Aṅgiras
c. 1450 BCE · Varanasi (Benares)
Legendary primordial seer; no historical dates. He gives his name to the Āṅgirasa hymns associated with the Atharvaveda and to a major Rigvedic priestly lineage. The early date is a stratum convention reflecting his archaic status; historicity is uncertain.
Aṅgiras is a legendary archaic seer and one of the Prajāpatis, regarded as the ancestor of the Āṅgirasa priestly family, whose name is bound up with the Atharvaveda (sometimes called Atharvāṅgirasaḥ). He appears in the Rigveda among the most ancient seers and in the Puranas as a mind-born son (mānasaputra) of Brahmā. He is traditionally counted among the Saptarṣis and named as the father of Bṛhaspati. The figure is mythic rather than historical.
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Varanasi (Benares)
We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.
About Varanasi (Benares)
Varanasi, also called Benares or Kashi, lies on the Ganges in Uttar Pradesh, northern India, and is among the world's oldest continuously inhabited cities. Once centre of the kingdom of Kashi, it is one of Hinduism's holiest places, known for its riverside ghats, its cremation grounds and the Kashi Vishwanath temple to Shiva. Just to the northeast lies Sarnath, where Buddhist tradition holds that the Buddha gave his first teaching, and tradition places the physician Sushruta, to whom the Sushruta Samhita is attributed, in the city. It has long been a seat of Sanskrit learning; the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Tarthang Tulku taught there in the 1960s.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Aṅgiras’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works
No works attributed in the corpus yet.