Pride of Hinduism - Views of foreigners

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Sandhya Jain ( ? ) author of Adi Deo Arya Devata. A Panoramic View of Tribal-Hindu Cultural Interface and Evangelical Intrusions as well as eminent columnist in the mainstream English Media of India, she has written eloquently about Hinduism: "India has existed for several millennia; it is rooted in history and enshrined and encompassed by a civilisational ethos based on the attainment of Consciousness (self-realisation). India's ancient religion, Hinduism, is not a codified creed in the manner of other world religions. Properly known as the Sanatan Dharma or the Eternal Tradition, it is simultaneously a religion and a living civilisation or way of life, and is inspired by the ideal of universal welfare of all beings, both human and other creatures. Dharma is natural (cosmic) law. As Hinduism, it takes on a formal structure, creed and ritual; yet it is never the captive of absolutism.

 

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Ram Dass (1931- ) was born Richard Alpert, the bright and personable scion of a wealthy, influential Jewish family. His father, George Alpert, a prominent Boston lawyer, helped found Brandeis University and was president of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad. Alpert taught at Harvard in the '60s, joining his colleague Timothy Leary in "consciousness-raising" experiments.

Alpert has been studying the nature of consciousness for more than 50 years, and began his studies with psychology, specializing in human motivation and personality development. While at Harvard in 1961, Alpert's explorations of human consciousness led him to collaborate with Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg.
Unsatisfied by that research Alpert then traveled to India where he met a man, Neem Karoli Baba, who would become his Hindu guru. Alpert stayed on to study Hinduism with this master, was renamed Ram Dass, and subsequently came back to the States to spread word of new techniques for spiritual practice based on yoga and transcendental meditation using a repeated mantra, such as "Om.

 

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aul Johnson ( ? ) eminent British historian and author of several books including A History of the American People has observed that to prosper a nation needs tolerance. He pointed out the economic value of being tolerant. All societies flourish mightily when tolerance is the norm. And India is a good example of this. India's tradition, particularly the Hindu tradition of tolerance, has been exalted by Johnson to make his point that whenever a society develops tolerance, there is prosperity in the society. He says this about India:
" It is the nature of the Hindu religion to be tolerant and, in its own curious way, permissive. Under the socialist regime of Jawaharlal Nehru and his family successors the state was intolerant, restrictive and grotesquely bureaucratic. That has largely changed (though much bureaucracy remains), and the natural tolerance of the Hindu mind-set has replaced quasi-Marxist rigidity."

(source: Forbes.com).

 

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Andrew Krieger ( ? ) President and CEO of NorthBridge Capital Management. A BA in Philosophy (Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa), an MBA in Finance -- and prior to that, an MA in South Asian Studies, most notably Sanskrit. He has studied Sanskrit and Indian philosophy. He has visited India more than 20 times, studying yoga, traveling, introducing his family to "my love affair with an amazing civilization."

Krieger said he thought he had "ended up in the wrong body," meaning that he is really an Indian in his heart. I have heard this from my wife. India does this to some people.

"I got turned on to Vedanta when I was about 11 years old,"

 

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Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881 - 1955) was a visionary French Jesuit, paleontologist, biologist, and philosopher. Author the book Le Phenomene Humain, or The Human Phenomenon. Teilhard’s evolutionism earned him the distrust of his religious superiors, while his religious mysticism made scientific circles suspicious.A prominent 20[SUP]th[/SUP] century scientific Christian theologian, studied Ramanuja’s Vedanta, and then equated Saguna Brahman with “the body of Christ.” However, he was persecuted by the Church, and lived in Asia in exile, while writing many of his works.
(source: Indic Challenges to the Discipline of Science and Religion - By Rajiv Malhotra ).
Teilhard de Chardin's extensive study and commentary on Vedanta during his trip to India, especially Ramanuja's works, are suppressed by his modern followers, even though Teilhard used these ideas to develop what is now 'liberal Christianity'. Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science quoted Indic thought in the early editions of her books, but these references later got removed as Theosophy and she became competitors - one deploying Indic ideas openly in a perennial way and the other within strictly branded Christianity.
(source: The Ethics of Proselytizing - By Rajiv Malhotra - Hindu Vivek Kendra).

 

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Queen Fredricka of Greece (1931- 1981) The wife of King Paul of Greece.

Queen Frederika had come to pay homage to her guru, one of the Shankaracharyas, following his book on non-dualism -i.e., absolute monism, also called Advaita (or Advaita Vendanta). This book was an exposition of the teachings of the ancient Hindu scriptures called the Upanishads, or Vedanta. While the Paramacharya was in Kalahasthi, Queen Frederica of Greece, who had visited India at that time, came to kalahasthi to have the blessings of the Paramacharya on December 3rd.
Queen Frederika said that it was her advanced research in physics that had started her on a spiritual quest. It culminated in her accepting the non-dualism or absolute monism of Shankara as her philosophy of life and science.
Long before physics discovered it, Shankara had argued that the world of sense experience, that is the world of matter, was a world of appearance (maya), because at the root of each individual existence is the same energy which forms the cosmos. The human self (atman) is ultimately not distinct from the universal self (brahma). Duality is illusion. Reality is not dual, but one. Science, said Frederika, has yet to catch up with what the seers in India had already understood over 2500 years ago. Therefore, she said to the Rajmata,
‘You are fortunate to inherit such knowledge. I envy you. While Greece is the country of my birth, India is the country of my soul.’

 

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Stephen H Ruppenthal ( ? ) Son of a TWA pilot, he could travel across the world but India hooked him during his first visit. Later he would come to know the spiritual master Eknath Easwaran and work with him for about three decades. The author of the recently published The Path of Direct Awakening: Passages for Meditation was barely 14 when he fell in love with India." I have a special, soft corner in my heart for Hinduism. It is like a mother to me, and I have always felt so,"
A journalist said not too long ago that my insights into India may have been due to karma. Over the past month, I have thought a lot about that. Maybe I did have some of India in me even before I landed there at age 14. Mine is the India of the spirit. Before that, I was not religious in the least. But I came away from India wanting passionately to find the deepest truth in religion; not hear it from a church pulpit, but experience it in my consciousness.

 

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Professor Robert P Goldman ( ? ) Professor of Sanskrit at Berkeley. His areas of scholarly interest include Sanskrit literature and literary theory, Indian Epic Studies. He is perhaps best known for his work as the Director, General Editor, and a principal translator of a massive and fully annotated translation of the critical edition of the Valmiki Ramayana. Goldman said he fell in love with Indian culture and history when he was a 20-year-old student at Columbia University, New York. "I was studying chemistry and took up a course on Indian history," he said. "I became fascinated. Indian history and culture was so rich," said Goldman, now 60. He took to studying Sanskrit, which he found "very tough and complicated". But he mastered it.
Delivering a lecture on ‘Ramayana: Medieval Indian Interpretations’, organised by the University of Hyderabad as part of its distinguished lecture series, Goldman rejected the Western view that Ramayana was a mixture of the real and the mythological.

 

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John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (1892- 1964) the world-renowned geneticist. In 1922, he joined Cambridge University to take up research in biochemistry and in 1925, J.B.S. became interested in genetics-the study of genetics and variations and this subsequently led him to his being elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1932. A year later he joined the University College, London, as Professor of Genetics, a position he held as long as he stayed in Britain. Haldane was the first to use mathematics in genetics. Among his significant contributions is an estimate of the rate of mutation of a human gene. He wrote articles on popular science and gave lectures. Some of his famous books are The Causes of Evolution, New Paths in Genetics and Biochemistry of Genetics.

 

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Richard Garbe (1857–1927) a professor at the University of Tübingen, had earned his reputation through his scholarship on Indian philosophy, particularly his work on reconstructing the Bhagavad Gita in its original form.

His year-long trip to India in 1885 was financed by the Prussian government through its Ministry of Culture and the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Garbe kept a detailed record of his experiences in India, which he published in 1889 under the title Indian Travel Sketches. Garbe's travels and reactions to the East are especially interesting because he was one of a handful of nineteenth-century German Indologists (scholars of Indian culture and antiquity) who actually visited India.
He had devoted a large part of his life to the study of the Sankhya, consoled himself with the thought that 'in Kapila's doctrine, for the first time in the history of the world, the complete independence and freedom of the human mind, its full confidence in its own powers, were exhibited."
(source: Philosophy of Hinduism - By Galav p. 35).

 

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Swami Akhilananda ( ? ) Texas raised Hindu disciple.

The first question most people ask the tall, blond, blue-eyed Hindu swami from Texas, almost everywhere he goes on his traveling lectures, is how did he get to be a Hindu swami.
"People always ask me that," said Swami Akhilananda, wearing sandals, beads, a saffron robe and a vertical red streak on his forehead called a tilak during a recent visit to the Hindu Temple and Cultural Center of Birmingham.
"Since I was a young child I was raised as a Hindu," he said. "Hinduism is such that, whatever you can ask, there's always an answer."
His father, a carpenter, was a spiritual seeker who studied Hinduism and helped oversee construction on the Barsana Dham, a Hindu Temple in Austin, Texas. Built on 200 acres near a flowing stream, it's one of the largest Hindu temples in the United States. Steeped in the history and scriptures of Hinduism, but raised in Texas, Swami Akhilananda has emerged as an eloquent spokesman for the appeal of the ancient religion to people who are not of Indian descent.
"Every Hindu knows there's only one god and he manifests himself in many different ways," Swami Akhilananda said.

 

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Dr. Frank Gaetano Morales aka Sri Dharma Pravartaka Acharya ( ? ) He earned a Ph.D in Languages and Cultures of Asia from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He specializes in Sanskrit, Hindu Studies, Philosophy of Religion and History of Religion. At the young age of 14, Dr. Morales visited a Hindu temple for the first time. So awed was he with the majestic beauty and spiritual power that he encountered in this temple that, on the spot, he decided to devote his life to the path of Yoga. After living the life of a celibate Yoga monk for six years, Dr. Morales was ordained as a brahmana (a spiritual teacher) in 1986. His Sanskrit name is Sri Dharma Pravartaka Acharya. He is a follower of the ancient Vishishta-Advaita philosophy of Ramanuja. His first book Experiencing Truth: The Vedic Way of Knowing God is scheduled to be published by Motilal Banarsidass Publishers.

 

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Dr. Matheson ( ? ) wrote: "It is not too much to say that the mind of the West with all its undoubted impulses towards the progress of humanity has never exhibited such an intense amount of intellectual force as is to be found in the religious speculations of India.....These have been the cradle of all Western speculations, and wherever the European mind has risen into heights of philosophy, it has done so because the Brahmin was the pioneer. There is no intellectual problem in the West which had not its earlier discussion in the East, and there is no modern solution of that problem which will not be found anticipated in the East."
"We may think this language too strong but we shall never again depreciate the intellectual value, the philosophic subtleties, the religious purpose of the sacred books of the East."

(source: Is India Civilized - Essays on Indian Culture - By Sir John Woodroffe p.138 -139).

 

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Philip Rawson ( ? ) academic, and artist and author of The Art of Southeast Asia has written:“The culture of India has been one of the world’s most powerful civilizing forces. Countries of the Far East, including China, Korea, Japan, Tibet and Mongolia owe much of what is best in their own culture to the inspiration of ideas imported from India. The West, too has its own debts. But the members of that circle of civilizations beyond Burma scattered around the Gulf of Siam and the Java Sea, virtually owe their very existence to the creative influences of Indian ideas. No conquest or invasion, no forced conversion imposed upon them. They were adopted because the people saw they were good and that they could use them. “
“The sculptures of Indian icons produced in Cambodia during the 6[SUP]th[/SUP] to the 8[SUP]th[/SUP] centuries A.D. are masterpieces, monumental, subtle, highly sophisticated, mature in style and unrivalled for sheer beauty….”
“One of the most interesting pieces of all is a fragmentary bronze bust, from the western Mebon, of the God Vishnu lying asleep on the ocean of non-being. Head and shoulders and the two right arms survive. It shows the extraordinary, delicate integrity and subtle total convexity of surface, which these sculptors could achieve by modeling. Eyebrows, moustache and eyes seem to have been inlaid, perhaps with gold, silver or precious tone, though the inlay is gone and only the sockets remain. This was one of the world’s great sculptures.
Another magnificent bronze of Shiva, from Por Loboeuk, suggests the wealth of metal art that once must have existed in Cambodia (Kamboja) at the height of its power."

 

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Arthur Osborne (1909 - 1970)has lived with the Indian sage, Sri Ramana Maharshi. He was a man of brilliant intellect and introspective spirit. After graduating from Oxford, his inner longing to experience the Supreme Reality ultimately brought him to the hermitage of the great Indian sage, Sri Ramana Maharshi. In Ramana's presence, Osborne's literary abilities flourished, and he became a vehicle for the genuine spiritual understanding that awakened within him. He wrote some poems - including one on Arunachala. His son was Adam Osborne who invented the portable computer. "The recognition of Pure Being as one's Self and the Self of the universe and of all beings is the supreme and ultimate truth, transcending all other levels of doctrine without denying their truth on their own plane. This is the doctrine of Advaita, non-Duality, taught by the ancient Rishis and pre-eminently by Shankaracharya. It is the simplest as well as the most profound, being the ultimate truth beyond all the complexities of cosmology."
(source: The Collected Works of Ramana Maharshi - By Arthur Osborne). Refer to Osborne's India - hvk.org).

 

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Jeffrey Armstrong ( ? ) worked as a sales manager with Apple Computer for six years, is married to Sandy Gramah, who shares his passion for all things Indian. The couple, which has founded an educational institute called the Vedic Academy of Science and Arts (VASA), is now working on creating a permanent library of Hindu and Vedic culture in Vancouver. Their clients include successful businessmen, lawyers, corporate executives and leaders of society. “Bring as much knowledge from India as you can,’’ concludes Mr Armstrong. “People in North America are eager for it.’’He has written:
"The Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic of ancient India, records the history of Bharat. Within it is the Bhagavad-Gita which describes the events of five thousand years ago when Lord Krishna appeared and spoke to Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, which saw the triumph of the Pandavas over the Kauravas, the triumph of good over evil. That event marked the beginning of Kali Yuga. So the Sanskrit of the Vedas refers to an era before that time and to the existence of a pool of knowledge that has survived for thousands of years. That is why India and Indian culture is the mother of all modern civilizations."
"Sanskrit is such a perfect language that NASA, the American space agency, contemplated using it as a programming language. I’ll give you a comparison so that you will understand just how perfect Sanskrit is! Imagine that Bill Gates came out with a version of Windows that was so good that it did not need to be upgraded for 2,500 years! He would have created a monopoly. Well Sanskrit has the monopoly on languages, because Sanskrit is a perfect language. It cannot be improved upon."

 

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Dr. L P (Lawrence Pearsall) Jacks (1860-1955) was probably the most widely known British Unitarian minister in both Britain and North America between 1914 and 1940. He was an educator, a prolific writer, and an interpreter of modern philosophy. According to L. A. Garrard, he was 'the last of the Victorian prophets in the line of Thomas Carlyle'. Jacks argued for a natural religion for the common man using twentieth century means of communication.

 

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Aleksandr Georgievich Spirkin (1918 - 2004) a well-known Soviet psychologist, who was a corresponding member of the erstwhile USSR Academy of Science and the head of the section of methodological problems of Cybernetics in Scientific Council of Cybernetics of the USSR Academy of Sciences, presents some illuminating views in his book Dialectical Materialism (Progress Publishers Moscow-1983, published during the Soviet days) about Indian's ancient explorers. Professor Spirkin writes:
" The sages of India discovered astonishingly subtle and profound psycho-biophysical connections between human organism and cosmic subterranean processes. They knew much that even today is beyond the ken European scientific thought, or that it ignores, often trying to conceal its helplessness by asserting that oriental wisdom is mere mysticism, and thus showing its inability to distinguish the rational but not yet fully understandable essence from various figments of imagination…
It is sometimes difficult for us to penetrate the profound language of symbolic forms in which this wisdom is couched, to get at the essence of that wisdom. A full understanding of these complex problems can be achieved only in the broad context of history and culture. Historical experience offers us some instructive lessons for the present day. If we look around thoughtfully at the path humanity has passed, it is not difficult to see that the minds of the makers of culture have been guided by the desire to achieve an understanding and a rational transformation of the human being himself, his bodily and spiritual organization, the preservation and strengthening of his health. Socio-political, philosophical, religious, moral, aesthetic and all cultural efforts in general have tended towards this goal.

 

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Serge Trifkovic ( ? ) has received his PhD from the University of Southampton in England and pursued postdoctoral research at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. His past journalistic outlets have included the BBC World Service, the Voice of America, CNN International, MSNBC, U.S. News & World Report, The Washington Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Times of London, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He is foreign affairs editor of Chronicles. He is the author of The Sword of the Prophet: History, Theology, Impact on the World has observed in his article:"India prior to the Moslem invasions was one of the world’s great civilizations.
Tenth century Hindustan matched its contemporaries in the East and the West in the realms of philosophy, mathematics, and natural science. Indian mathematicians discovered the number zero (not to mention other things, like algebra, that were later transmitted to a Moslem world which mistaken has received credit for them).

 

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William Blake (1757—1827) English poet, painter, and engraver, who created a unique form of illustrated verse; his poetry, inspired by mystical vision, is among the most original, lyric, and prophetic in the language. According to author David Weir - William Blake’s poetry was due to the British discovery of Hindu literature. His mystic system springs from the rich historical context that produced the Oriental Renaissance.
Blake’s poetic career underwent a profound development as a result of his exposure to Hindu mythology. By combining mythographic insight with republican politics and Protestant dissent, Blake devised a poetic system that opposed the powers of Church and King
The reference to Brahma in The Song of Los shows that Blake was able to incorporate the latest mythographic material into his own evolving system.

 

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Rev. Roger Bertschausen ( ? ) at the Fox Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Appleton, Wisconsin. He has written about the Philosophy of Time.
"We in the West have long had trouble with time. Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam had no inkling of the long age of the universe. Cosmologies from these religions were based on the notion that the universe started at a finite point in the recent past. St. Augustine set the beginning of the universe at 5000 BCE. For centuries, this figure was embraced by most Westerners. (And some continue to believe it.) Additionally, the early Christians also believed that the end of time as we know it was close at hand.

This view of time contrasts sharply with other religious perspectives on the age of the universe. In the Hindu tradition, for example, one day in the life of Brahma lasts 4,300,000,000 years. And Brahma lives for the equivalent of 311,040,000,000,000 human years. The historian of religions Huston Smith reports one way of conceiving of the Hindu time-frame.

 

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Michael Cremo (1948 - ) born in Schenectady, NY, in 1948, he received his first copy of the Bhagavad-Gita from some Hare Krishnas at a Grateful Dead concert. You later joined the group and began writing for the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust at ISKCON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness). In their 1993, 900-page tome, Forbidden Archeology and its condensed version, Hidden History of the Human Race, co-authors Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson brought forth largely unknown evidence illustrating that modern humans worked and walked the earth millions of years ago, even as far back as 2 billion years ago.
The idea of ape-men is not something that was invented by Darwinists of the nineteenth century. Long before that, the ancient Sanskrit writings were speaking of creatures with apelike bodies, humanlike intelligence, and a low level of material culture. For example, the Ramayana speaks of the Vanaras, a species of apelike men that existed millions of years ago. But alongside these ape-men existed humans of our type. The relationship was one of coexistence rather than evolution.

 

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Charles H. Townes (1915 - ) A member of the technical staff of Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1933 to 1947. Dr. Townes worked extensively during World War II in designing radar bombing systems and has a number of patents in related technology. He invented the microwave-emitting - MASER.He has observed:
“Indian students should value their religious culture and of course, the classical Indian culture bears importantly on the meaning of life and values. I would not separate the two. To separate science and Indian culture would be harmful. …I don't think it is practical to keep scientific and spiritual culture separate.”(source: Interviews with Nobel Laureates and Eminent Scholars to T. D.Singh and Pawan K. Saharan on 19-Oct-1985, (1986) p.67).

 

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Major-General Charles Stuart - 'Hindoo' Stuart (1758- 1828) was an Irish man and a member of the Asiatic Society, who came out to India in his teens. He seems to have been almost immediately attracted to Hinduism and within a year of his arrival in Calcutta had adopted the practice-which he continued to his death-of walking every morning from his house to bathe in and worship the Ganga according to Hindu custom.
"Incredible as it may sound," wrote one horrified officer, "there is at this moment a British general in the Company's service, who observes all the customs of the Hindoos, makes offerings at their temples, carries about their idols with him, and is accompanied by fakirs who dress his food. He is not treated as a madman, but would not perhaps be misplaced if he had his idols, fakirs, bedas, and shasters, in some corner of Bedlam, removed from its more rational and unfortunate inmates."

 

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Devamrita Swami ( ? ) American born, is an author and researcher specializing in the history and knowledge of ancient India. Born in New York City, he began his immersion in India upon graduating from Yale University in 1972. Visiting India annually for three decades he is an ordained sannyasi or monk, of India's Vaishnava spiritual tradition. "The Vedas are the largest mass of sacred knowledge from the ancient world, and they are its most brilliant literary achievement. In the Vedic literature we find an exquisite Weltanschanuung, a majestic world outlook followed by millennia by a highly developed civilization.
The West, however, would benefit profoundly by seriously exploring the value of the Vedic texts, in revealing a completely different way of seeing the universe. And – most important for our problems today – the Vedas reveal a completely different way of belonging to the universe."