Some of the intellectual
celebraties in the world of the
West and the East had the following things
to say about Hinduism:
201.Professor Kakuzo Okakura (1862 -1913) a Japanese philosopher, art expert, curator and author of The Book of Tea and The Ideals of the East, with Special Reference to the Art of Japan says
"We catch a glimpse of the great river of science which never ceases to flow in
Okakura adds that in this scientific age:
"Such a faith in its early energy and enthusiasm was the natural incentive to that great scientific age which was to produce astronomers like Aryabhatta, discovering the revolution of the earth on its own axis, and his not less illustrious successor Varamihira; who brought Hindu medicine to its height, perhaps under Susruta; and which finally gave to Arabia the knowledge with which she was later to fructify Europe.
The religion and culture of
(source: The Ideals of the East, with Special Reference to the Art of Japan - By Kakuzo Okakura ISBN 4925080261).
Asia is one,” says Okakura “The Himalayas
divide only to unite."
(source: The Heritage of Asia - By Kenneth Saunders p.24 1932
Student Christian Movement Press)
202. Sir Michael Sadler (1861-1943) authority on education, wrote in
1919: "One cannot walk through the streets of any center of population in India without meeting face after face which is eloquent of thought, of fine feeling, and of insight into the profound things of life. In a very true sense the people of
(source: India and British Imperialism - By Gorham D. Sanderson p. 49).
203. Dr. Arthur Versluis (1959 - ) Associate Professor of American Thought and Language at
"It is necessary that we turn to the Vedanta....because the Upanishads provide the purest metaphysics available to us from the primordial past."
(source: The Egyptian Mystery - By Arthur Versluis SBN 014019018X).
204. Count Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) was a Belgian writer of poetry and a wide variety of essays. He won the 1911 Nobel Prize for literature. In his book Mountain Paths, in the doctrine of Karma, he finds "the only satisfactory solution of life's injustices."
"he falls back upon the earliest and greatest of Revelations, those of the Sacred Books of
(source: Mountain Paths - By Maurice Maeterlinck ISBN 1589632532).
Maeterlinck writes in his book The Great Secret pages 26-98:
"We cannot tell how the religion of the Hindus came into being. When we become aware of it, we find it already complete in its broad outlines, its main principles. Not only is it complete, but the farther back we go, the more perfect it is, the more unadulterated, the more closely related to the loftiest speculations of our modern agnosticism."
"When the world had emerged from the darkness," says the Bhagavata Puranam, "the subtle elementary principle produced the vegetable seed which first of all gave life to the plants. From the plants, life passed into the fantastic creatures which were born of the slime in the waters; then, through a series of different shapes and animals, it came to Man." They passed in succession by way of the plants, the worms, the insects, the serpents, the tortoises, cattle, and the wild animals - such is the lower stage," says Manu again, who adds, "Creatures acquired the qualities of those that preceded them, so that the farther down its position in the series, the greater its qualities.
"Have we not here the whole of Darwinian evolution confirmed by geology and foreseen at least 6,000 years ago? On the other hand, is this not the theory of Akasa which we more clumsily call the ether, the sole source of all substances, to which our science is returning? Is it true that the recent theories of Einstein deny ether, supposing that radiant energy - visible light, for example - is propagated independently through a space that is an absolute void. But the scientific ether is not precisely the Hindu Akasa which is much more subtle and immaterial being a sort of spiritual element or divine energy, space uncreated, imperishable, and infinite."
Commenting on the Vedic hymns Maseterlinck says:
"Is it possible to find, in our human annals, words more majestic, more full of solemn anguish, more august in tone, more devout, more terrible? Where, from the depths of an agnosticism, which thousands of years have augmented, can we point to a wider horizon? At the very outset, it surpasses all that has been said, and goes farther than we shall even dare to go. No spectacle could be more absorbing than this struggle of our forefathers of five to ten thousand years ago with the Unknowable, the unknowable nature of the causeless Cause of all Causes. But of this cause, or this God, we should never have known anything, had He remained self-absorbed, had He never manifested Himself." Thus it is, say the Laws of Manu, "that, by an alternation of awakening and repose, the immutable Being causes all this assemblage of creatures, mobile and immobile, eternally to return to life and to die." He exhales Himself, or expels His breath, throughout the Universe, innumerable worlds are born, multiply and evolve. He Himself inhales, drawing His breath, and Matter enters into Spirit, which is but an invisible form of Matter: and the worlds disappear, without perishing, to reintegrate the Eternal cause, and emerge once more upon the awakening of Brahma - that is, thousands of millions of years later; to enter into Him so it has been and ever shall be, through all eternity, without beginning, without cessation, without end."
(source: Ancient Indian Education - By Radha Kumud Mookerji p.17 and 49 ISBN 8120804236).
Maeterlinck in his book The Great Secret, calls The Bhagavad Gita or "Song of the Blessed" a magnificent flower of Hindu mysticism.
(source: The Great Secret - By Maurice Maeterlinck ASIN 0806511559 p. 14).
205. John Adam Cramb (1862-1913) author of The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain says:
"India is not only the Italy of Asia, it is not only the land of romance of art and beauty, it is in religion, earth's central shrine.
(source: Ancient Indian Culture At A Glance - By Swami Tattwananda p.76)
206. James Bissett Pratt (1875-1944) American author of Why Religions Die and India and its Faiths, makes these observations about Hinduism, which according to him, is the only religion which tends to survive the present crisis in the life of all religions.
Hinduism, which he calls the "
Unlike other religions "not death, but development" has been the fate of Hinduism. "that which in it was vital and true cast off the old shell and clothed itself in more suitable expression, with no break in the continuity of life and no loss in the sanctity and weight of its authority." Generalizing on the secret of longevity of the Vedic religion, Professor Pratt says: "If a religion is to live it must adapt itself to new and changing conditions; if it is to feed the spiritual life of its children, it must have the sensitivity and inventiveness that shall enable it to modify their as their needs demand."
Another secret of the vitality of Hindu religion, is its catholicity. He says: "Mutually contradictory creeds can and do keep house together without quarrel within the wide and hospitable Hindu family." "Hindu thought....because of its ingrained conclusiveness, its tolerance, and its indifference to doctrinal divergences, stressed the essential unity of all Indian Dharmas, whether Hindu or Buddhist, and minimized differences."
(source: Why Religions Die - By James Bissett Pratt Berkeley.
"For most Westerners “histories of
philosophy” begin with the Greeks and end with the Americans, and convey not
the least suggestion that anyone outside of the West ever had a philosophical
idea. A glance at the curricula of most our colleges and universities would
seem to indicate that the one principle on which they are planned might be
phrased: nothing east of Suez China nor Japan
(source: Vedanta for Modern Man - Edited by Christopher Isherwood
p. 41 - 43).
207. William Harten Gilbert (1904 - ) author of Peoples of India has said: "In the history of human culture the contribution of the Indian peoples in all fields has been of the greatest importance. From India we are said to have derived domestic poultry, shellac, lemons, cotton, jute, rice, sugar, indigo, the buffalo, cinnamon, ginger, pepper, sugar-cane, the games of chess, Pachisi, Polo, the Zero concept, the decimal system, the basis of certain philological concepts, a wealth of fables with moral import, an astonishing variety of artistic products, and innumerable ideas in philosophy and religion such as asceticism and monasticism."
(source: Peoples of India - By William Harten Gilbert)
208. Arun Shourie (1941- ) is a Rajya Sabha member and among
Shourie writes:
"The traditions of
(source: Missionaries in India - By Arun Shourie 1994 - ISBN 8172232705 p. 41-43). For more on Arun Shourie refer to chapter GlimpsesVII and Conversion).
209. Prof. Brian David Josephson (1940 - ) Welsh physicist, the youngest Nobel Laureate has said:
"The Vedanta and the Sankhya hold the key to the laws of mind and thought process which are co-related to the Quantum Field, i.e. the operation and distribution of particles at atomic and molecular levels."
"He has turned to meditation and Indian Philosophy especially the Vedanta and Smakhya philosophy to find" scientific explanations" for the laws of mind and thought processes and their correlation to the quantum field in physics, which deals with creation and destruction of particles at atomic and molecular levels. 'Indian philosophy shows the relationship between mind and matter. Mind as seen in Indian philosophy enables one to describe subjective reality or the process of decision making as a wave function in terms of quantum physics".
Samkhya and Vedanta propound the evolution of universe in it inanimate and animate aspects, more comprehensively than modern science does. Vedananta derives it from primal Divine Energy or Sakti and Samkhya from proto-Nature or Prakriti.
(source: Science and Vedanta - By H. M. Ganesh Rao and Mera Bharat Mahan).
210. Michael Wood (1948 - ) British historian/host/writer of The Barbarian West public TV documentary. At the heart of the Western Civilization, says Wood, lies a deep streak of violence which drives them to exploit nature and mankind.
"Usually it is said that the East is hopelessly backward and needs to catch up with the West. But, a consideration of the legacy of these great civilizations suggests, says wood, that the West has some catching up to do. It needs to learn from the East a way of cultivating its inner space, of accepting limits and desires in an increasingly finite world. "In the past 200 years one form of civilization, that of the West, has changed the balance of nature for ever. And now it is civilization itself which has become a central problem of our world."
Taking the Eastern perspective of life, Wood leads us through Western history from its Greco/Roman beginnings to Sir Francis Bacon's and momentous treatise declaring science's supremacy over God. Wood says this is where the West really got off-track, into matter, away from spirit. Final frames of this uncomplimentary portrait of Western societies-and their claims of superiority over Eastern cultures-are cuts from NASA spaceships to a worship scene in Meenaskhi temple,
He forcefully appreciates
"History is full of empires of the sword, but
"
"Ancient
(source: India: Empire of the Spirit - Michael Wood, quoted from program 2 of the television documentary "Legacy")
211.
"Hindu mythology is virtually a large scale projection into the psychological realm of microscopic scientific discoveries." "The Wu Li Masters know that physicists are doing more than 'discovering the endless diversity of nature.' They are dancing with Kali, the Divine Mother of Hindu mythology."
(source: The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An overview of the new physics ASIN 0553249142).
212. Dr. Koenraad Elst (1959 -) Dutch historian, born in
During a stay at the
An strong advocate for Hindu revivalism in the West. He writes:
"The struggle of Hindu society is not primarily with the Muslim community. The most important opponents of Hindu society today are not the Islamic communal leaders, but the interiorized colonial rulers of
"The Hindu fight is not at all with Muslims; the fight is between Hindus anxious to renew themselves in the spirit of their civilization, and the state, Indian in name and not in spirit and the political and intellectual class trapped in the debris the British managed to bury us under before they left."
"The worst torment for Hindu society today is this mental slavery, this sense of inferiority which Leftist intellectuals, through their power positions in education and the media, and their direct influence on the public and political arena, keep on inflicting on the Hindu mind."
"Pride in being Indian means, for 99%, pride in Hinduism. So, this legitimate pride has to be nourished with broad and in-depth knowledge of Hindu culture. The two enemies of this effort are the pseudo-secularist morbidity that glorifies the destroyers of Hindu culture, and discourages its study altogether..."
"Most Western scholars positively dislike Hinduism when it stands up to defend itself. They prefer museum Hinduism, or innocent Gandhian kind of Hinduism, and they readily buy the secularist story that an assertive Hinduism is not the “real Hinduism”.
(source: Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society - By Koenraad Elst p. vi - vii and p. 83 and 356. Voice of
Elst notes that Eastern philosophy has appeal in the West these days because ‘‘of their aura of rationality and the absence of a conflict between science and religion as there is in Islam or Christianity.’’
(source: Elst probes, discovers India for himself - newindpress.com).
"Hinduism applauds diversity and consequently accepts that people of different temperaments, circumstances and levels of understanding develop different viewpoints and different forms to express even the same view point. In that sense, it has always paid equal respect to shramanas and brahmanas, to jnana and bhakti etc. It showed samabhava to all traditions which counted as dharma. This respect was never extended to adharma practices and doctrines such as Christianity and Islam, the religions for whose benefit the slogan is used mostly."
"The fundamental mistake of Indian secularism is that Hinduism is put in the same category as Islam and Christianity. Islam and Christianity's intrinsic irrationality and hostility to independent critical thought warranted secularism as a kind of containment policy. By contrast, Hinduism recognizes freedom of thought and does not need to be contained by secularism. "
"Historically, Hindus have quickly recognized Islam and missionary Christianity as mleccha, barbaric predatory religions, not as instances of dharma to which any respect is due. Until Swami Dayananda Saraswati, they didn't even consider these religions as worthy of a detailed critique."
"Christianity and Islam are wrong in their central truth claims and can immediately be discarded. Humanity has lived without these pretentious doctrines for long, and that it is a matter of mathematical certainty that it will resume doing so. The question is only how much damage they will be allowed to add to their record before expiring." "A very optimistic objection could be that Hindu society need not bother about Christianity and Islam, because the thrust of their historical aggression against Hinduism is weakening and will weaken further in the future. It has happened before; while Communists were plotting the death of Hinduism and the dismemberment of India, the Hindutva movement did very little to counter Communism, yet Communism collapsed under its own failure in its very stronghold."
(source: Bharatiya Janata Party vis-a-vis Hindu Resurgence - By Koenraad Elst p. 9-142)
"The Hindu revivalist movement perceives itself as the cultural chapter of
(source: Decolonising The Hindu Mind - Ideological Development of Hindu Revivalism - By Koenraad Elst Rupa & Co. January 2001 ISBN 8171675190 p. 10).
He advocates the intellectual mobilization of Hindu society. He has observed: "Consider the situation in
(source: Negationism in India: Concealilng the Record of Islam - By Koenraad Elst Voice of
"Hindu tradition is based on the
experience of sages, sane men and women who observed the world and explored
consciousness. Its approach is scientific: the Vedic truths are verifiable, universal
and repeatable, not dependent on the views of privileged individuals
(“prophets”) but apaurusheya, “impersonal”."
(source: Bharatiya Janata Party vis-a-vis Hindu Resurgence - By
Koenraad Elst p. 145 -146). For more refer to Koenraad Elst site.
213. Edmund Burke (1729-1797) British statesman, parliamentary orator
and political thinker, played a prominent part in all major political issues
for about 30 years after 1765, and remained an important figure in the history
of political theory. In all his speeches in Parliament on India - those made in connection with his Impeachment of Warren Hastings and others - Edmund Burke invariably represented the civilization of India as high. In his speech on the
"This multitude of men (the Indian nation) does not consist of an abject and barbarous populace, much less of gangs of savages; but of a people for ages civilized and cultivated; cultured by all the arts of polished life while we (Englishmen) were yet dwelling in the woods. There have been in (
(source: India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom - By Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland p. 325).
214. Fredrick von Schiller (1759-1805) was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's friend, who otherwise took little interest in Indian literature, was also moved to enthusiastic praise of Shakuntala, which he found in some respects un paralled in the classical literature of Greece and Rome. He published part of the Shakuntala in Thalia, and in a letter to Wilhelm von Humboldt he wrote that:
"in the whole of Greek antiquity there is no poetical representation of beautiful love which approaches Sakuntala even afar."
(source: India and World Civilization - By D. P. Singhal Pan Macmillan Limited. 1993 ASIN 0870131435 p. 230-231).
215. H. M. Hyndman (1842-1921) the eminent British publicist thus describes the important place of
"Many hundreds of years before the coming of the English, the nations of India had been a collection of wealthy and highly civilized people, possessed of a great language with an elaborate code of laws and social regulations, with exquisite artistic taste in architecture and decoration, producing beautiful manufactures of all kinds, and endowed with religious ideas and philosophic and scientific conceptions which have greatly influenced the development of the most progressive races of the West. One of the noblest individual moralists who ever lived, Sankya Muni was a Hindu; the Code of Manu, dating from before the Christian era, is still an essential a study for the jurist....and there are in India, in this later age, worthy descendants of the great authors of the Vedas, of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana."
"and yet, nine-tenths of what has been written by the British about
(source: India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom - By Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland p. 350).
216. Ernest E. Kellett (1864-1950) author of A Short History of Religions:
"On the other hand there seems to be an increasing number of persons who have been led by natural and acquired sympathy to adopt in some form one of the Eastern religions." The new German faith is said to have for its main source of interpretation Eckhart and the Bhagavad-Gita.
(source: Eastern Religions & Western Thought - By S. Radhakrishnan p. 251
217. Sister Nivedita - Margaret Noble (1867-1911). Her first literary achievement was Kali the Mother, in which she expounds the conception of Kali. There are many 'educated Indians - of Christian missionaries we need not speak - who think that Kali is some blood-thirsty deity worshipped by barbarous people. to such people this book ought to be a revelation. The Web of Indian Life, may be at once said that it is the greatest in the English language upon
Sister Nivedita probed into the heart of Indian womanhood and reflected in her rhythmic and eloquent prose the natural simplicity and spiritual fervor of the women of
"Hinduism would not be eternal were it not constantly growing and spreading, and taking in new areas of experience. Precisely because it has this power of self addition and re-adaptation, in greater degree than any other religion that the world has even seen, we believe it to be the one immortal faith."
(source: The Complete Works, Vol III).
In the chapter on the Bhagavad Gita, she writes: "The book is nowhere a call to leave the world, but everywhere an interpretation of common life as the path to that which lies beyond. "Better for a man is his own duty, however, badly done than the duty of another, though that be easy. "Holding gain and loss as one, prepare for battle." That the man who throws away his weapons, and permits himself to be slain, unresisting in the battle, is not the hero of religion, but a sluggard and a coward; that the true seer is he who carries his vision into action, regardless of the consequences to himself; this is the doctrine of the "Gita" repeated again and again....Not the withdrawn, but the transfigured life, radiant, with power and energy, triumphant in its selflessness, is religion. "Arise!" thunders the voice of Sri Krishna, "and be thou an apparent cause!"
Sister Nivedita talked about the task before
(source: Eminent Orientalists: Indian European American - Asian Educational Services. ISBN 8120606973 p. 257-276).
"Beauty of place," writes Sister Nivedita, "translates itself to the Indian consciousness as God's cry to the soul. Had Niagara been situated on the
(source: The Web of Indian Life - By Sister Nivedita Ramakrishna-Vivekananda. London, 1904. p. 262).
Sister Nivedita realised that India's unrivalled, integrating culture that had spread from the Himalayas in the North to Kanyakumari in the South was due to this closeness with the ancient epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, a closeness that had been attacked and almost severed by Colonial style of education: "These two great works form together the outstanding educational agencies of Indian life. All over the country, in every province, especially during the winter session, audiences of Hindus and Mohammedans gather round the Brahmin storyteller at nightfall, and listen to his rendering of the ancient tales. The Mohammedans of Bengal have their own version of the Mahabharata."
This is why she would never call Indian women as ever having been illiterate. They had imbibed the best in the Indian tradition and strove to bring up their children as a Rama or Krishna, Arjuna or Karna, Sita or Savitri.
(source: In her Bharati saw the Modern Woman of India - By Prem Nandakumar - hindu.com).
218 Sir Edwin Arnold (1832-1904) poet and scholar. Author of The Song Celestial, which is a translation of the Bhagavad Gita. It has great elevation of tone and majesty and dignity of style. There are many translations of the Gita but Arnold's translation has a place apart among them by its accuracy and the grave harmony of the verse. The translation is dedicated by the poet to India.
The dedicatory verses are in Arnold's own translation:
"So have I read this wonderful and spirit-thrilling speech,
By Krishna and Prince Arjuna held, discoursing each with each;
So have I writ its wisdom here, its hidden mystery,
For England; O our India! as dear to me as she!
He wrote in his preface:
"This famous and marvelous Sanskrit poem occurs as an episode of the Mahabharata, in the sixth - or "Bhishma" - Parva of the great Hindu epic. It enjoys immense popularity and authority in India, where it is reckoned as one of the "Five Jewels" - pancharatnani - of Devanagari literature. In plain but noble language it unfolds a philosophical system which remains to this day the prevailing Brahmanic belief blending as it does the doctrine of Kapila, Patanjali, and the Vedas."
(source: Eminent Orientalists: Indian European American - Asian Educational Services. ISBN 8120606973 p. 234 -235).
Arnold already well known for the Light of Asia, wrote in India Revisited of the rite of bathing in the Ganga, and he described with emotion the people he observed at their prayers:
"Some are old and feeble, weary with long journeys of life, emaciated by maladies, saddened from loses and troubles; and the morning air blows sharp, the river wave runs chilly. Yet there they stand, breast-deep in the cold river, with dripping cotton garments clinging to their thin or aged limbs, visibly shuddering under the shock of the water, and their lips blue and quivering, while they eagerly mutter their invocations. None of them hesitates; into the Gunga they plunge on arrival, ill or well, robust or sickly; and ladle the holy liquid up with small, dark, trembling hands, repeating the sacred names, and softly mentioning the sins they would expiate and the beloved souls they would plead for."
(source: Banaras: City of Light - By Diana L Eck p. 15 -17).
219. Acharya Jiwatram Bhagwandas Kriplani (1888 -) Noted Gandhian, and Eminent National Leader. When speaking as the President of the Congress in India, he said:
" I am a Hindu and am proud of the fact. But this is because Hinduism for me has stood for tolerance, for truth and for non-violence....
(source: Indian Controversies - By Arun Shourie South Asia Books ASIN 8190019929 p. 173)
220. Guy Sorman (1944 - ) French intellectual, writer, economist and a professor of political science at Paris University, visiting scholar at Hoover Institution at Stanford and the leader of new liberalism in France. He has observed India with a keen eye, a great deal of intelligence and genuine affection. He has written:
"Temporal notions in Europe were overturned by an India rooted in eternity. The Bible had been the yardstick for measuring time, but the infinitely vast time cycles of India suggested that the world was much older than anything the Bible spoke of. It seem as if the Indian mind was better prepared for the chronological mutations of Darwinian evolution and astrophysics."
He has commented on the wise division of life in India: "Here is a philosophy far removed from the grotesque refusal to grow old in the West, where wisdom has been replaced by cosmetic surgery and psychiatric help."
"The Indian tradition, on the other hand, is that men submit to nature and form part of it, there nature preserves its sacredness, lost in the West since the Industrial Revolution." He further states that the idea of feminism and ecology came from the 1968 movement, from the meeting between India and the West. He says: "There is hardly anything in European thought to predispose the West to reject virility, the respect for authority, the mastery over nature. India too has a warrior (khastriya) tradition of virility as exemplified in the Mahabharata, only it is secondary. First, comes the veneration of thousands of goddesses - for the Indians, India is above all Mother India. India's femininity and sexual ambiguity, is the very antithesis of Western virility. For example, when the British scaled earth's highest peak, the exploit was widely hailed as the "conquest of the Everest." It was not realized and is often not realized still, that the word "conquest" was totally out of place in the context of the peak which is considered an object of reverence by many.
"The Brahmins attached to knowledge and learning is what has helped the Indian civilization endure and allowed the arts to flourish. If comparisons have to be made, it may be said that the endurance of the Brahmins in India has kept her elite intact, whereas in neighboring China the anti-intellectualism of communist peasants has completely wiped out the intelligentsia of that country. The Brahmins kept knowledge and art alive in India, preserving not only their savant but also their popular forms. The Brahmin elite is perhaps egoistical and domineering, nonetheless it has preserved a sense of dignity and beauty that has disappeared from China where all that remains is vulgarity and crass ignorance."
"The more decentralized, diversified and ritualized a religion is the better it can withstand the onslaught of rationalist thought. Hinduism, derives its strength from the fact that it is not a single unified religion but the sum total of thousands of local faiths. Every village has its own cult, rooted in the local culture without any universalist pretensions."
"India is a marvelous example of the art of living together at a time when Westerners are apprehensive about the future of their society."
"You cannot be a Hindu fundamentalist. It does not mean anything...The concept of fundamentalism does not exist in Hinduism." No one man embodies the spirit of universalism, it runs through the whole of India and there is a place for all religious groups and communities. The spiritual message of India is her capacity to let so many divergent practices coexist. The Enlightenment philosophers seemed to have grasped this profound originality...This the real message of India."
He says, "India has a strong cultural image in the west; unfortunately, it is not being commercially exploited." This should sink into the heads of those of us who are happy to be third-rate imitators of the US.
Sorman asserts that India is not a rogue state when he talks of the nuclear option. But there seem to be some Indians who are not so sure of their own country. He points out that "Nobody knows what is right. Each civilization...has its sense of the right. No one can impose his perception of right over others."
"Each Indian looks for God in his own way and worships one or several of the millions of deities who are the supposed reincarnation or expression of God, a Spirit or a Force. This has never led to a religious war. There have been communal clashes, but India has never had to face religious wars or crusades save those that were thrust on it from outside. The multiple revelation of the East has proved to be in many ways more advantageous than the single revelation of the West."
(source: The Genius of India - By Guy Sorman (Le Genie de l'Inde) Macmillan India Ltd. 2001. ISBN 0333 93600 0 p.195 , 122)
221. Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland (1842-1936) American born, former President of the India Information Bureau of America and Editor of Young India (New York). Author of India, America and World Brotherhood, and Causes of Famine in India. He has written glowingly about India's culture:
"India is a highly civilized nation - a nation which developed a rich culture much earlier than any nation of Europe, and has never lost it."
India was the first and only nation that proved too powerful for Alexander the Great. It was India that stopped his advance and compelled him to turn back in his career of world conquest. India was the richest nation in the world until conquered and robbed of her wealth by Great Britain.
India gave to the world two out of six of its greatest Historic religions. Of the six greatest Epic Poems of the world India produced two. India gave to mankind - Kalidasa. India contributed enormously to the origin and advancement of Civilization by giving to the world its immensely important decimal system, or so-called "Arabic Notation" which is the foundation of modern mathematics and much modern science.
India early created the beginning of nearly all of the sciences, some of which she carried forward to remarkable degrees of development, thus leading the world. India has produced great literature, great arts, great philosophical systems, great religions, and great men in every department of life - rulers, statesmen, financiers, scholars, poets, generals, colonizers, ship-builders, skilled artisans and craftsmen of every kind, agriculturists, industrial organizers and leaders in far-reaching trade and commerce by land and sea.
For 2,500 years India was pre-eminently the intellectual and spiritual teacher of Asia, which means of half the human race.
"When the British first appeared on the scene, India was one
of the richest countries of the world; indeed, it was her great riches that
attracted the British to her shores. For 2,500 years before the British came on
the scene and robbed her of her freedom, India was self-ruling and one of the
most influential and illustrious nations of the world."
“This wealth, was created by the
Hindus’ vast and varied industries. Nearly every kind of
manufacture or product known to the civilized world – nearly every kind of
creation of Man’s brain and hand, existing anywhere, and prized either for its
utility or beauty – had long, long been produced in India. India was a far
greater industrial and manufacturing nation than any in Europe or than any
other in Asia. Her textile goods – the fine products of her loom, in cotton,
wool, linen, and silk – were famous over the civilized world; so were her
exquisite jewelry and her precious stones, cut in every lovely form; so were
her pottery, porcelains, ceramics of every kind, quality, color and beautiful
shape; so were her fine works in metal – iron, steel, silver and gold. She had
great architecture – equal in beauty to any in the world. She had great
engineering works. She had great merchants, great business men, great bankers and
financiers. Not only was she the
greatest ship-building nation, but she had great commerce and trade by land and
sea which extended to all known civilized countries. Such was the India
which the British found when they came."
"The fact is, not Europe but Asia
seems to have been the cradle of political liberty, the cradle of democratic
and republican government, in the world...research makes it clear that the
democratic and republican institutions of Europe and America actually send
their roots back to Asia, and especially to India. Republics actually existed in India at least as early as the days
of the Buddha (6th century before Christ). The republican form of government in
ancient India had a duration of at least a thousand years. We have records of
no other country, ancient or modern, where republics have existed and continued
for so long a period. Even more important than her republics has been the
spirit of freedom and democracy which has manifested itself in many forms among
the Indian people from the earliest ages. The Vedas show that the principle of representative government were
held by the ancient Aryans 12-13 centuries before the Christian era."
(source: India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom - By Rev. Jabez T.
Sunderland p.1- 61 and 196 -197). 222. Dr. Subhash Kak (1949 - ) is a widely known scientist and a Indic scholar. Currently a Professor at Louisiana State University, he has authored ten books and more than 200 research papers in the fields of information theory, quantum mechanics, and Indic studies. He is a Sanskrit scholar and is author of Astronomical Code of the Rig Veda, The Wishing Tree: Presence and Promise of India and India at Century's End: Essays on History and Politics.
Dr Kak has recently resolved the Einstein's twin paradox.
He has observed:
"India has had cultural continuity for at least 10,000 years. Before that we had a rock-art tradition which, according to some estimates, goes back to 40,000 BCE. Not only are we one of the most ancient civilizations, we have found in India the record of the earliest astronomy, geometry, mathematics, and medicine. Artistic, philosophical and religious impulses, central to the history of mankind, arose first in India.
Vedic Indians were scientific. They believed in laws of nature. They represented their astronomy in terms of the altar constructions. One problem they considered was that of the synchronization of the lunar and the solar years: the lunar year is about 11 days shorter than the solar year and if we add a round number of days every few years to make up for the discrepancy, we find we cannot do it elegantly unless we have a correction cycle of 95 years or its multiples. This 95-year cycle is described in the earliest Vedic prose books.
The altars were to be built to slightly larger dimensions each year of the cycle to represent the corrections. There were other symbolic constructions. Like building a square altar (representing the sky) with the same area as a circular altar (representing the earth), which is the problem of squaring the circle. This led to the discovery of the earliest geometry. They were aware that the sun and the moon were at 108 times their own diameters from the earth."
" Our school books talk about Socrates, Plato and Aristotle -- and rightly so -- but they don't mention Yajnavalkya, Panini and Patanjali, which is a grave omission. Our grand boulevards in Delhi and other cities are named after Copernicus, Kepler and Newton, but there are no memorials to Aryabhata, Bhaskara, Madhava and Nilakantha!"
"For at least 50 years, Indian intellectual life was stifled by a Stalinist attitude. And before that, for two centuries, colonialist historians appropriated Indian past for their own purposes. What they left for us was a mutilated version of our past. We are barely emerging from that hell."
(source: rediff.com interview - For more on Astronomical Code refer to chapter on India and Egypt).
Watch Raga Unveiled: India ’s Voice – A film: The history and essence of North Indian classical Music.
He writes about the spread of Hinduism to Japan:
"The Vedic devas went to China and
Japan through Kashmir. The fourth great council was held there
under the patronage of the Kushana emperor Kanishka (r. 78-120) in around 100
CE, where monks of the Sarvastivādin School compiled a new canon. This became
the basis of Mahāyāna. The Vedic devas
were a part of this understanding, as was dhyāna of the Vedic tradition (Ch’an
in China and Zen in Japan) with devotion to Īśvara (Śiva) as its ultimate
objective (Yogasūtra 1.23). The Parihāsapura monuments (near Śrīnagar)
of the Cankuna stūpa (Kārkota dynasty, 8th century) “served as a model
all across Asia from the Pamir Mountains to Japan”.
Vedic ideas were also taken to Japan by
the sea route from South India and Southeast Asia. That serves to explain the specific transformations of some
Sanskrit terms into Japanese through Tamil phonology. For example, consider the
transformation of Sanskrit homa, the Vedic fire rite, into Japanese goma, where
the initiation is given by the achari (Sanskrit ācārya). The Sanskrit mantras
in Japan are written the Siddham script of South India."
(source: The Vedic Gods of
Japan - By Subhash Kak and http://www.ece.lsu.edu/kak/hist.html). For more refer to
chapter on India and China223. Lord Curzon (1859-1925) Marquis of Kedleston, a British statesman, was a Conservative Party politician. He was viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905, and later became chancellor of Oxford University. Curzon re-entered politics during World War I (1914-1918). He became a member of Lloyd George's war cabinet in 1916.
In an address delivered at the great Delhi Durbar in 1901:
"Powerful Empires existed and flourished here [in India] while Englishmen were still wandering painted in the woods, and while the British Colonies were a wilderness and a jungle."
" India has left a deeper mark upon the history, the philosophy, and the religion of mankind, than any other terrestrial unit in the universe."
It is such a land that England has conquered and is holding as a dependency. It is such a people that she is ruling without giving them any voice whatever in the shaping of their own destiny.
(source: India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom - By Jabez T. Sunderland p. 7 and theatlantic.com).
224. Yaqubi the 9th century Muslim historian has written:
"The Hindus are superior to all other nations in intelligence and thoughtfulness. They are more exact in astronomy and astrology than any other people.
The Siddhanta is a good proof of their intellectual powers; by this book the Greeks and Persians have also profited. In medicine their opinion ranks first."
(source: The Vision of India - By Sisirkumar Mitra p. 226).
225. Harvey Cox (1929 - ) of the Harvard Divinity School remarks,
”I agree that the quest for Truth is the quest for God. This is the core teaching of all religions. The Scientist’s motivation is to seek the very kind of truth that Krishna speaks about in the Bhagavad Gita. I also agree that the word Religion is an invention of modern western thought.”
(source: The Lost City of Dvaraka - S. R. Rao p. 2).
226. L. Adams Beck (? - 1931) author of The splendour of Asia : the story and teaching of the Buddha and The Story of Oriental Philosophy writes:
India has had a spiritual freedom never
known until lately to the West. Christianity when it came offering
its spiritual philosophy of life imposed an iron dogma upon the European
peoples. Those who could not accept this dogma, whatever it happened to be at
the moment, paid so heavy a penalty that the legend of the Car of Juggernaut
(Jagarnath) is far truer of Europe than Asia.
Whereas in India the soul was free from
the beginning to choose what it would, ranging from the dry bread of atheism to
the banquets offered by many-colored passionate gods and goddesses, each
shadowing forth some different aspect of the One whom in the inmost chambers of
her heart India has always adored. Therefore the spiritual outlook was universal. Each took un
rebuked what he needed. The children were at home in the house of their father,
while Europe crouched under the lash of a capricious Deity whose ways were
beyond all understanding.
But while India fixed her eyes on the Ultimate she did not forget
that objective science in the beginning of wisdom. In India, in relation to
this consciousness, all roads lead home. A prayer daily repeated by millions
says: "As different streams, having different sources and with wanderings
crooked or straight, all reach the sea, so Lord, the different paths which men
take, guided by their different tendencies, all lead to Thee."
There the foundation of mathematical and mechanical knowledge were
well and truly laid by the Noble Race. Here,
written two thousand years before the birth of Copernicus, is an interesting
passage from the Aitareya
Brhamana:
“The sun never sets or rises. When people think the sun is setting
he only changes about after reaching the end of the day and makes night below
and day to what is on the other side. Then, when people think he rises in the
morning, he only shifts himself about after reaching the end of the night, and
makes day below and night to what is on the other side. In truth, he does not
set at all.”
It is interesting to wonder along what lines the philosophies of
this great race might have developed later if its ancestral heritage had been
less diffused and intermingled with other such different stocks as it found in
India on arrival, or were forced by many invasions and conquests to accept
later.
Regarding the Mahabharata
and Bhagavad Gita, he
writes:
"I read almost daily in both, marveling at the vast
fertility, the tropic splendor of romance unfolded in either, but still more at
the nobility of ideals set forth, the great passion for the Unseen, the
Beautiful, and Entirely Desirable, both in man and woman, which has always been
the soul of India."
"The Bhagavad Gita
is known as the Lord's Song - or the Song Celestial - and it represents one of the highest flights of
the conditioned spirit to its unconditioned Source ever achieved."
(source: The Story of Oriental Philosophy - By L. Adams Beck p.
10 - 120). 227. Father Heras (1885-1955) was a Spanish Jesuit priest who worked in India and was a celebrated Professor of History in Bombay. He wrote in Studies in Proto-Indo-Mediterranean Culture:
"India has not changed much in the course of ages. Invasions have taken place, wars have been waged in her vast plains, new nations and races have conquered the land and ruled over it, foreign civilizations have brought new notions and new ideals; but everybody and everything has been remodeled and reshaped and recast by the influence of the Indian nation and its ancient civilization. The ancient civilization of Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria have been blotted out from the map of the world. But that of India, the first lights of which have been discovered in modern times along the banks of the Indus, is still alive...."
(source: East and West - By S. Radhakrishnan p. 19)
228. Friedrich Creuzer (1771-1858) German philologist and archaeologist, was born at Marburg, the son of a bookbinder. In 1802 he was appointed professor at Marburg, and two years later professor of philology and ancient history at Heidelberg. Creuzer’s first and most famous work was his Symbolik und Mythologie der allen VOlker. He says:
"If there is a country on earth which can justly claim the honor of having been the cradle of the human race or at least the scene of primitive claim the honor of having been the cradle of the human race or at least the scene of primitive civilization, the successive developments of which carried into all parts of the ancient world and even beyond, the blessings of knowledge which is the second life of man, that country assuredly is India."
(source: India: Mother Of Us All - By Chaman Lal p. 24).
229. Arnold Hermann Ludwig Heeren (1760-1842) an Egyptologist has observed:
"India is the source from which not only the rest of Asia but the whole Western World derived their knowledge and their religion."
"The literature of the Sanskrit literature incontestably belongs to a highly cultivated people, whom we may with great reason consider to have been the most informed of all the East. It is, at the same time, a scientific and poetic literature.
(source: Historical researches into the politics, intercourse, and trade of the Carthaginians, Ethiopians, and Egyptians - By A. H. Heeren Vol. II p. 201).
"India is the source from which not only the rest of Asia but the whole western world derived their knowledge and religion."
(source: Yoga: A Vision of its Future - By Gopi Krishna p. 119).
"The literature of the Hindus is rich in epic poetry." "It will scarcely be possible to deny the Mahabharata to be one of the richest compositions in Epic poetry that was ever produced." “The Hindu lyric surpassed that of the Greeks in admitting both the rhyme and blank verse."
(source: Historical researches into the politics, intercourse, and trade of the Carthaginians, Ethiopians, and Egyptians - By A. H. Heeren p. 45).
"If we compare the mythology of the Hindus with that of the Greeks, it will have nothing to apprehend on the score of intrinsic copiousness. In point of aesthetic value, it is sometimes superior, at others, inferior to Greek: while in luxuriance and splendor it has the decided advantage. Olympus, with all its family of gods and goddesses, must yield in pomp and majesty to the palaces of Vishnu and Indra." The Hindu Mythology like the sublime compositions of Milton and Klopstock, extends its poetic flight far into the regions of unlimited space."
(source: Hindu Superiority - Har Bilas Sarda p. 244)
230. Richard Wagner (1813 -1883) German composer, known for his 13 operas
Wagner absorbed Indian ideas and transformed them to suit his aesthetic purpose. They appear in the libretti of such operas as Parsifal (1882), in which he used an episode from the great epic of the Ramayana (c.400 BC). In a sense, he succeeded in producing a synthesis of East and West, and from it derived the materials of a universal drama. In this, he was in a direct line from the early German romantics.
(source: British India: 1772-1947 - By Michael Edwardes p. 306).
231. Carl Suneson author of Richard Wagner och den indiska tankevärlden has said: "Parsifal" is in my opinion, of Wagner's completed music-dramas, that in which the Indian influence is most demonstrable.
(source: Richard Wagner Und Die Indische Geisteswelt - By Carl Suneson).
232. Flavius Arrian (2nd century) Greek historian of the campaigns of Alexander, wrote of the Hindus:
"They are remarkably brave, and superior in war to all Asiatics; they are remarkable for integrity; they are so reasonable as seldom to have recourse to law suits, and so honest as to require neither locks to their doors nor writings to bind their agreements. They are in the highest degree truthful."
(source: India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom - By Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland p. 178).
233 Swami Abhedananda (1866-1939) in his book, India and her people Kessinger Publishing Company February 1998 ISBN 076610186X writes:
"Hinduism stands like a huge banian tree spreading its far reaching branches over hundreds of sects, creed and denomination and covering with innumerable leaves, all forms of worship, the dualistic, the qualified non-dualistic and monistic worship of the one Supreme God, the worship, of the Incarnation of God and also hero worship, saint worship, ancestor worship and the worship of the departed spirit. It is based on the grand idea of universal receptivity. It receives everything."
(source: Ancient Indian Culture At A Glance - By Swami Tattwananda p. 50).
234. John Davies (? -1890) author of Hindu philosophy has written:
"The latest German philosophy, the system of Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann, is mainly a reproduction of the philosophic system of Kapila in its materialistic part, presented in a more elaborate form but on the same fundamental lines. In this respect the human intellect has gone over the same ground, that it occupied more than two thousand years ago; but on a more important question it has taken a step in retreat. Kaipila recognized fully the existence of a soul in man, forring indeed his proper nature - the absolute ego of Fichte - distinct from matter and immortal; our latest philosophy, both here and in Germany, can see in man only a highly developed physical organization. 'All external things' says Kapila 'were formed that the soul might know itself and be free.' "The study of psychology is vain says, Schopenhauer, "for there is no Psyche."
(source: Hindu Philosophy: The Sânkhya Kârikâ of Îúwara Krishna. An Exposition of the System of Kapila - By John Davies Elibron Classics reprint. Paperback. New. Based on 1881 edition by Trьbner & Co., London - in preface).
"Scythianus was a contemporary of the Apostles, and was engaged as a merchant in the Indian trade. In the course of his traffic he often visited India and made himself acquainted with Hindu philosophy. According to Epiphanius and Cyril, he wrote a book in four parts, which they affirm to be the source from which the Manichaean doctrines were derived."
(source: Bhagwad Gita - by John Davies p. 196 and Hindu Superiority - By Har Bilas Sarda p. 282)
235. Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) French poet, novelist, dramatist, and art and literary critic. He became a leader of the avant-garde in Paris in the early 20th century and is believed to have coined the term surrealist. He was christened Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky.
He used the Shakuntala theme in his poem in La Chanson du Mal-Aime:
" L'époux royal de Sacontale
Las de vaincre se réjouit
Quand il la retrouva plus pâle
D'attente et d'amour yeux pâlis
Caressant sa gazelle mâle."
Las de vaincre se réjouit
Quand il la retrouva plus pâle
D'attente et d'amour yeux pâlis
Caressant sa gazelle mâle."
"The
royal spouse of Sacontale (Shakuntala)
Weary of victories, rejoices
When he finds her paler
From waiting and eyes pale from love,
Petting her male gazelle."
(source: The India I Love - By Marie-Simone Renou p.
45-46). Weary of victories, rejoices
When he finds her paler
From waiting and eyes pale from love,
Petting her male gazelle."
236. Dr. Aidan Rankin author of Lifting the shadow : why Conservatives must reclaim human rights and was a Research Fellow in Government at the London School of Economics and editor of the Britain's leading environmental magazine, the Ecologist has written:
"Hinduism, whose rishis or seers the Greeks admired from afar, provides the strongest, most consistent critique of materialism. It is the philosophical tradition best adapted to our post-modern age.
"...Hinduism, offers true universalism, that is to say unity-in-diversity. In the Hindu dharma, the individual can approach the divine in his or her own way. The eternal truth is the same truth, but can be pursued by different means, according to personal or cultural preference. Hindu economics is based on local production for local need, a principle to which the green movement now looks. Rooted in Hindu philosophy it offers a humane alternative to the failed socialist planning of Nehru - and the ascendant Coco Cola capitalism, the iniquities of which become more apparent every day. Similarly, the ethical teachings of the Vedas provide for a healthy balance between masculine and feminine principles, to the advantage of both and the detriment of neither. Above superficial ' rights' for individuals or groups, Vedic teaching exalts our responsibilities - for each other, as human beings, and to our fellow creatures who have souls as we do. Hinduism gives spiritual underpinnings to the new wisdom of Deep Ecology and the revelations of modern science."
"Hinduism has survived its historical tribulations and is finding a new voice in world affairs."
(source: Hinduism and the Clash of Civilizations - By David Frawley p. foreword vi -x)
237. Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779 - 1859) was one of the first dissenters. He was aware of the kinship in language between Sanskrit and European tongues, but found the theory of their "spread from a central point...a gratuitous assumption." In his History of India, 1841, he observed,
"Neither in the Vedas, nor in any book...is there any allusion to a prior residence ....out of India...There is no reason whatever for thinking that the Hindus ever inhabited any country but their present one."
He wrote: "In the Surya Siddhanta is contained a system of trigonometry which not only goes beyond anything known to the Greeks, but involves theorem which were not discovered in Europe till two centuries ago."
(source: Sanskrit Civilization - By G. R. Josyer p. 2).
Comparing the Hindus and the Greeks as regards their knowledge of algebra, Elphinstone says:
"There is no question of the superiority of the Hindus over their rivals in the perfection to which they brought the science. Not only is Aryabhatta superior to Diaphantus (as is shown by his knowledge of the resolution of equations involving several unknown quantities, and in general method of resolving all indeterminate problems of at least the first degree), but he and his successors press hard upon the discoveries of algebraists who lived almost in our own time!"
(source: History of India - By Mountstuart Elphinstone London: John Murray published in 1849 p. 131).
238. Kenneth Saunders (1883-1937) author of The Heritage of Asia has written:
"India is not only a mother of civilization, she is pre-eminently a spiritual mother of Asia. Her arts - noble architecture, fresco painting, sculpture, chamber-music and poetry - these have in India been handmaiden of religion. And this is no less true of her poetry from the rich anthology of the Rig Veda and the Great Epics to the lyrics of Rabindranath Tagore, the best of which are hymns. The tradition, too, of her education, from the university of Nalanda, where ten thousand students sat at the feet of religious teachers, to the guru seated under a tree with his handful of disciples, has been pre-eminently religious. India, in a word, is a God-intoxicated country; and her philosophy, which has in many ways and by many centuries anticipated the systems of European thought, is for the most part a religious philosophy; it deals with the One behind the many, the Real behind the illusory, and is perhaps man's most courageous attempt to reach an ultimate unity.
The essential unity of ancient India may be sufficiently demonstrated for our purpose by two facts. Firstly, her sacred places are known and visited by all; they are a common heritage, and a network of pilgrim-roads links them one with another. "The institution of pilgrimage," says a Hindu writer, "is entirely an expression of love for the motherland, one of the modes of worship of the country which strengthens the religious sentiment and expands the geographical consciousness." Whether amidst the snowy peaks of the Himalayas or the palm-fringed shores of Bengal or Madras, these shrines are all set in scenes of great natural beauty. Indian religion and Indian patriotism are, the, inseparably intertwined; the motherland is a holy land, one for every Indian from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin."
Mark Twain called Benares older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.
India's noblest gift to humanity - a belief that the unseen and intangible values are stronger and more real than the things of sense, and to this, her philosophy, with its unshaken conviction that there is One behind the many. One alone supremely real, bears witness.
Her most ancient prayer is a summary of her immemorial quest:
From the unreal to Reality
From death to Immortality.
(source: The Heritage of Asia - By Kenneth Saunders p. 35 - 41 - Student Christian Movement Press).
We may say schematically that India has been more concerned with
the mystical than the ethical, with the beauty of the unseen mind at play in
the universe…..”
In the golden age of Korea, too, something of Indian mysticism and
of Chinese humanism was blend in a fine synthesis which inspired the
Japanese….”
(source: The Heritage of Asia - By Kenneth Saunders p. 24
- Student Christian Movement Press).
239. Francois Gautier (1950 - ) Paris-born, he has lived in India for 30 years, is a
political analyst for Le Figaro, one of
France's largest circulation newspaper. He defends Indian nationalism. He
caused a storm of controversy in India by advocating reunification with
Pakistan. He is the uthor of several books, including A Western journalist on India : The Ferengi's Columns and Rewriting Indian History and A New History of IndiaHe has called India, Spiritual leader of the world.
"Ancient Hindus were intensely secular in spirit, as their spirituality was absolutely non-sectarian - and still is today in a lesser measure. Seven thousand years ago, Vedic sages, to define the Universal Law which they had experienced within themselves on an occult and supra-spiritual plane, had invented the word dharma. In a nutshell, dharma is all that which helps you to become more and more aware of jiva inside yourself.
India also survived the immense threat of European colonialization, which has annihilated the souls of so many countries, some more powerful than India. The British came, conquered...understood nothing...left nothing...and India's spirituality remained. It survived the cruel partition of its ancient land, tearing its limbs into Pakistan and Bangladesh, any other nation might never have recovered from such a maiming. It survives today the Hindu-bashing of its westernized elite..."
Thus, for India, the Muslims invasions and later the European ones, must be the result of bad karma....India's soul is so strong, so old, so vibrant, that she has managed so far to survive the terrible Muslim onslaughts and later the more devious British soul-stifling occupation."
"Yet because of this extraordinary spirituality, because of the Dharma stored by its great Rishis, India always had the extra impetus to renew itself, to spring forward again, when it seemed she was on the brink of collapsing."
(source: Arise O' India - By Francois Gautier Har Anand publisher ISBN: 81-241-0518-9 p. 11 and 155-156).
Speaking about the legendary tolerance of Hinduism, he recently wrote:
" But, once again my "fringe" Hindu brothers and sisters, as well as the Christian and Muslim communities of India, should remind themselves than in the entire Indian history, Hinduism has always shown that it is not fundamentalist, that it accepts the others with their religions and customs as long as they do not try to impose these beliefs on the majority community.
Indeed, in a recent report, UNESCO pointed out that out of 128 countries where Jews lived before Israel was created, only one, India, did not persecute them and allowed them to prosper and practice Judaism in peace.
Hinduism is probably the only religion in the world which has never tried to convert others, or conquer other countries to propagate itself as a new religion. The same is not true of Islam and Christianity. "
(source: Redefining India - By Francois Gautier - dailypioneer.com December 11 '02) For more visit Francois Gautier).
"O members of the Indian intelligentsia! You think that reading the latest New York Times bestseller, speaking polished English, and putting down your own countrymen, specially anybody who has a Hindu connection, makes you an intellectual. But in the process you have not only lost your roots, you have turned your back on a culture and civilisation that is thousands of years old and has given so much to the world. Your are forgetting what a privilege it is to be born an Indian -- and a Hindu at that -- inheritors of a spirituality that accepts that God manifests Himself under different names, at different times, when today the world's two biggest monotheistic religions still think their God is the only true one and it is their duty to convert everybody by guile or force. "
"For the greatness of India is spiritual. The world has lost the truth. We have lost the Great Sense, the meaning of our evolution, the meaning of why so much suffering, why dying, why getting born, why this earth, who we are, what is the soul, what is reincarnation, where is the ultimate truth about the world, the universe... But India has kept this truth. India has preserved it through seven millennia of pitfalls, genocides, and mistakes. And this was meant to be India's gift to this planet in this century: to restore to the world its true sense, to recharge humanity with the real meaning and spirit of life. India can become the spiritual leader of the world, if only its own people will allow it. "
(source: Cry O my beloved India! - By Francois Gautier - rediff.com).
"In all humility I propose that a Supreme Spiritual Council,
composed of at least seven of the most popular Hindu leaders of India, be
constituted. It should be a non-political body, and each group would keep its
independence but nevertheless. It could meet two three times a year and issue
edicts, which would be binding on 850 millions Hindus in India and one billion
over the world. Then and then only can
this wonderful spirituality which is Hinduism, this eternal knowledge behind
the outer forms, the wisdom to understand this mad earth and its sufferings, be
preserved for the future of India, and for the future of humanity. I bow down
to all the great gurus who have graced over the ages, this wonderful and sacred
land which is India and beseech them to hear my prayer:
Hindus leaders, unite, if you want
eternal Dharma to survive."
(source: In defence of
Hindu gurus - By Francois Gautier - rediff.com).
"The ancient Hindus were intensely secular in spirit, as
their spirituality was absolutely non-sectarian - and still is today in a
lesser measure. Nine thousand years ago, Vedic sages, to define the Universal
Law which they had experienced within themselves on an occult and
supra-spiritual plane, had invented the word dharma. "
"Hindu have venerated the feminine element under its
different manifestations: Mahalaxmi, Mahakali, Mahasaraswati, Maheshwari - and
even India is feminine: "Mother India." She is the consciousness
transcending all things, she is the emptiness beyond all emptiness, the smile
beyond all smiles, the divine beauty beyond all earthly beauties. "
"Throughout India's long history, the concept of dharma, or the Universal Law, gave such freedom to
Indians that all kind of branches and sects developed within Hinduism. Indeed, Hinduism was never static, it never barred
its followers from experimenting new techniques and spiritual paths: everything
that helps you on the way is dharmic. It is this fundamental principle which
allowed India to survive all over the ages with a prodigious continuity,
whereas other civilizations saw their cultures and their religion
systematically destroyed. Hinduism is without doubt the most monotheistic
religion in the world because it recognized that the Supreme can only be diverse
and that he incarnates Himself in many forms - hence the millions of gods in
the Hindu pantheon. Vedic Sages had understood that man has to be given a
multiplicity of different approaches, if you want him to fathom the
Unfathomable. Indeed, Hindus, who were once upon a time the best dialecticians in the world (and
this maybe why they are today the best software programmers of this planet),
were able to come-up with this kind of equation: (a) God is in the world; (b)
the world is in God; (c) the world is God; (d) God and the world are distinct;
(e) God is distinct from the world, but the world is not distinct from God; (f)
it is impossible to discern if the world is distinct from God or not...Never
has the unique nature of Hindu polytheism been better defined."
(source: A New History of India - By Francois Gautier p. 1 - 18)
240. Sita Ram Goel (1921- 2003) scholar, writer, publisher, the
founder of Voice of India, an ‘intellectual’ Kshatriya’ par excellence, and a
Hindu revivalist. Author of several books, including The Story of Islamic Imperialism, Defence of Hindu Society and History of Hindu-Christian Encounters. He writes: "It is an intuition ingrained in the Hindu psyche to inhabit our entire environment - celestial, physical, vegetable, animal, and human - with innumerable Gods and Goddesses. Some of these divinities are installed in temples as icons, and worshipped with well-defined rituals. Some others are worshipped as and where they are invoked. Hindu shastras, saints and sages have paid homage to many Gods and Goddesses in many sublime hymns."
" I am a Hindu, which to me means the inheritor of the oldest and the highest spiritual culture known to human history."
Hindu seers and sages as also Hindu shastras, no matter to what Hindu sect they belong, designate this spiritual center of Hindu society as Sanãtana Dharma. Sanãtana Dharma says that the aspiration for Truth (satyam), Goodness (šivam), Beauty (sundaram), and Power (aišvarya) is inherent in every soul, everywhere, and at all times, like the physical hunger of the body for food and drink.
The Upanishadic prescription, ãtmãnam viddhi (know thyself) is a variation on the same theme. It leads to the same attainment - aham brahmo’smi (I am Brahma), tat tvam asi (thou art That), and sah tadasti (he is That). It is a steep spiritual ascent at the end of which the Ãtman (Self) becomes Paramãtman (Supreme Self), and the PuruSa (Person) becomes PuruSottama (Superperson). In the language of Theism, man becomes God."
(source: Defence of Hindu Society - By Sita Ram Goel - voi.org).
241 Sir Chetpat Pattabhirama Ramaswami Aiyar (1879-1966) former Dewan of Travancore, and eminent scholar-statesman and former Vice-Chancellor, who was the first to ban hunting in India
"Indian Culture in the past is analogous to a subterranean river that has been fertilizing many countries which have not only on the landscape but also on all the countries of the mind."
He has shown how we see manifestations of the pervasive influence of Hindu Culture in Greece and Egypt and in Peru and Mexico as also in Sumatra and Java and Bali and in Burma and Siam and Cambodia and Indo-China and even in China and Japan. He has shown how Vedanta has inspired the Sufi doctrine.
Sir C. P. Ramaswami Aiyar, who had reached New York en route to San Francisco, met on the 30th September a group of American intellectuals and journalists. British historian had observed that India was conquered in a spirit of British absent-mindedness. Free India wanted to make sure that there was not going to be such absent-mindedness on anybody' part again. Asked if India would accept Communist doctrine, he replied it could not, because the Indian was a rugged individualist.
(source: Sir C. P. on India and the U. S).
242. Count Magnus Fredrik Ferdinand Bjornstjerna (1779-1847) Swedish minister in London, author of The Theogony of the Hindoos with their systems of Philosophy and Cosmogony after quoting from the Vedas says:
"These truly sublime ideas cannot fail to convince us that the Vedas recognize only one God, who is Almighty, Infinite, Eternal, Self-existent, the Light and the Lord of the Universe."
He says: “No nation on earth can vie with the Hindus in respect of the antiquity of their civilization and the antiquity of their religion.”
"In a metaphysical point of view we find among the Hindus all the fundamental ideas of those vast systems which, regarded merely as the offspring of fantasy, nevertheless inspire admiration on account of the boldness of flight and of the faculty of human mind to elevate itself to such remote ethereal regions. We find among them all the principles of Pantheism, Spinozism and Hegelianism, of God as being one with the universe; spiritual life of mankind; and of the return of the emanative sparks after death to their divine origin; of the uninterrupted alternation between life and death, which is nothing else but a transition between different modes of existence. All this we find among the philosophies of the Hindus exhibited as clearly as by our modern philosophers more than three thousand years since."
Referring to the practical character of Hindu philosophy, he said, In this respect the Hindus were far in advance of the philosophers of Greece and Rome, who considered the immortality of the soul as problematical."
"The literature of India makes us acquainted with a great nation of past ages, which grasped every branch of knowledge, and which will always occupy a distinguished place in the history of the civilization of mankind."
(source: Hindu Superiority - By Har Bilas Sarda p. 203-278).
243. Rick Briggs NASA researcher, has written about India's ancient language - Sanskrit:
" In ancient India the intention to discover truth was so consuming, that in the process, they discovered perhaps the most perfect tool for fulfilling such a search that the world has ever known -- the Sanskrit language.
It is mind-boggling to consider that we have available to us a language which has been spoken for 4-7000 years that appears to be in every respect a perfect language designed for enlightened communication. But the most stunning aspect of the discovery is this: NASA the most advanced research center in the world for cutting edge technology has discovered that Sanskrit, the world's oldest spiritual language is the only unambiguous spoken language on the planet. Considering Sanskrit's status as a spiritual language, a further implication of this discovery is that the age old dichotomy between religion and science is an entirely unjustified one.
Why has Sanskrit endured? Fundamentally it generates clarity and inspiration. And that clarity and inspiration is directly responsible for a brilliance of creative expression such as the world has rarely seen.
Another hope for the return of Sanskrit lies in computers. Sanskrit and computers are a perfect fit."
(source: Knowledge Representation in Sanskrit and Artificial Intelligence - By Rick Briggs - Artificial Intelligence Magazine 6(1) 32-39 1985).
244. Dr. Alexander Duff (1806-1878) British Christian missionary, is reported to have said, in a speech delivered in Scotland, that:
"Hindu philosophy was so comprehensive that counterparts of all systems of European philosophy were to be found in it."
(source: Hindu Superiority - BY Har Bilas Sarda p. 277).
245. Al-Jahiz 9th century Muslim historian writes:
"The Hindus excel in astrology, mathematics, medicine and in various other sciences. They have developed to a perfection arts like sculpture, painting, and architecture. They have collections of poetry, philosophy, literature and science of morals. From India we received the book called Kalilah wa Dimnah. These people have judgment and are brave. They posses the virtues of cleanliness and purity. Contemplation has originated with them."
(source: The Vision of India - By Sisirkumar Mitra p. 226).
246. Abdullah Wassaf, writing in the 14th century A.D. says of India in his history book, Tazjiyatul Amsar:
" India, according to the concurrent opinion of all writers, is the most agreeable abode on earth and the most pleasant quarter of the world. Its dust is purer than air and its air is purer than purity itself: Its delightful plains resemble the garden of paradise.
248. Alexander Dow author of History of Hindustan and had published an essay on Hinduism, entitled A Dissertation Concerning the Customs, Manners, Language, Religion, and Philosophy of the Hindus (1768). The first European scholar to produce a real dissertation on Sanskrit learning, he pointed out the vast quantities of Sanskrit literature in existence, plus the fact that the history of the Hindus was older than that of any other people.
(source: India and World Civilization - By D. P. Singhal Pan Macmillan Limited. 1993. Pg 242).
248. Theordore Goldstucker (1821-1872) born in Germany, professor of Sanskrit at London’s University College wrote the Dictionary of Indian Biography. He finds in the Upanishads: "the germs of all the philosophies."
(source: Hindu Superiority - By Har Bilas Sarda p. 277).
249.
James Ramsey MacDonald (1866-1937) first Labor Party prime minister of Great Britain
could grasp the truth when he said in his Introduction to the "The
Fundamental Unity of India: "The Hindu from his traditions and religion regards India not only as a political unit naturally the subject of one sovereignty, but as the outward embodiment, as the temple - nay even as the Goddess Mother of his spiritual culture. "India and Hinduism are organically related as body and soul."
(source: The Soul of India - By Satyavrata R Patel p.208).
250. Michael Pym (1889 - ) author of The Power of India writes:
"Hindu philosophy has had more effect upon the world than is perhaps generally realized, though it has often come through at second and third hand. Hinduism as a practical working institution is intended for and has grown out of Indian condition."
"India challenged, one realized, the whole of the West. Not Western inventions, Western science, Western conveniences, which India was perfectly ready to adopt insofar as they suited India's convenience. ...Not that. The challenge was a much deeper thing. A challenge of values, of ethics, of attitude to life.
India, like the rest of the East, had bowed to the illusion of Western superiority, taken it all quite literally - Christianity as the religion of peace and love, of the brotherhood of man. Western education and Western progress as the panacea for the evils of existence.
The West spoke fairly enough, talking of honor, the sanctity of the given word, and of promises; of freedom and enlightenment. It vaunted its poets, its philosophers, its scientists, its classical inheritance from that beautiful, far off Greece, whose greatest philosophers, it forgot to mention, had been inspired through Egypt and Persia, by India.
For years India and all the East really believed all this. Complete subscribers to Nordicism and the theory of the Great Race. Indians did their best to Westernize themselves. It was a dis-illusionizing period. This great Western civilization, what was it? The West brought certain material benefits, certain aspects of learning which nobody could deny….But also it seemed to bring a deadly poison. Beneath its hand, the East withered – its morality destroyed, its physical body destroyed, its ancient learning destroyed. Only its vices added to by the new vices of the West, remained and flourished.
So this wonderful Western civilization made its own people no more happy, no better off ultimately, than the ancient systems of the East. India understood greed; she understood treachery and lies, violence and vice. All that exists wherever humanity exists, is a part of life. But it could not understand a claim to superiority which, as far as it could see, was based upon just these things. It saw that in the West vice hardly troubled any longer even to pay tribute to virtue. The West, India observed, did not revere its holy men. It seemed always to prefer killing them. It saw the West take possession of other lands, because the people to whom they first belonged were, said the West, ignorant and miserable and it was the sacred duty of the Christian West – “the White Man’s Burden” – to bring them enlightenment, education, freedom.
It saw these people, in their turn, strive towards Western education, imitating the White Man, and saw the White man, when this or that individual had successfully obtained the prize, gone through Western universities, Western schools, scornfully deny them equality, and openly declare that Western education spoilt a good Orient. Finally, India, the East, saw the West in its frenzy of destruction turn upon itself, and, in the most horrible of all wars – a conflict disgraced by its barbarism, its inhumanity, its slimy filth of propaganda, tear itself to pieces. The forces of Western civilization revealed themselves to the East as forces of sheer, mad, destruction.
Then India shuddered. It did not condemn the peoples of the West. But it realized that somewhere in the Western scheme existed a dreadful flaw. India does not believe in the validity of Western civilization. It does not believe in Western ethics or in Western standards – taken as a whole. It challenges dynamic action with dynamic thought. It challenges the intolerance which conceives of a personal Deity creating, at his pleasure, a Chosen Race to inherit and rifle the earth, with the tolerance which sees all the world as changing forms expressing the same essential divinity. It challenges the intellectual conceit which sees no divinity anywhere, man as the supreme formation of matter, with the spiritual wisdom which realizes the limitations of the senses and of the intellect. It lifts above the five pointed star, the seven pointed!
That is India’s challenge to the West – a question of values, of attitude to existence. India as Vishnu, preserving the sacred flame; as Shiva dancing the dance of creation over the Darkness he has destroyed; even as Kali, garlanded with skulls, smeared with blood, destroying destruction. India will win. Matter is always molded by spirit. But what is this spiritual power of India? As a sensitive Russian woman asked me: “Why does God seem so much nearer in India?”
India is God-intoxicated. Not, as the limited view has it, religion mad, but infected by what Plato called the divine madness of the philosopher, the seeker after wisdom. Nothing of that explains India’s spiritual power.
It may be that India has realized God. Is that the secret of her power?
India regards the attempt to understand
the ultimate reality as the
highest and finest aim of existence... This
freedom is more priceless than any political institution. Because of this,
India has been able to arrive at spiritual knowledge and strength unequalled
anywhere in the world.
Were India ever to be influenced by
superficial Western ideas as to institute foolish vagrancy laws and organized
charity distribution societies, it would
lose living torches of spiritual wisdom and knowledge, and perhaps even sink to
levels of materialistic barbarism. The spiritual adventurers of India
are the yogis, sadhus, holy men and women of all creeds and descriptions…They
have existed in India since the earliest days of history, and through all its
magnificent and wealthy civilization they have kept alive in India the thought
of another beauty, a more wonderful existence, of which is all this is but a
lovely veil.
To reach
the reality which is concealed by the unrealities of the visible world. That is
yoga – literally union with God. With ruthless logic, India dismisses
the unthinking Western deification of science as a means of discovering
ultimate truth. Science, especially as the popular mind understands it, with
its test tubes, its microscopes, its laboratories, all its most delicate
instruments, while it is helpful, has an inherent limitation. It is still
confined to the bounds of this form world. India, through centuries upon
centuries, has taught another method of attaining reality. This is the system
of yoga. It is based upon two things: intuitive knowledge; and the development
of other faculties, other states of consciousness.
(source: The Power of India - By Michael Pym p. 156 - 160 and
302 - 306 Putnam Publication NY 1930).
(Continued...)
( My humble Pranam, Honour and also gratefulness to Ms. Sushma Londhe ji for her noble, magnanimous and eminent works on the peerless Wisdom of our Sacred Scriptures)
(My humble salutations to , H H Swamyjis, Hindu Wisdom, great Universal Philosophers, Historians, Professors and Devotees for the discovering collection)
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