Pride of Hinduism - Views of foreigners

[talwan]

Share:

Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp Email Share Link

Sting (1951 - ) Born in Newcastle, England in 1951, the son of a milkman, Born Gordon Matthew Sumner in Wallsend, Northumberland. He received his name Sting from his striped sweater in which Gordon Solomon said that he looked like a bee. Sting, who received the Commander of the British Empire (CBE) honour from the queen is reportedly unimpressed with the honour and believes it is not a big achievement to get awards from a country that has shrunk to an island. "It's not very big, the British Empire. It used to be the whole world and now we own, like, one island. It's called England"Rock star Sting has declared himself a Hindu in an e-mail interview with Hindustan Times ahead of his concerts in India in aid of Tsunami victims. Sting revealed that he feels like a Hindu.
"In a sense I am more of a Hindu ... I like the Hindu religion more than anything else at the moment."

 

[talwan]

Denis Diderot (1713-84) he was a prominent French figure in what became known as The Enlightenment, and was the editor-in-chief of the famous Encyclopédie. He was also a novelist, satirist, and dramatist. Diderot was enormously influential in shaping the rationalistic spirit of the 18th century.He suggested in his article on India that the “sciences may be more ancient in India than in Egypt.”
(source: Searching for Vedic India – By Devamrita Swami p. 164).
379. Andrew Tomas (1906- 2001) was an Australian UFO pioneer, author of several books including Mirage of the Ages: A Critique of Christianity and We Are Not The First and On the shores of endless worlds: The search for cosmic life and Beyond the Time Barrier has written:
"A thousand years before the childish image of the earth drawn by Cosmas Indicopleustes, a scholar-explorer of the 6[SUP]th[/SUP] century, in his Christian Topography, philosophers had a different and much more accurate idea of the shape of the earth.

Until the second part of the 19[SUP]th[/SUP] century scholars and clerics of the West thought that the earth was but a few thousand years old. Yet ancient Brahmin books, estimated the Day of Brahma, the life-span of our universe, to be 4.32 billion years. This figure is close to that of our astronomers, who calculate it to be about 4.6 billion years. "
" The atomic structure of matter is mentioned in the Hindu treastises Vaisesika and Nyaya. The Yoga Vasishta says: “There are vast worlds within the hollows of each atom, multifarious as the specks in a sunbeam.”

 

[talwan]

Frederick Soddy (1877 - 1956) English born scientist. Studied in the University of Oxford. From 1900 to 1902 and was Chemistry assistant in the University of McGill, Montreal, where he co-worked with Rutherford. He received in 1921 a Nobel Prize Laureate in Chemistry. He awarded the Nobel prize in 1921 - ""for his contributions to our knowledge of the chemistry of radioactive substances, and his investigations into the origin and nature of isotopes"
In 1903, with Sir William Ramsay, Soddy verified that the decay of radium produced helium.
He had a great regard for the Indian epics of Ramayana and The Mahabharat. In 1909 when academics were first beginning to grasp the awesome power of the atom, he did not take these ancient records as fable.
In the Interpretation of Radium (1909) he wrote these lines:
“Can we not read into them some justification for the belief that some former forgotten race of men attained not only to the knowledge we have so recently won, but also to the power that is not yet ours?”
When Dr Soddy wrote the book, the atom-bomb box of Pandora had not yet been opened.

 

[talwan]

Walter Eidlitz (1892 - 1976) also called Vaman dasa. A Jew from Germany finds himself in an internment camp in India during the Second World War. His goal was to study Indian religion and philosophy. He had left his family in Germany in late 1930 and traveled to India in search of God. His wife loved him enough to honor his spiritual quest, the fruit of which he would share with her years later upon his return. He has written about his spiritual journey in his book Journey to Unknown India.From India he merged from the myriad of India’s spiritual paths on the bhakti marg, the path of devotion as taught by Sri Chaitanya.
His goal was to go Mount Kailash, the mountain of God’s revelation, and at its base Manasarovar, the lake of the divine spirit. There, says the legend, the eternal human soul glides upon the clear waves like a swan, untouched by fear, hate, or desire.
“God himself speaks the Bhagavad Gita, the innermost God which Brahma the Creator, Vishnu, the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer are only aspects."
Hindus have a greater respect for the spoken word than do people in the West. Not only every word in a mantra, but practically every sound and every word in the language is called akshara in Sanskrit, which means “the indestructible”. Akshara is also a name for God. A true mantra should be sung not spoken. Indian scriptures call Brahma the Creator “the first singer”. Our world is said to have sprung from the mantra he sang. In the West, these ideas are probably utterly foreign, and yet there are traces of similar teachings.

 

[talwan]

Franklin Merrell-Wolff (1887 - 1985) was an American Mystic, Philosopher, and Mathematician who combined an extraordinary intellect with profound mystical insight and authenticity. Born in 1887 in Pasadena, California, he was raised in San Fernando as the son of a Methodist minister. Wolff graduated from Stanford University in 1911 with a major in mathematics and minors in philosophy and psychology. He then went on to Harvard graduate school to study philosophy. As a result of his philosophical studies, Wolff "became convinced of the probable existence of a transcendent mode of consciousness that could not be comprehended within the limits of our ordinary forms of knowledge." Prior to completing his degree at Harvard, he returned to Stanford to teach mathematics. When it became clear to him that he must "reach beyond anything contained within the academic circles of the West" to Realize Transcendental Consciousness, he left his promising career in academia to engage in a spiritual quest. Wolff was drawn to the philosophical works of the Indian sage Shankara, who founded the Advaita Vedanta school of Hindu philosophy.
Wolff's first premonitory recognition took place in 1922, approximately 14 years prior to his transcendental breakthroughs. Wolff describes this first recognition as a noetic insight into the truth of "I am Atman". The term "Atman" is a Sanskrit term that Wolff uses to refer to the transcendental subject to consciousness (see the discussion above of the second fundamental of the philosophy).

 

[talwan]

Graham Hancock ( ? ) is the author of a number of bestselling investigations of historical mysteries, including The Sign and the Seal, Fingerprints of the Gods. "The Vedas (a superb religious literature with no known parent) might in fact have been the work of the undeniably maritime Indus Sarasvati civilization which was long known to have possessed a script but apparently had no religious literature.'
"What is the most amazing about these hymnodies is not so much their overall length, which is awesome, but that for most of their history it is probable that no written versions of them ever existed – and not because they could not be written down but because the priests of the Vedic religion that evolved into Hinduism believed that they should not be written down but should be kept alive instead in human memory."
" Almost supernatural feats of memory - Unlike in other big modern industrial nations that have long ago lost all sense of the sacred and all respect for ‘what the ancients said’, the sacred life still permeates India through and through to such an extent that an appeal to the authority of scripture can still settle all disputes. And unlike the cultures of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and the Americas, where only spectacular fossils of architecture and language remain, the culture of ancient India is still vibrantly alive today in the subcontinent and offers as its gift to the present a vast library of archaic rituals, dances, games, ceremonies, festivals and customs as well as an immense oral literature that has not only been preserved and continuously passed on in the memory of sadhus and rishis (sages, wise men) for thousands of years but that is also celebrated, rehearsed, admired and relished in hundreds of thousands of Hindu villages from the Himalayas to the sea. "

 

[talwan]

Linda Johnsen ( ? ) holds a Master's degree in Eastern studies. She is author of Daughter of the Goddess: The Women Saints of India, and The Living Goddess: Reclaiming the Tradition of the Mother of the Universe. She has published nearly 100 articles in magazines such as Hinduism Today, Yoga Journal, and Yoga International and has lectured throughout the United States on Hindu spirituality. In her book on Hinduism, she has written:
"Hinduism is the one world religion that reaches out to embrace other faiths with respect, a welcome change from groups who expend enormous amounts of energy condemning the sincere beliefs of others. There is no eternal damnation in Hinduism because Hindus believe absolutely no one is excluded from divine grace.
The Hindu tradition has held the culture of greater India together for thousands of years, through fair times and foul. Increasingly, we in the West are looking to Hinduism with the respect and appreciation it deserves, realizing we modern people have a great deal to learn from the oldest religion on Earth.
Today, there's a resurgence of interest in "the wisdom of the East." Many of us in the West flounder spiritually, confused by the inability of our religions to square with scientific reality and craving actual spiritual experience of which our lives seem so devoid. We're impressed by the ability of Eastern religions like Hinduism to meet science head on, agreeing in many respects about important topics, such as the age and size of the universe.
Today, Hindu culture is one of the last remaining enclaves of a universal minded religion.

 

[talwan]

Hajime Nakamura (1912 - 1999) Was a Japanese scholar. His field of research was exceedingly broad, encompassing Indian philosophy, Buddhist studies, historical studies, Japanese thought, comparative thought. He was the author of The History of Early Vedānta Philosophy an epoch-making study in four volumes. “Indians conducted far more elaborate speculations than the Westerners of antiquity and the Middle Ages with respect to the theory of numbers, the analysis of psychological phenomena, and the study of linguistic structures. The Indians are highly rationalistic, insofar as their ideal is to recognize eternal laws concerning past, present, and future. The thought represented by Tertullian’s aphorism, “credo quia absurdum,” or “I believe because it is absurd,” had no receptivity in India.
The Indians are, at the same time, logical since they generally have a tendency to sublimate their thinking to the universal; they are at once logical and rationalistic. On the contrary, many religions of the West are irrational and illogical, and this is acknowledged by the Westerners themselves. For example, Albert Schweitzer, a pious and most devoted Christian, says, “Compared to the logical religions of Asia, the gospel of Jesus is illogical.”
It is often contended that in contrast to Western thought the spirit of tolerance and mutual concession is a salient feature of Eastern thought. The religion of the West at times is harsh and even emphasizes struggle for the sake of keeping the faith and condemning unbelievers:
“If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke, 14.26).

 

[talwan]

Friedrich Heiler (1892 – 1967) born in Muenchen, Germany. He was a professor of history of religions.
He is the author of Mysticism of the Upanishads, Christian faith and Indian thought and Das Gebet and Die Religionen der Menschheit pointed out that Greek mysticism was borrowed from India.
He wrote:
" India is our motherland of speculative theology."
“There runs in unbroken chain from the Atman-Brahman mysticism of the Vedic Upanishads to the Vedanata of Sankara on the one side and on the other through the mystical technique of the Yoga system to the Buddhist doctrine of salvation.
Another line of development equally continuous leads from the Orphic-Dionysiac mysticism to Plato, Philo and the later Hellenistic mystery cults to the Neoplatonic mysticism of the Infinite of Plotinus which is in turn is the source of the “mystical theology” of the pseudo-Dionysius the Areioagute…..Perhaps this second chain is only an offshoot from the first, since the Elatic speculations and the cryptic doctrine of redemption have possibly borrowed essential elements from early Indian mysticism.”
(source: Prayer: A Study in the History and Psychology of Religion - By Frederic Heiler p. 135 and Eastern Religions & Western Thought - By. Dr. S. Radhakrishnan p. 248 – 249).

 

[talwan]

General George S. Patton (1885-1945) He came from a long line of soldiers who fought and often died in many conflicts, including the American Revolution and, in particular, the Confederate side in the American Civil War.
Remembered for his fierce determination and ability to lead soldiers, General S. Patton, Jr. is considered one of the greatest military figures in history.
He believed that he had acquired his military skills on ancient battlefields.
He was a staunch believer in reincarnation. One of his favorite topics, he would offer up as evidence pertinent bits of The Bhagavad Gita:
"For sure is the death of him that is born, and sure the birth of him that is dead"

 

[talwan]

Victor Hugo (1802 – 1885) He was a French author, designer, and artist. He was possibly the most important of the Romantic authors in the French language. His major works include the novels Notre Dame de Paris and Les Misérables, and a large body of poetry.
Victor Hugo’s respect and awe for the literary masterpieces of India were born of his perception of the immensity of the universe described in the epics. In ‘Supremate,’ a poem in his Legend of the Ages, he versified the narrative portion of theKena Upanishad in 1870.
He imitated the Kena Upanishad in his poem, Suprematie (The Legend of the Centuries) in 1870.
He gathered his information from G. Pautheir’s Les Livres Sacres de l’Orient.
Vayou - is Vayu (God of Wind), Agni (God of Fire) and Indra (God of space):

 

[talwan]

James Henry Tuckwell ( ? ) in his book, Religion and Reality: A Study in the philosophy of Mysticism rightly says:
“In our main conclusion we have long ago been anticipated by the religious philosophy of India. In the West our philosophy has been surely but slowly moving to the same inevitable monistic goal. In Professor Ladd of Harvard we have a notable Western thinker who by a process of careful and consistent reasoning, concrete in character, has also arrived at the conclusion that the ultimate reality must be conceived of as an Absolute Self of which we are finite forms or appearances."
"But it is the crowning glory of Vedanta that it so long ago announced, re-iterated and emphasized this deep truth in a manner that does not permit us for a moment to forget it or explain it away. This great stroke of identity, this discernment of the ultimate unity of all things in Brahman or the One Absolute Self seems to us to constitute the masterpiece and highest achievement of India’s wonderful metaphysical and religious genius to which the West has yet to pay the full tribute which is its due.”
(source: Is India Civilized - Essays on Indian Culture - By Sir John Woodroffe Ganesh & Co. Publishers 1922 p. 140 - 141).

 

[talwan]

Alun Lewis (1915 -1944) was one of the few great British writers of the Second World War. His early death at the age of twenty-eight robbed Wales of its most promising poet and story writer. Born and brought up near Aberdare in south Wales, the son of a teacher, he read history at Aberystwyth and Manchester. After a period of unemployment he became a teacher in south Wales, before enlisting in the Royal Engineers in 1940. Later in 1942 Lewis's new regiment, the South Wales Borderers, travelled to India. His experiences there are recreated in the beautiful poems of Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets and the stories and letters of In the Green Tree.
After E M Forster, the only British writer, to find the Imagination physically confronted by India was Alun Lewis, whose early death in the jungle is frequently regarded as a sad loss to literature. One of his last stories, “The Earth is a Syllable” acknowledges its debt to the Upanishads both by its title and within the story itself.

 

[talwan]

Alexander Zinoviev (1922 - ) Russian sociologist and works in Russian Academy of Sciences. He has been many times in India and interested in Indian culture.
He has recently written:
" But I would like to believe Hinduism is too valuable for humanity, and sacred Indian books contain too much precious and unique knowledge that it will not sink in oblivion. I’d like to believe that the principles of Indian philosophy and religion are much more in agreement with the needs for the future than any other religion in the world, in agreement with the tendency, known in Western countries as New Age. It’s my deep belief that without India the world will sink in spiritual darkness and ignorance."

"So, what must be done in order to save Hinduism and stop the Islamic flood? There is only one way and it is called mass conversion of Muslims into Hinduism. If Hindus want to survive, they must convert. They must adopt the strategy of Catholic missionaries and Muslim mullahs. I don’t mean only conversion of one-time Hindus that only recently adopted other religions.
"Hinduism must convert also people of non-Hindu origin. The fact that they live in India is enough because all Indians, notwithstanding their religious affiliation, had once had Hindu ancestors."

 

[talwan]

Lady Callcott (Mrs Graham) (1785 - 1842) One of the spectacular exceptions to the English Memsahibs was a woman called Maria Graham who came to India with her father Rear-Admiral George Dundas of the Royal Navy. She married Capt Thomas Graham of the Royal Navy. Later she became Lady Callcott by her second marriage. Her 'Journal of a Residence in India', dealing with her experiences mainly in the coastal areas of India during the period from 1809 to 1811 was first published in England in 1812.
She was culturally very different from most of the English Ladies who came to India along with their husbands.
She was a great lover of India and clearly stated in her Journal that one of her purposes was 'to exhibit a sketch of India's former grandeur and refinement so that I could restore India to that place in the scale of ancient nations, which European historians have in general unaccountably neglected to assign to it'.
She wrote eloquently about the grandeur of Sanskrit language and literature, its majesty of thought and loftiness of expression.
She went to Mahabalipuram along with a Brahmin servant of Col Colin Mackenzie and stayed there for three days. The Oriental Manuscripts Library in Madras today contains all the manuscripts collected by Col Mackenzie between 1792 and 1815. Lady Calcott gave a beautiful description of Mahabalipuram and its environs in her Journal.

 

[talwan]

Professor Edward Washburn Hopkins (1857-1932) graduated at Columbia University in 1878, studied at Leipzig, where he received the degree of Ph.D. in 1881 and became professor of Sanskrit and comparative philology in Yale University in 1895. He became secretary of the American Oriental Society and editor of its Journal, to which he contributed many valuable papers, especially on numerical and temporal categories in early Sanskrit literature. ​

He observed:​

"Plato is full of Sankhyan thought, worked out by him, but taken from Pythagoras. Before the sixth century B.C. all the religious-philosophical idea of Pythagoras are current in India (L. Schroeder, Pythagoras). If there were but one or two of these cases, they might be set aside as accidental coincidences, but such coincidences are too numerous to be the result of change. "
And again he writes: "Neo-Platonism and Christian Gnosticism owe much to India. The Gnostic ideas in regard to a plurality of heavens and spiritual worlds go back directly to Hindu sources. Soul and light are one in the Sankhyan system, before they became so in Greece, and when they appear united in Greece it is by means of the thought which is borrowed from India. The famous three qualities of the Sankhyan reappear as the Gnostic 'three classes."
(source: Religions of India - By Edward Washburn Hopkins p. 559-560).

 

[talwan]

Henri Bergson (1859 - 1941) French Philosopher and the son of a Jewish musician and an English woman, was educated at the Lycée Condorcet and the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied philosophy. After a teaching career as a schoolmaster, Bergson was appointed to the École Normale Supérieure in 1898 and held the chair of philosophy at the Collège de France. He was elected to the Académie Française; then was president of the Commission for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations.
He observed that:
"From the earliest times divine and many of the great pilgrimages of Hindu India were focused upon sacred rivers such as the Ganges, Indus, Yamuna, Krishna, Godavari, and Brahmaputra.
The largest religious festival in the world today, held every 12 years near Allahabad, India and attracting upwards of twenty million pilgrims, takes place at the confluence of two rivers."

 

[talwan]

Savitri Devi (1905 - 1982) was born Maximiani Portas, of English and Greek parents in Lyons, France. After becoming a Greek national she took to Hellenism, and was disillusioned with Christianity. It was the swastikasigns on the palace of Athens, built by 19th century German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, that stirred Maximiani's first feelings for the Aryan race. She left for India to search for the roots of the Aryan civilisation. She regarded Hinduism as the only living Aryan heritage in the modern world and was convinced that only Hinduism could take on and oppose the Judaeo-Christian heritage. Soon, she adopted the name Savitri Devi which would make her famous in neo-Nazi circles.
India fascinated her - she noted now even a street-side vendor would discuss the Mahabharat in the morning. In 1939, she published A Warning to Hindus under the auspices of the Hindu Mission. In the book, she scorned the Congress for its secular policies and said there was no India but a Hindu one and warned the Hindus not to let the Muslims overwhelm them. In 1939 Savitri Devi met and married a Bengali Brahmin, Asit Krishna Mukherjee, in a Hindu ceremony in Calcutta. During the war the couple gathered intelligence on behalf of the Axis, and Mukherji put Subhas Chandra Bose in contact with the Japanese, who would later support his Indian National Army in its abortive campaign against the British.

 

[talwan]

Vera Christine Chute Collum (1883 - 1957) scholar and author of The Dance of Civa or Life's Unity and Rhythm has observed:
"The conviction that seeming diversities and differences are but passing and rhythmically varying phases of a fundamental unity led the East to symbolize Life and Death as the ever supple and continuously flowing Dance of Civa, in which construction and destruction are rhythmically pulsating patterns that the subtle dancer eternally presents and dissolves with the swiftness of a rapidly turning wheel."

 

[talwan]

Professor Ernest E Wood (1883 - 1965) a Sanskrit and Asian scholar, introduced the Montessori philosophy to the study group who were considering establishing a new nursery school. Professor Wood lived in India for 38 years. He founded two University Colleges, acted as President, Principal and Professor of Physics, English and Sanskrit at different times. His love for India and its people, and his deep experience, found expression in active aid to an educational renaissance initiated by the leaders of India, including the poet Rabindranath Tagore. He wrote several books including Practical Yoga and The Glorious Presence.
Vedanta is considered in India to be the loftiest achievement in thinking of God. Schopenhauer, Emerson, William James and Whitehead are deemed by the Wood to be most in accord with Vedantist teachings.
"The Vedanta philosophy has as its basis the belief that the universe of our experience is only one reality and it can be known."

 

[talwan]

Lowell Jackson Thomas (1892 - 1981) was an American writer, broadcaster. A war correspondent in Europe and the Middle East while in his 20s, Thomas helped make T.E. Lawrence famous with his exclusive coverage and later with the book With Lawrence in Arabia. His radio nightly news was an American institution for nearly two generations, and he appeared on television from its earliest days. Out of his lifelong globetrotting came lectures, travelogues, and more than 50 books of adventure and comment, including Kabluk of the Eskimo and The Seven Wonders of the World.
He observed in his book, India: Land of the Black Pagoda:
“These things ease the heart of man from sorrow,” says an Indian sage, “water, green grass, and the beauty of a woman.”

 

[talwan]

Major Francis Yeats-Brown (1886 - 1944) was the younger son of an English diplomat. The Orient called to him and he became a Bengal Lancer, although every turn of his mind was toward scholarship, literature, and philosophy. His book The Lives of a Bengal Lancer was perhaps the most extraordinary book ever written about India by a westerner.
Francis Yeats-Brown liked Indians, so he was not unhappy to be sent to an Indian regiment (17th Cavalry, Indian Army). But his acquaintance with Indians and Indian culture educated him out of humor with Western civilization. "Very humbly and hopefully'' he went to Benares, holy city of the Hindus, there to sit at the feet of Theosophist Annie Besant, How far Yeats-Brown has progressed in the practice of Yoga is not clear. But he tried the primary breathing exercises, says he attained moments of impersonality. "Poised and relaxed and completely in my body (not out of it, as the mystologues would have it) I saw myself at times impersonally. The future lay at my feet. I surveyed it as an interested traveler."
In India he plunged deeply into the study of the Hinduism, Vedantism and Yoga.

 

[talwan]

Horace Alexander (1899 - 1989) was an English Quaker, diplomat, teacher and writer, pacifist and ornithologist. He was the youngest of four sons of Joseph Gundry Alexander (1848–1918). One of his brothers was biologist Wilfred Backhouse Alexander. He has observed that:
"Western scholars of our age, when they talk of heritage of the ancient world, still commonly confine themselves to the Mediterranean countries, with Mesopotamia and Arabia and Persia possibly included. The ancient cultures of China and India are omitted.

 

[talwan]

Dr. William Ralph Inge (1860 - 1954) Anglican Platonist author in his Christian Mysticism refers to the mystic strains in the early thinkers.
Inge, however, agrees with Heiler in looking upon the negative descriptions of the deity and the world-denying character of ethics as Indian in origin. He says:
“The doctrine that God can be described only by negatives is neither Christian nor Greek, but belongs to the old religion of India.”
"To give a negative account of God is to affirm His immensity of being."
(source: Eastern Religions & Western Thought - By. Dr. S. Radhakrishnan p. 293).

 

[talwan]

Richard Schiffman ( ) is nationally known as an on-air journalist whose features regularly appear on the National Public Radio shows: Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Living of Earth. He has studied in India for over four years and is the author of Sri Ramakrisnhna - Prophet for the New Age(1989). Schiffman lived in India for a number of years and studied Hindu spirituality under several spiritual Masters, including the Jillellamudi Mother, Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba and Mata Amritananadamayi. He is the author of Mother of All, a biography of the Jillellamudi Mother, and former editor of the Matrusi Journal.
He has observed about the Upanishads thus:
“These sparse treatises of great beauty, intensity, and revelatory power are set for the most part in the form of dialogues of spiritual guidance between youthful seekers and their enlightened masters, the immortal rishis. The approaches pioneered by the rishis remain to this day the mainstays of Hindu mystical practices.”