskrit word for "one" was picked up from some Finno-Ugric language. Since numerals seemingly often are more preserved than other words, borrowing them might indicate some very close contact, but nothing like racism.

Another thing is whether the "early contacts" only resulted in the Proto-Finno-Ugrian picking up a few loan words, or also resulted in a more substantial exchange of ideas. Personally, I sometimes think that philologists overestimate the importance of the appearance of a borrowed word. However, my private opinions has no bearing on what we should put into the articles.

I sometimes find it rather frustrating to "know" that some (sourced) stuff in some wp article is wrong, but without having reliable sources for it. (See the next section for an example!) Thus, I understand your frustration. However, the stuff about "jumula" and joma (added here) is reasonably well sourced, from a "modern and reliable scolarly source". It is also not ridicuously impossible, in view of other knowledge. What we can do (and what I did) was to criticise the way the source was used. I'll also move it under the Yima subclause, for the reasons given above. JoergenB (talk) 14:51, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Cognates

@RandomCritic: A very long time ago, you relativised the claim that Yama and Ymir were cognates, here. Now, I have no complaint about this in itself (quite apart from the reasonable prescription time for wp edits:-). However, I wonder if you still have access to the source you refer to, namely, Meid, W., 1992, Die Germanische Religion im Zeugnis der Sprache. In Beck et al., Germanische Religionsgeschichte – Quellen und Quellenprobleme, pp. 486-507. New York, de Gruyter, and if you could check one point there.

The point is this: You formulated your change as if the hypothesis of common etymological roots of Yama and Ymir had been first formulated in that work by Meid. However, I hear this being mentioned as a fact in my childhood, and I was born in 1950. In fact my mother had studied history of religion in her youth, and when I as early teenager showed an interest of this subject, she told me a lot of interesting stuff - some of which even may have been correct:-). My mother was quite inspired by the theories of Dumézil, which I think were quite dominant in the times of her studies. She claimed that there very often were close relationships between mythological "protohumans" and underworld kings; I believe she also was thinking about the Osiris myths, but do not remember her mentioning it at the time. I have later read more modern books about Indoeuropean languages and Protoindoeuropean reconstructions, which are much more restrictive in recognising cognates and inferring facts about the Protoindoeuropean society and beliefs from them.

(On the other hand, I do not recall that my mother ever referred to Protoindoeuropean twin myths. I have seen some mention of this in more recent literature - including one which also considers the twin pair Romulus and Remus, and actually implicitly seems to consider Remus as originating from a cognate to Yama, but with a changed initial consonant, in order to alliterate with the ethnonymic Romulus.)

Now, of course, I do not consider my memories of what my mother told me half a century ago as a reliable Wikipedia source. However, if you have access to Meid's article, could you then please check whether the author claims to have discovered these cognates, or more seems to be referring to an hypothesis which has been around for a while? I also think that this reference should be re-added to the article; your in-line reference to Meid remains since your edits in protowikipedian times:-), but not the information about the actual source. JoergenB (talk) 19:07, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Yama (Hinduism) which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 13:32, 24 December 2023 (UTC)