Pride of Hinduism - Views of foreigners

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Satprem (1923 -2007) aka Bernard Enginger, a sailor and a Breton born in Paris. A member of the French Resistance. Satprem was arrested by the Gestapo when he was twenty and spent a year and half in concentration camps. Devastated he journey first to Upper Egypt, then to India, where he served in the French colonial government of Pondicherry. There he discovered Sri Aurobindo and Mother. Their Message - "Man is a transitional being" - struck a deep chord. His first essay was dedicated to Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness a book that has led so many to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. His book, Evolution II translated from the French by Michel Danino is dedicated to the Souls of India:

"the millions souls of India
unknown to themselves
unknowing of their own Treasure
with my love infinite
In his book, Evolution II, he wondered after Man, who? But the question is: After Man, how?
(source: Evolution II - by Satprem - Translated by Michel Danino).

 

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Allama Iqbal (1873-1938) Indian thinker and poet.The great civilization of the Indian subcontinent, has had its roots deep in antiquity, some seven to eight thousand years ago, and its flowering in the third millennium B.C. still lives on. In contrast, when we look round the world we are surprised by the fact that the Egyptian and Mesopotamia civilizations that flourished alongside this Indic Civilization have all disappeared, leaving hardly any trace behind. Why? The Indian psyche has indeed been pondering over this great cultural phenomenon of 'livingness', and this quest has been very aptly echoed by him in the following words:
Yunan-o-Misra Ruma sab mit gaye jahan se
Ab tak magar hai baqi namo-nishan hamara
Kuchh bat hai ki hasti mitati nahin hamari
Sadiyon raha hai dushman daur-i-zaman hamara

 

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Swami Ghanananda Saraswati ( ?) the first African swami was initiated by Swami Krishnanand of India in 1975. He heads the Hindu Monastery of Africa in Accra, Ghana, regularly imparting spiritual guidance to devotees. He writes: "African religions and Hinduism have certain similarities. Traditional African religions recognize the many aspects of Brahman and worship God as Prithivi, Vayu, Varuna, Agni, etc., just as in Hinduism. Only Africans who have been exposed to Hinduism can appreciate these similarities which help them to better understand African beliefs and aspirations."
"I was searching for the truth. I went through some books on yoga and discovered that Hinduism is a very good religion. It is open minded. It teaches you about God. It also teaches you about science of the soul. Later I went to Rishikesh and stayed with Sivananda's ashram, the Divine Life Society. There I found that Hinduism is a straightforward religion that revealed the truth.

 

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Herbert George H. G. Wells (1866 -1946) historian, a bitter critic of the Roman Catholic Church and author of several books including A Short History of the World and Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church and The Time Machine.In Hinduism, tolerance is not simply a matter of policy but an article of faith. He say that Hindu kings actually welcomed with open arms Christian missionaries and Muslim fakirs and Buddhist monks for a free exchange of ideas. One great Hindu king, Ashoka, in fact changed his religion to Buddhism and propagated Buddhism throughout India.
(source: Am I a Hindu - by Ed Viswanathan p. 8).

 

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Andrew Harvey (1952 - ) has devoted hi life to studying the world's mystical traditions. He is the author of several books including The Direct Path creating a journey to the divine through the world's mystical traditions. "The Sanatana Dharma is a gallimaufry of the most extravagantly varied faiths, rituals, customs, beliefs; Hinduism has no single dogmatic authority and, until very recently in its history, no "missionary zeal" to convert others, sine it has never seen itself as the one true religion or the only hope of salvation.
"While there is no one 'exclusive' dogmatic Hindu tradition, then, there is a very definitely, a spirit of inquiry and of revelation that is so consistent with the greatest of modern Hindu mystics, Ramana Maharshi...down the Upanishads more than two thousand years before him. It is this consistency that gives the Hindu mystical tradition its timeless purity, weight, and grandeur. "
"What, then, is the core truth of the Hindu tradition? It is the truth of the mystery of a Spirit that pervades, creates, and transcends all things and of each soul's conscious identity with it beyond space and time. In the Upanishads, this all-pervading, all-creating, all-transcending Spirit is named Brahman. For the Upanishads and all the later teachings rooted in them, every human being is naturally one with Brahman in his or her Atman, his or her "soul" or "indwelling core of divine consciousness." The aim of human life and the source of liberation from all the chains of life and death is to know, from inmost experience, the Atman's identity with Brahman and to live the calm, fearless, selflessly loving life that radiates from this knowledge."

 

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General Joseph Davey Cunningham (1812-1851) author of A history of the Sikhs, from the origin of the nation to the battles of the Sutlej says:

"Mathematical science was so perfect and astronomical observations so complete that the paths of the sun and the moon were accurately measured. The philosophy of the learned few was perhaps for the first time, firmly allied with the theology of the believing many, and Brahmanism laid down as articles of faith the unity of God, the creation of the world, the immortality of the soul, and the responsibility of man. The remote dwellers upon the Ganga distinctly made known that future life about which Moses is silent or obscure, and that unity and Omnipotence of the Creator which were unknown to the polytheism of the Greek and Roman multitude, and to the dualism of Mithraic legislators, while Vyasa perhaps surpassed Plato in keeping the people tremblingly alive to the punishment which awaited evil deeds."
(source: History of the Sikhs - By Joseph Davey Cunningham).

 

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H. T. Goldich ( ? ) writes: “No river on the surface of the globe, can compare with the Ganga in sanctity. From her source to her outflow in the Bay of Bengal, every yard of the river is sacred. To bathe in the Ganga at stated festivals is to wash away sin; to die and cremated on the river bank is to attain eternal peace. Tracing magnificent curves through the flat lowlands, the four rivers – Ganga, Jumna, Gogra and Gandaki – have for centuries combined to form an over-ruling factor in the development of Indian races.”
Below the Rajmahal hills, the flood-discharge amounts to a million and a half cubic feet per second. Nearly every vegetable product which feeds and clothes, a people, or enables them to trade with foreign countries, is to be found in its basin. Upon its banks, in the present day, are such centers of wealth as Calcutta, Patna, Benares, Allahabad, Cawnpore – with Agra and Delhi on its affluent Jumna. “There is not a river in the world which has influenced humanity or contributed to the growth of material civilization or of social ethics, to such an extent as the Ganga. The wealth of India has been concentrated in her valley; and beneath the shade of trees, whose roots have been nourished on her waters, the profoundest doctrines of moral philosophy have been conceived to be promulgated afar for the guidance of the world.”
(source: Imperial Gazetteer of India – The Clarendon Press. Oxford. I 22-26 and Our Heritage and Its Significance - By Shripad Rama Sharma p. 16-17).

 

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Yann Martel (1963 - ) a Canadian who won this year's Booker Prize for Life of Pi thinks: ''Hinduism -- is a very open religion. It can lend itself to so much,''
Martel claims he has always loved India. ''India is all lives in one place, India is all emotions in one place. It's an extra - ordinary, dazzling place, it's all the wonder and horror of life.''
According to him, India stokes the fires of creativity. ''There are stories that can be told only in India. There are things that are possible in India that are not possible anywhere else.'' ''It's a country that dazzles me because it is all of life. I truly think that in some ways, India is the richest place on earth.''
(source: India is the richest place on earth: Booker winner- sify.com).

289. Sir Henry James Summer Maine (1822-1888) His first work, Ancient Law was his most famous. He was (1862-69) legal member of the viceroy's council in India, where he planned the codification of Indian law.
This eminent Jurist has shown that the old Brehon laws of Ireland are derived from Vedic laws of India.
(source: The Vision of India - By Sisirkumar Mitra p. 208).

 

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E. M. Plunkett ( ? ) writes in his book Ancient Calendars and Constellations: "The opinion of the Greek writers at the beginning of the Christian era may be quoted as showing the high estimation in which Indian astronomy was held. In the Life of Appollonius of Tyana, the Greek philosopher and astrologer, written by Philostratus about 210 CE, the wisdom and learning of Appollonius are set high above his contemporaries because he had studied astronomy and astrology with the sages of India."
(source: Antiquity of Indian Astrology).

 

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William Enfield (1741-1797) ) was an influential dissenting theologian and tutor at Warrington Academy. His History is a translation of Johann Jakob Brucker's "Historia Critica Philosophiae (first published in six volumes in 1742--67), the most significant and scholarly history of philosophy of the pre-Kantian era. He has written:"We find that it (India) was visited for the purpose of acquiring knowledge by Pythagoras, Anaxarchus, Pyrrho, and others who afterwards became eminent philosophers in Greece."
(source: History of Philosophy - By William Enfield Vol. I p. 65).

 

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Thomas Carlyle (1795 - 1881) Scottish-born English historian and essayist who was leading figure in the Victorian era. He was a historian, novelist and essayist who exerted a huge influence over the Victorian age. His major works are the satirical novel Sartor Resartus (1833-4) The French Revolution (1837) and the lecture-series On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841).
The Vedantic note in Carlyle's writings is too well known to require mention. And the Gita was the only book he chose to present to Ralph Waldo Emerson when the latter met him for the first time.
(source: The Vision of India - By Sisirkumar Mitra p. 204).

 

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Joseph Needham (1900-1995) is famous mainly for the formidable magnitude and scholarship of his work on science in China. He impressed by the achievements of India in the field of knowledge and learning. He comments on the Indian fascination with perpetual motion, 'to seek the ultimate origin or predisposition of the Indian conviction in the profoundly Hindu world view of endless cyclical change, kalpa and mahakalpas succeeding one another in self-sufficient and unwearying round. For Hindus as well as Taoists, the universe itself was a perpetual motion machine."
(source: The Speaking Tree: A Study of Indian Culture and Society - By Richard Lannoy p. 292).

 

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Stephen Knapp (Sri Nandanandana Dasa) ( ? )American bornauthor of several books including The Secret Teachings of the Vedas : The Eastern Answers to the Mysteries of Life and Proof of Vedic Culture's Global Existence. He has observed the following about the total freedom in Hinduism:
"One of the unique things about Vedic philosophy is that within the many texts it contains, it deals with all varieties of viewpoints, from impersonalistic atheism, outright materialism, to loving devotion to God. And you have room to discover and realize the knowledge at your own rate, whether it be many months, many years, or even lifetimes. In other words, you may at first be an impersonalist persuasion and believe that the Supreme is only a great unembodied force. Or you might believe that God is a person. Or you may worship Durga, Ganesh, Shiva, Vishnu or Krishna, and still be considered on the Vedic path, though on different parts of the path. But this is the sort of freedom and opportunity you have in the Vedic philosophy for your growth and development. However, we find that in other religions, such as Christianity and Islam, if you question or doubt the local scriptures or authorities, or argue different points of view, or look for answers from another religion, your faith will be questioned, you may be called a heretic, and you may even be excommunicated from the Church, which is supposed to equate with eternal damnation. This is obviously a very closed minded discipline to work in compared to the freedom of Vedic system. After all, what kind of God would make a system in which you have only one life to live and only one chance to discover how to attain Him, and then follow all the scriptural demands and requirements or face eternal damnation?

 

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L S S O'Malley ( ?) author of Popular Hinduism writes about Hindu Literature as giving help to a sense of moral value and to maintain a healthy ethical standard. The two great epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, are a means of moral education for millions, teaching moral lessons in concrete terms and illustrating in the lives of heroes and heroines such virtues as truth, love, fidelity, courage and calm resignation. "Besides giving examples of noble lives, the literature of the Hindus is full of lines announcing moral truths and inculcating virtue. In the Ramayana Rama, who is himself a pattern of loyal truthfulness, declares: "Truth is lord in the world; virtue always rests on truth.
The Mahabharata has been described as an encyclopedia of moral teaching, the nature of which may perhaps be judged from a few extracts. "The sum of true righteousness is to treat others as you yourself would be treated. Do nothing to your neighbor that you would not have your neighbor do to you hereafter." "It is the constant duty of the good to injure no one by thought, word or deed, to give to others and to be kind to all." "High minded men delight in doing good without thought of their own interest. when they confer a benefit on others, they do not count on favors in return." "Fasts, ablutions and austerities are all in vain unless the soul is pure." "Overcome the wicked by goodness."
' The complexity of Hinduism is so great, the forms which it assumes so protean, that it defies precise definition. It is a composite religion made up of many conflicting elements.... It allows the greatest possible freedom of thought as apart from practice, as is admitted by Hindu scholars."
Hinduism has a highly spiritual side and contains many sublime conceptions."

 

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Sir James Mackintosh (1765-1832) British writer and Philosopher. He was trained as a physician, but after settling in London he became a writer and lawyer. He served as recorder of Bombay (1804-6) and judge in Bombay vice-admiralty court (1806-12). He called: "the theory (propounded by Vedanta) refined, abstruse, ingenious and beautiful."
(source: Hindu Superiority - By Har Bilas Sarda p. 297).

 

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Gustav Holst (1874 - 1934) composer of S¯avitri ; The dream-city, Choral hymns from the Rig Veda and S¯avitri; an episode from the Mah¯abharata, Op. 25 He was Vaughan Williams’ greatest friends. Despite his German name, Holst was born in Cheltenham in 1874. Holst’s music as exploring ‘mystical regions’ Conventional religion did not interest Holst, and he felt himself drawn towards Hinduism. He believed in the concept of Dharma and the idea of life after death, and this eastern influence also led to his love of astrology. Holst’s beliefs are revealed in a letter to a friend : -
‘…everything in this world – is just one big miracle. Or rather, the universe itself is one.’
He conceived as well a passion for Wagner, whose style looms large in Hoist's apprentice works, and an interest in Hindu philosophy and literature. The most notable of many works springing from Holst's preoccupation with Hinduism was the chamber opera Savitri dating from 1908, based on an episode from the epic poem Mahabharata: its economy and intensity are exemplified in the arresting and dramatic opening, where Death sings, offstage and unaccompanied.

 

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Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910) founder of the Christian Science Movement. She published Science and Health With a Key to the Scriptures in 1875. She had imbibed some of the teachings of the New England Transcendentalists (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott and Henry D. Thoreau) who made their influence widely felt through books, magazines and newspaper articles. "Christian Science founded in the little town of Lyn, MA in 1815 by Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy. Yet when we read in texts of Science and Health up to the 33rd edition there are quotations from the sacred Hindu text The Bhagavad Gita, as well as allusions by Mrs. Eddy to Hindu philosophy. These were omitted in later editions, causing modern-day Christian Scientists to be unaware that their founder gleaned from Hindu philosophy."
"There was a similarity between Advaita Vedanta Hinduism and Mrs. Eddy's view of God and the material world. She makes reference to Bhagavad Gita in page 259 of the 33rd edition.
Swami Yogananda in his East-West magazine for the issue of May-June 1926 in his article “Christian Science and Hindu Philosophy contends that in older editions, the Christian Science Church has drawn a lot from Hindu philosophy. The current editions of Science and Health contain no Hindu references, to Hindu teachings are quite clear and distinct.

 

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Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888) writer, philosopher, schoolteacher, visionary. Born in 1799 to an illiterate flax farmer in Wolcott, Connecticut, Amos Bronson Alcott was singular among the Transcendentalists in his unassailable optimism and the extent of his self-education. He is also the author of Orphic Sayings, Tablets, and Concord Days. Louisa May Alcott, portrayed him as the grandfather in her novel Little Women.His second daughter, Louisa Alcott, became a world-famous writer, and his youngest daughter, May, was a critically acclaimed artist. When Ralph Waldo Emerson met Amos Bronson Alcott in Boston in the late 1830's, he was so impressed with his intellect and innovative ideas that he convinced him to move to Concord and join his circle of friends. Early in his life he was interested in the Quaker concept of "inner light" which is closer to the Hindu concept of the in-dwelling spirit in every man, the Atman or the Brahman. John T, Reid remarks: "As a young man....he was to identify the 'inner light' with Brahma."
The Bhagavad Gita impressed Alcott. He read it in 1846, during which he also read the writings of Carlyle, Coleridge, Goethe, Swedenborg and Behmen who were all idealists and mystics. On May 3, 1846, he wrote in his journal:
"In the evening I had an hour of quiet reading of the Oriental wisdom in the chapters of the Bhagavad Gita, on 'Works' and 'Performing of Works.'
On May 10, 17, and 19 the same year, he wrote in his journal

 

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Emile Burnof (1821-1907) author of La science des religions and Dictionnaire classique sanscrit-français and Essai sur le Veda, ou Introduction a la connaisance de l'Inde says: The Bhagavad Gita was "probably the most beautiful book which has ever come from the hand of man."
(source: The Fragrance of India - By Louis Revel p. 163).

 

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Amaury de Riencourt (1918 - ) was born in Orleans, France. He received his B.A. from the Sorbonne and his M.A. from the University of Algiers. He is author of several books including The American empire and The Soul of India, he wrote:“The boundless riches of the Hindu faith, its universal appeal, its tolerance, the profundity of Hindu philosophy and its enduring roots among the Indian people all this made India a poor soil for the sowing…”
"there can be no doubt that the Upanishads are based on the most profound study and understanding of human nature ever achieved, one with which we twentieth century Westerners, in spite of our vast present day knowledge, have not yet fully caught up.

 

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Dick Teresi ( ? ) author and coauthor of several books about science and technology, including The God Particle. He is cofounder of Omni magazine and has written for Discover, The New York Times Magazine, and The Atlantic Monthly. "The big bang is the biggest-budget universe ever, with mind-boggling numbers to dazzle us – a technique pioneered by fifth-century A.D. Indian cosmologists, the first to estimate the age of the earth at more than 4 billion years.
The cycle of creation and destruction continues forever, manifested in the Hindu deity Shiva, Lord of the Dance, who holds the dream that sounds the universe’s creation in his right hand and the flame that, billions of years later, will destroy the universe in his left. Meanwhile Brahma is but one of untold numbers of other gods dreaming their own universes.

 

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Sir Yehudi Menuhin (1915 – 1999) Born to Russian - Jewish parents who migrated to America. One of the greatest violinists of the 20[SUP]th[/SUP] century revered an Indian Yogi as his teacher. He was famous for his affiliation with renowned Hatha yoga teacher B K S Iyengar and legendary sitarist Ravi Shankar. The more he learned about India and Yoga, the more he loved it. He was among the first in the West to espouse yoga and the principles of organic food. He said: “India is the primal source, the mother country.”

 

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Tom McArthur ( ?) author of Yoga and the Bhagavad Gita has observed: "If all the forms of Christianity from voodoo in Haiti to Christian Science in Boston were penned up – and had for centuries been penned up – in one peninsula, however large, then the results would be much the same as the Hinduism we see today. Vishnu and Shiva are no more at odds than Calvin and the Papacy; the Hare Krishna movement and the Ramakrishna Mission are no further apart than the Pentecostalists and the Jesuits."
"Hinduism is India’s response to what the German philosopher of religion Rudolf Otto has called ‘the numinous’, that mystery all around us that fascinates and inspires awe. The universe into which we are born –thrust, thrown, whatever, weak and dependent as kittens – is only ever partly explicable, often hostile, and always awesome, whether we want to feel the awe or not.
Hinduism demonstrates the interplay of seven factors over at least 3,000 years. Natural disasters are a constant in the collective Indian experience, part of the Wheel of Rebirth. Mountains, rivers, cities, and shrines have all been turned into focuses of supernatural powers; they are the bindus or ‘points’ where the gods meet us or this world touches the Other.
Hinduism combines in its gigantic tapestry the threads of both fantasy and logic, where some centuries ago the Western world severed the two fairly thoroughly. In the West, rationality and fantasy live uneasily together in divided minds; in India at large, the division was never even attempted, at least not until the coming of European education."

 

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Sir William Wilson Hunter (1840-1900) He was educated at Glasgow University (B.A. s86o), Paris and Bonn, acquiring a knowledge of Sanscrit, and passing first in the final examination for the Indian Civil Service in 1862. Author of A Brief History of the Indian Peoples and editor of Imperial Gazetteer of India.He says "The Astronomy of the Hindus has formed the subject of excessive admiration."
(source: Hindu Superiority - By Har Bilas Sarda p. 332 - 348).
"The various theories of creation, arrangement and development were each elaborated, and the views of the modern physiologists at the present day are a return with new light to the evolution theory of Kapila, whose Sankhya system is the oldest of the Darsanas."

 

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Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998) was born in 1907 in Basle, Switzerland, of German parents. He was a philosopher, poet and artist author of Language of the Self. Many of his ideas are taken from Vedanta. Schuon often expressed a deep appreciation for Advaita-Vedanta and characterized his perspective as that of the Sanatana Dharma, the "eternal religion."
Schuon considers yoga as a spiritual exercise which results "not from a human willing, but from the nature of things," thus applying to the substance of the soul principles that are quasi-geometrical in their objectivity.