Kevin's Watch

A talk I had with amanibhavam in the name-poll made me think. amanibhavam sound like an Indian name. I don't know if it is a real word from Indian language. But it certainly rings like one.

Is the reverence the Ramen give to the Ranyhym inspired by the Indian treatment of cows? The Indians believe the cows have higher souls and revere them. They let them wander in their markets and sample the foods from the stalls as they will.

shadowbinding shoe wrote:A talk I had with amanibhavam in the name-poll made me think. amanibhavam sound like an Indian name. I don't know if it is a real word from Indian language. But it certainly rings like one.

Is the reverence the Ramen give to the Ranyhym inspired by the Indian treatment of cows? The Indians believe the cows have higher souls and revere them. They let them wander in their markets and sample the foods from the stalls as they will.

heheh....thats a good parallel, and if its true then just about the entire world is going to hell. can you imagine the land in a time when the people slaughtered Ranyhyn for meat? I believe SRD had lived in an eastern country for a period when he was a child so alot of the myths and beliefs from his childhood may have carried over to be sure, there is probably something about it in the GI

SRD lived in India. Hence his use of words like samadhi, turiya, and moksha. I never thought about it before, but yeah, amanibhavam sure sounds like one too. And yeah again, it could certainly be that the attitude toward cows there has something to do with the Ramen. We could hypothesize that SRD just made the cows into extraordinary creatures that nearly everyone would think worthy of such reverence.

Whenever I think of the Ramen, I'm always put in mind of the Native American plains culture - the great value put on horses, small clan/band family system, awareness and oneness with their natural surroundings.

I once did a search across the net on the meaning of amanibhavam (of course I did). It was not easy to find any reference outside SRD but I came across a definition that it is a state of mind, (one of the highest) stept towards enlightenment, a state where the mind is mostly/almost separated from the body. Sanskrit.

Brasidas wrote:Whenever I think of the Ramen, I'm always put in mind of the Native American plains culture - the great value put on horses, small clan/band family system, awareness and oneness with their natural surroundings.

So do I.

The things that I write are so important, people always agree with me twice...

Indeed! Well done, Brasidas! *bows*

Just glancing at the Map of the Land again, I might simply have been primed by the fact that the Plains of Ra and the Centre Plains figure so prominently; perhaps these names simply slipped into my subconscious all those years ago when I first read the books?

Brasidas wrote:Whenever I think of the Ramen, I'm always put in mind of the Native American plains culture - the great value put on horses, small clan/band family system, awareness and oneness with their natural surroundings.

I must agree with you...2x in fact because you hit it that nail square on the head

thank you, Blackhawk. I think I've always had the idea that the Ramen, the lords, the Woodhelvennin etc are all pretty much a 'western' culture (speaking in a very general sense, of course), though I've never had any sense of geographic racism from Donaldson as is often the case with other fantasy writers - bad things and people come from the east and south, the good stuff belongs to the west and north, that kind of thing.

Brasidas wrote:thank you, Blackhawk. I think I've always had the idea that the Ramen, the lords, the Woodhelvennin etc are all pretty much a 'western' culture (speaking in a very general sense, of course), though I've never had any sense of geographic racism from Donaldson as is often the case with other fantasy writers - bad things and people come from the east and south, the good stuff belongs to the west and north, that kind of thing.

well....all the invasions of the Land tended to come from the east (Foul's Creche)...the south was a desert.....the west mountainous plus home of the Haurachi and north....icy?