Pride of Hinduism - Views of foreigners

[talwan]

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Madame Helena Petrova Blavatsky (1831- 1891) HPB, as she was known, was a cultured and widely traveled woman. Brilliant, fiery and witty; able to attract the attention of the highest minds, she was in the frequent company of scientists, philosophers and scholars in many fields. She wrote many books-Isis Unveiled, The Voice of Silence and Key to Theosophy. But her magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine, published in 1885, is her most profound book-a bible of Theosophy. She traveled to India and entered Tibet via Kashmir and Ladakh. In the 19th century, imperialism had reached its height. Western nations were so convinced of the superiority of the white races that they had no compunction about exploiting their colonies. In this environment, Mme. Blavatsky taught the first principle of occultism-the brotherhood of all humanity, the unity of all races. With its strong resemblances to Eastern mysticism and spirituality, Theosophy has an intertwining relationship with Hinduism-especially the Upanishads and Advaita Vedanta-and also Buddhism. The establishment of the Theosophical Society in 1875 in New York proved to be a precursor and harbinger of Hinduism in the West. Mahatma Gandhi reports further that the two Theosophists who introduced him to the Bhagavad Gita also took him on one occasion to the Blavatsky Lodge and introduced him to Madame Blavatsky and Mrs. Besant.

 

[talwan]

Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) the famous Austrian existentialist philosopher Regarding Shankara's commentary, once told Professor K. Satchidananda Murthy that, 'there is no metaphysics superior to that of Shankara.'
(source: Vedanta influence - vedanta.org).
312. Paul Thieme (1905 - ) German Indologist University of Tuebingen has observed:
"Vedas are noble documents not only of value and pride to India, but to the entire humanity because in them we see man attempting to lift himself above the earthly writing of epics."
(source: India Rediscovered - By Giriraj Shah p. 39).

 

[talwan]

Sir William Wedderburn Bart (1838 - 1918) He left for India in 1860 and began official duty at Dharwar as an Assistant Collector. He was appointed Acting Judicial Commissioner in Sind and Judge of the Sadar Court in 1874. In 1882 he became the District and Sessions Judge of Poona. At the time of his retirement in 1887, he was the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bombay. As a Liberal, William. Wedderburn believed in the principle of self-government. "The Indian village has thus for centuries remained a bulwark against political disorder, and the home of the simple domestic and social virtues. No wonder, therefore, that philosophers and historians have always dwelt lovingly on this ancient institution which is the natural social unit and the best type of rural life: self-contained, industrious, peace-loving, conservative in the best sense of the word...I think you will agree with me that there is much that is both picturesque and attractive in this glimpse of social and domestic life in an Indian village. It is a harmless and happy form of human existence. Moreover, it is not without good practical outcome."
(source: Hindu Swaraj or Indian Home Rule - By M. K. Gandhi p.110).

 

[talwan]

Robert Earnest Hume (1877-1948) was the only American Sanskritist native to India (he was born in Bombay) and taught in India as well as at Oxford. His correct appreciation of the Upanishads as the first written evidence of a philosophical system in India resulted in the publication of his Thirteen Principal Upanishads in 1921. It has been reprinted many times since then. With skillful imperative he included his estimation of the Upanishads in a lengthy introduction: "In the long history of man's endeavor to grasp the fundamental truths of being, the metaphysical treatises known as the Upanishads hold an honored place . . . they are replete with sublime conceptions and with intuitions of universal truth. . . . The Upanishads undoubtedly have great historical and comparative value, but they are also of great present-day importance. It is evident that the monism of the Upanishads has exerted and will continue to exert an influence on the monism of the West; for it contains certain elements, which penetrate deeply into the truths which every philosopher must reach in a thoroughly grounded explanation of experience."
(source: The Thirteen Principal Upanishads, vii ff,)

 

[talwan]

G. Le Bon ( ? ) commenting on Hindu philosophers: "Their philosophical daring remains unequalled to this day; indeed, one has to admit that, 2,000 years ago, India had begun pondering on the great issues which have been raised in the West only in within the last century, and that, in doing so, it did not shrink from the most drastic solution."
(source: The World of Ancient India - By G. Le Bon p. 100)

 

[talwan]

James Young (1782-1848) officer, Bengal Horse Artillery, and twice sheriff of Calcutta Secretary, Savon Mechanics Institutes "Those races (the Indian viewed from a moral aspect) are perhaps the most remarkable people in the world. They breathe an atmosphere of moral purity, which cannot but excite admiration, and this is especially the case with the pioneer classes, who, notwithstanding the privations of their humble, lot, appear to be happy and contented. Domestic felicity appears to be the rule among the Natives, and this is the more strange when the customs of marriage are taken into account, parents arranging all such matters. Many Indian households afford examples of the married state in its highest degree of perfection.
This may be due to the teachings of the Shastras...."

 

[talwan]

Abraham Kaplan (1918 - ) American professor of philosophy, has commented that the Upanishads are: "remarkable in literary quality as well as in content."
(source: The New World of Philosophy - By Abraham Kaplan New York: Vintage Books, 1961 p. 203)

 

[talwan]

Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad (1891-1953) British philosopher, author, teacher, and radio personality. He was one of Britain's most colorful and controversial intellectual figures of the 1940s. He became head of the department of philosophy at Birbeck College, Univ. of London, in 1930. As a rationalist, he was a successful lecturer and writer. Author of several books including Guide to Philosophy and The Story of Indian Civilization. "Hinduism developed from the very first a wide tolerance, Hindus do not proselytize, they do not lay exclusive claims to salvation, and they do not believe that God will be pleased by wholesome slaughter of those of his creatures whose beliefs are mistaken. As a result, Hinduism has been less degraded than the most religions by the anomaly of creed wars."
The civilization of the East are very old; their roots stretch back into the past to a time when Europe was still a cockpit of fighting savages."

 

[talwan]

The inexhaustible Ramanujan was an observant Hindu, adept at dream interpretation and astrology. His work was marked by bold leaps and gut feelings. Growing up he had learned to worship Namagiri, the consort of the lion god Narasimha. Ramanujan believed that he existed to serve as Namagiri´s champion - Hindu Goddess of creativity. In real life Ramanujan told people that Namagiri visited him in his dreams and wrote equations on his tongue.

Ramanujan could never explain to G H Hardy how he arrived at his deep insights in mathematical terms; but he did say many of his discoveries came to him in dreams, from the goddess Namakkal, and that he had a morning ritual of awakening and writing them down.
He was intensely religious. He often united mathematics and spirituality together. He felt, for example, that zero represented Absolute Reality, and that infinity represented the many manifestations of that Reality. Ramanujan felt that each mathematical discovery was a step closer to understanding the spiritual universe. He once told a friend, "An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God."
While growing up, he lived the life of a traditional Brahmin with his forehead shaved and wearing a topknot. He often prayed to his family Deity, the Goddess Namagiri of Namakkal, and followed Her advice. Namakkal is also called as "Namagiri". He pilgrimaged all over Tamil Nadu. He quoted the Vedas, interpreted dreams and was regarded by his friends to be a mystic. Throughout his life, Ramanujan worshiped at the Sarangapani Vishnu temple in Kumbakonam.

 

[talwan]

Georges Ifrah ( ? ) French historian of Mathematics and author of the book, The Universal History of Numbers"The Indian mind has always had for calculations and the handling of numbers an extraordinary inclination, ease and power, such as no other civilization in history ever possessed to the same degree. So much so that Indian culture regarded the science of numbers as the noblest of its arts...A thousand years ahead of Europeans, Indian savants knew that the zero and infinity were mutually inverse notions."
(source: Histoire Universelle des Chiffres - By Georges Ifrah Paris - Robert Laffont, 1994, volume 2. p. 3 ).

 

[talwan]

Sir Lepel Henry Griffin (1840-1908) Knight Indian Civil Servant. President, East India Association and the diplomatic representative at Kabul of the Indian government. Author of several books including The Rajas of the Punjab; being the history of the principal states in the Punjab and their political relations with the British government and The Great Republic. At a a meeting of the East India Association held at the Westminister Palace Hotel, London in December, 1901, he reported as paying the following tribute to Indian morality:"The Hindu creed is monotheistic and of very high ethical value; and when I look back on my life in India and the thousands of good friends I have left there among all classes of the native community, when I remember those honorable, industrious, orderly, law-abiding, sober, manly men, I look over England and wonder whether there is anything in Christianity which can give a higher ethical creed than that which is now professed by the large majority of the people of India. I do not see it in London society, I do not see it in the slums of the East End, I do not see it on the London Stock Exchange. I think that the morality of India will compare very favorably with the morality of any country in Western Europe."
(source: India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom - By Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland p. 329 - 330).

 

[talwan]

Diana L. Eck ( ? ) Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Member of the Faculty of Divinity, Harvard University. Her work on India includes the books Banaras, City of Light and Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India."Hinduism is an imaginative, an "image-making, religious tradition in which the sacred is seen as present in the visible world – the world we see in multiple images and deities, in sacred places, and in people. The notion of darsan call attention as students of Hinduism, to the fact that India is a visual and visionary culture, one in which the eyes have a prominent role in the apprehension of the sacred. For most ordinary Hindus, the notion of the divine as "invisible" would be foreign indeed. God is eminently visible, although human beings have not always had the refinement of sight to see. Furthermore, the divine is visible not only in temple and shrine, but also in the whole continuum of life – in nature, in people, in birth and growth and death. Although some Hindus, both philosophers and radical reformers, have always used the terms "nirguna"(qualityless) and nirakara (formless) to speak of the One Brahman. Yet the same tradition has simultaneously affirmed that Brahman is also saguna (with qualities) and that the multitude of "names and forms" of this world are the exuberant transformations of the One Brahman."

 

[talwan]

Robert Blackwill ( ? ) lecturer on international security at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, former ambassador to India. Blackwill is the author and co-editor of numerous books and articles on U.S. foreign policy, including: America’s Asian Alliances. Although he returned this summer, part of Blackwill's heart is clearly still in India. A huge map of "Mother India" adorns the cream-colored walls of his fastidious office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. The only item on his vast desktop -- besides precisely arranged wooden "in" and "out" boxes -- is a tiny figurine of Ganesh, the Hindu elephant-headed god of wisdom and success. In What India means to me, he says: "......

India's innumerable and distinctive dances, beginning with the classical. The Vedas and the Upanishads.

They mean so much more when I read them here: "It is the ear of the ear, the mind of the mind, the speech of speech, the breath of breath, and the eye of the eye. When freed (from the senses) the wise, on departing from this world, become immortal."
And, despite my continuing contemplations, I am not always able to follow Krishna's wise words, "Be thou of even mind."

 

[nannilam_balasubramanian]

Pride of Hinduism

Foreigners praise us the method of our worship and prayers, which I noticed in
Aurabindo Ashram in Pondicherry.

God never asks us to do Puja in a large scale. One should have faith in God and
even a Single Flower or a Vilva Petal with a little water one can offer Puja. The
aim of our Puja should be to find out the actual truth of God in us. Mind should
be free and plain hearted with humbleness. One should execute good deeds and
it should not harm others. One should have love, affection, sympathy, etc towards
others. One should always do Puja for the sake of well-being of everyone and not
for him/her alone. The Prasadam what we offer to the God should first be
distributed to the children before giving to elders. In fact, God becomes happy on
seeing the happiness of Children. God and children are to be treated as one. One
should not eat too much because the food is tasty or eat less owing to non-tasty.
One should always try to live healthy, then only one will have concentration on the
God. One should not have a chance to give room to the feelings of anger, jealousy, etc .
One can devote on any God, according to his/her desire, but should not leave Mother or
Father in the Orphanage. Mother never hates the child, even if the child does mistakes
or wrongs. Like that God extends affection on everyone irrespective of the qualities
of a person. These concepts are clearly explained in our Hinduism. That is why
foreigners appreciate our activities.

Balasubramanian
Ambattur

 

[talwan]

Alfred B. Ford ( ) aka Ambarish Das grandson of Henry Ford (founder of the Ford Motor), and Trustee member of Ford Motor Company. He is involved in Ford's corporate charity work. Throwing light on his personal association with India, Ford said he was attracted to Indian civilization after he studied Hinduism during his college days 30 years ago.
Soon after, he converted to Hinduism and has traveled to India dozens of times. He even married an Indian girl, Sharmila Bhattacharya, a doctor, who hails from Jaipur.
He joined Iskcon in 1975. He traveled to India for the first time that same year with Srila Prabhupada. He was instrumental in the establishment of the first Hindu temple in Hawaii. He also helped establish the Bhaktivedanta Cultural Center, which is a highly regarded tourist destination in Detroit. Alfred has made significant donations to Iskcon over the years which have assisted many ongoing projects and helped to build the Pushpa Samadhi Mandir of Srila Prabhupada. He is the founding chairman of the Iskcon Foundation, and campaign chairman of the Sri Mayapur Temple of Vedic Planetarium.
The love for Hinduism brought a great grandson of US automobile legend Henry Ford to the Russian capital to lobby for a Vedic cultural centre.

 

[talwan]

Arthur William Ryder (1877-1938) Professor at Berkeley. J Robert Oppenheimer the nuclear physicist had studied Sanskrit with him at Berkeley in 1933. He has translated several books including, Dandin's Dasha-kumara-charita : The ten princes. He wrote in his introduction to the Bhagavad Gita:
"Uncounted millions have drawn from it comfort and joy. In it they have found an end to perplexity, a clear, if difficult, road to salvation."
(source: The Bhagavad Gita - translation by Arthur W Ryder p. viii).

 

[talwan]

Takeo Kamiya ( ) Japanese architect has spent about 20 years and all his savings traveling across India documenting the country's heritage buildings to enlighten Japan and the world about the "wonders of real India". He is a member of the Japan Architects Academy. Kamiya first visited India about 27 years ago and travelled across the country, like Hieun Tsang during the Golden Age of Guptas. When he was young, Japan was oriented only to the West and America. But he had a feeling that the world did not end there. He says:
"The first place I visited was the Konark Sun Temple. I was shocked...awestruck at the site of the marvelous man-made wonder, "all my worries and complaints vanished then and there."
"That intense emotional experience made me come back again and again. It gave me the urge to travel and see as much as I could. It is after this that I concretized the idea of documenting my experiences in a book form,"

 

[talwan]

Bulent Ecevit (1925 - ) the then Turkish prime minister, was asked what had given him the courage to send Turkish troops to Cyprus (where they still remain). His answer: he was fortified by the Bhagavad Gita which taught that if one were morally right, one need not hesitate to fight injustice. Besides the Gita, Ecevit was also influenced by Nehru’s Glimpses of World History.Ecevit first learnt Sanskrit at the Ankara University. Later his love for poetry and philosophy led him to Rabindranath Tagore. He learnt Bengali to appreciate and later translate Tagore’s writings, including some poems from Geetanjali. During his visit to India in early 2000, Ecevit fulfilled his dream of visiting Shantiniketan. After the 1971 military crackdown by the left, the Upanishads, Gita, and Geetanjali were banned in Turkey.
Turkish prime minister Bulent Ecevit's passage to India has far greater significance than that of an Indophile scholar-statesman realising his long cherished dream. Mr Ecevit, had translated Tagore's Gitanjali and the Bhagavad Gita into Turkish. Together with Delhi and Agra, he has included a visit to Shantniketan in his itinerary.
(source: The Turk who loves the Gita - telegraphindia.com).

 

[talwan]

Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949) American linguist and author of Language, published in 1933)characterization of Panini's Astadhyayi (The Eight Books) writes:

"as one of the greatest monuments of human intelligence is by no means an exaggeration; no one who has had even a small acquaintance with that most remarkable book could fail to agree. In some four thousand sutras or aphorisms - some of them no more than a single syllable in length - Panini sums up the grammar not only of his own spoken language, but of that of the Vedic period as well. The work is the more remarkable when we consider that the author did not write it down but rather worked it all out of his head, as it were. Panini's disciples committed the work to memory and in turn passed it on in the same manner to their disciples; and though the Astadhayayi has long since been committed to writing, rote memorization of the work, with several of the more important commentaries, is still the approved method of studying grammar in India today, as indeed is true of most learning of the traditional culture."
While in the classical world scholars were dealing with language in a somewhat metaphysical way, the Indians were telling us what their language actually was, how it worked, and how it was put together. The methods and techniques for describing the structure of Sanskrit which we find in Panini have not been substantially bettered to this day in modern linguistic theory and practice. We today employ many devices in describing languages that were already known to Panini's first two commentators. The concept of "zero" which in mathematics is attributed to India, finds its place also in linguistics.

 

[talwan]

Colonel Frank Smythe aka Francis Sydney Smythe (1900-1949) military leader, explorer, mountaineer, writer, photographer. He describes experiencing the same feeling of loneliness and revelation in the Bhyunder Ganga Valley. Chronicle of the author's four months in the remote, difficult to reach Bhyundar Valley in the Himalayas, the spectacular Valley of Flowers. The credit for the popularising the Valley of Flowers generally goes to Frank S. Smythe and R.L. Holdsworth who incidentally reached this valley after a successful expedition of Mount Kamet in 1931."In my mountaineering wandering I have not seen a more beautiful valley than this ... this valley of peace and perfect beauty where the human spirit may find repose." Originally called the Bhiundhar Valley (after a village located in south-east Badrinath) it was renamed “The Valley of Flowers” by Frank Smythe.

 

[talwan]

Abu’l Hasan al-Qifti ( ? ) Arab scholar and author of Chronology of the Scholars, speaks of Arab admiration for Indian place-value system and methods of calculation. “Among those parts of their sciences which came to us, the numerical calculation….it is the swiftest and most complete method of calculation, the easiest to understand and the simplest to learn; it bears witness to the Indians’ piercing intellect, fine creativity and their superior understanding and inventive genius.”
(source: The Universal History of Numbers - By Georges Ifrah p. 530 - 531).

 

[talwan]

Christian Fabre aka Swami Pranavananda Brahmendra Avadhuta (1942 - ) was born in the south of France. He grew up in a family with ties to the garment industry. Author of Swami : PDG et Moine hindou

He is a Hindu holy man, who has renounced the material world - yet he is also a business tycoon who employs thousands of people. He became a Hindu holy man, or sadhu, some years ago. Now he runs an ashram, or a hermitage for holy men, in the south-western state of Tamil Nadu, roughly 400 kilometres from Madras, the state capital.
He came to work in India in the 1970s, and fell in love with the place. "I was so powerfully attracted to India's culture, faith and its people that I cannot bear the thought of going back to France," he says.
At the time, his house was opposite that of a Brahmin family. His first exposure to Hinduism came at their hands. A woman from that house introduced him to a Hindu sage, or swami

 

[talwan]

Edward Gibbon (1734 - 1794) English historian and scholar, the supreme historian of the Enlightenment, who is best-known as the author of the monumental author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman EmpireHe admiringly describes the religious freedom in Hinduism:
"Thus the Hindus have an extraordinary wide selection of beliefs and practices to choose from: they can be monotheists, pantheists, polytheists, agnostics or even atheists. They may follow a strict or a loose standard of moral conduct, or they may choose instead an amoral emotionalism or mysticism. They may worship regularly at a temple or may not go there at all."

 

[talwan]

Beatrice Pitney Lamb (1904 - ) Author of several books including India: A World in Transition. She was Editor of the United Nations News for several years and has written and lectured extensively on Indian affairs. [SIZE=-1]Beatrice Lamb first visited India in 1949 on an assignment for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. [/SIZE][SIZE=-1] [/SIZE][SIZE=-1]Mrs. Lamb saw the many-hued soul of India revealed through its people, living, working and worshipping. [/SIZE][SIZE=-1] [/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]She [/SIZE] has noted:
"In addition to the still visible past glories of art and architecture, the wonderful ancient literature, and other cultural achievements of which educated Indians are justly proud, the Indian past includes another type of glory most tantalizing to the Indians of today - prolonged material prosperity. For well over a millennium and a half, the Indian subcontinent may have been the richest area in the world. As early as the first century A.D. a statesman in ancient Rome wrote in worried vein about the squandering of Roman wealth on Indian luxuries.....Although direct relations between Europe and India were cut off by the Arabs in the Middle Ages, the legend of the wealth of the "Indies" continued to grip Western minds. The power of this legend caused Columbus in 1492 to take his dangerous journey westward across the Atlantic, seeking to re-establish direct contact with India. As late as the 18th century, British observers were repeatedly struck by the material prosperity of the land they were beginning to conquer."

 

[talwan]

Alexander M. Kadakin ( ? ) Former Russian Ambassador in India. In his column Passage to India: The Coexistence of Multiple Realities, he has written: "How more profound is India 's traditional world, where each stone is a hierophant, a sign of the presence of the sacred in our world. Every sunrise here becomes a cosmogenic drama, every woman an embodiment of the tantric principle of Shakti. Behind the exterior forms specific only of India hides the sublime universal paradigm of the traditional conscience totally opposite to the modernistic one, also far more vibrant and wholesome. The craving of human soul for sacral archetypes is unquenchable, and archetypes are easily juxtaposed with new age constructs. The sacral and the profane coexist. "
It took me time to realize that my India is similar to the human body with its seats of power and intellect and various indriyas. At times the body is guided by reason, and at other times by mere emotion. It might feel rigid in the morning, elastic by day time, overexcited by evening, and frustrated by night. It fights its ups and downs, tides and ebbs, low and high spirits. It looks different if observed from various angles: familiar yet mysterious, gorgeous yet shabby, pure yet impure. I have visited many other countries, but I reserve this complex metaphor of the body for India .