Pride of Hinduism - Views of foreigners

[talwan]

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Sir Sidney James Mark Low (1857–1932) journalist, historian, and essayist and author of the book, The Governance of England and Vision of India. He visited the Kumbh Mela during the tour of the Prince and Princess of Wales in 1906, was wonderstruck and wrote: “Nothing more impressive, picturesque, and pregnant with meaning and significance than Kumbha Mela can be witnessed in all of India.”
(source: Kumbha Mela - By Jack Hebner and David Osborn p. 1 - 56 and A British View of India - Cultural Cataracts - By Jack Hebner - archaeologyonline.net).

 

[talwan]

Susan L Huntington (?) is professor in art history at Ohio State University. Among other books, she is the author of the Art of Ancient India. She has written: "Archaeological finds from India give us glimpses of a culture uniquely at ease with itself."
[FONT=&quot] "The word yoga means "to unite" and ancient yoga was intended to prepare the body for meditation through which the individual would seek to understand his or her oneness with the totality of the universe. Once this understanding was complete, people could no more hurt another living being than themselves. Today, such practices are routinely prescribed to complement western medical and psychotherapy treatments. Among the documented benefits of yoga and its corollary, meditation, are lowered blood pressure, greater mental acuity and stress reduction. "
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[talwan]

Josh Schrei (?) is a [FONT=&quot] Marketing Director, Strategist, Producer, Writer, Critic, Activist. [/FONT] [FONT=&quot] He has written most eloquently about Hinduism's open source and staggering contribution to the our spiritual world:[/FONT]
"[FONT=&quot]The sheer volume of spiritual literature and doctrine, the number of distinct gods worshiped (over 30 million, according to some sources), the breadth of distinct philosophies and practices that have emerged, and the total transformation over time of many of the core Indic teachings and beliefs can be disconcerting to those raised in monotheistic cultures, as we are used to each faith bringing with it a defined set of beliefs that -- with the exception of some denominational rifts over the centuries -- stay pretty much consistent over time."[/FONT]

 

[talwan]

Yogi Baba Prem ( ? ) who is a Hindu Yogi, a Vedavisharada trained in the traditional Gurukural system. He has spiritedly defended Yoga's Hindu roots and has expressed his views thus:
"there is no Christian Yoga. "Yoga is not a Judeo/Christian word! It is not a part of the Roman Catholic teachings and certainly not a part of protestant teachings. It is not found within the King James Version of the bible."
"It is a Hindu word, or more correctly a Sanskrit word from the Vedic civilization."

 

[talwan]

[FONT=&quot] William Wordsworth [/FONT] (1770 - 1850) [FONT=&quot] was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads.[/FONT] When Wordsworth penned one of his most famous poems, 'Immortality Ode', it seems the English Romantic poet was under the spell of Hindu religion and its philosophy of rebirth. Afraid that the numerous passages of the poem would antagonise the Orthodox Christians in England, Wordsworth deleted them from the original text, according to a new book on Hindu philosophy and the English Romantic movement.

 

[talwan]

Loriliai Biernacki ( ? ) is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She teaches and researches the religious traditions of India, especially Hinduism, Tantra, and the 11th-century Indian philosopher Abhinavagupta. She has expressed her ideas about Hinduism thus:
"Yoga is becoming increasingly a worldwide practice, no doubt particularized by a variety of modifications, as Raja Yoga, the Bihar School of Yoga, Iyengar yoga, Astanga yoga, with Indian-American cross-overs like Bikram's "hot yoga," and again, with more hybridized American variations such as Forrest Yoga, TriYoga, and Anusara Yoga. The roots of yoga are clearly Hindu, yet as it makes its way across the globe, its roots are obscured. It is becoming a pan-global phenomenon."

 

[talwan]

John Keats (1795 - 1821) British poet. Although he knew little about India, was somewhat drawn to her as the passage about the Indian maid in Endymion (1818) reveals. Keats was fascinated by the romantic aspect of Greek mythology but Endymion was severely criticized at the time for its un-Greek quality. Keats wrote all the poems which brought him such fame within twelve months of Endymion's publication.
(source: India and World Civilization - By D. P. Singhal p. 246).

 

[talwan]

Fred B Eiseman Jr ( ) author of the book Bali: Sekala and Niskala: Essays on Religion, Ritual and Art. He has lived in Bali since 1961 and has adopted Hinduism. "Hinduism is founded on the belief that there is order in the world, that the universe is not random. Left entirely to itself, any natural system will tend toward a state of maximum disorder; rocks roll downhill, cold things warm up, living cells die. There exists everywhere in the universe a disordering force. Because order does exist, there must be an equivalent organizing force.
What Hinduism seeks is an equilibrium, a balance, between these forces or tendencies. Order is personified as the gods, dewa and dewi or bhatara and bhatari. Disorder is personified as the earth demons, bhutas and kalas. One can think of order as good, or positive, and disorder as evil or negative. Or you can call order dharma, and disorder adharma. "

 

[talwan]

Josiah Royce (1855 - 1916) [FONT=Verdana,sans-serif]as an American objective idealist philosopher. He is regarded as America's most outstanding representative of absolute idealism. He was "America's first academic philosopher seriously to study Indian thought" and "he was also" as rightly pointed out by Professor D M Riepe, "one of the first Americans to show interest in the Sankhya philosophy, presumably because he took each different development of realism as a target on which to practice his idealistic gunnery". Though he clearly acknowledges Buddhism to have "given us some of the best expression of the Titanic individualism," he had declared Buddhism to be a "religion wholly grounded in self-denial."[/FONT] [FONT=Verdana,sans-serif]Royce has also made numerous references to Hindu philosophies and criticized Vedanta schools of Hinduism and the Upanishadic philosophies as untenable mysticism, while curiously enough his own views are hardly different from Ramanuja's Vedanta.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,sans-serif]It is an established fact that Royce had read Indian philosophies and was deeply influenced by them. Riepe has written that: "He felt much of Indian thought to be close to his own and he used it to clarify his own visions.."[/FONT]

 

[talwan]

Adlof Kaegi (1849 - 1923) was a Swiss India scholar and classicist. He studied ancient languages ​​and Indian studies, taking a focus of its work on the study of Greek and Sanskrit thought. Among his academic teachers were Rudolf von Roth and Karl Geldner. "Rig Veda is permeated by a lively sympathy and love of nature." He adds:
"We have, in the Rig Veda, a literature which well deserves, at least in extracts, to be known to every student and lover of antiquity. The chief importance of the Vedas is not, indeed, found in the history of literature, but it lies elsewhere. It lies in the extraordinary fullness of disclosures, which this unique book gives to the student of philosophy and the history of civilization.
In this regard, no other literature can be compared with it, and though the aesthetic value of this relic of long-vanished time has sometimes been exaggerated, yet its historical importance, its value for mankind cannot be easily overrated....It best displays the first development of intellectual activities of our race."

 

[talwan]

Dr. Dipak Basu ( ) Professor in International Economics at Nagasaki University in Japan has this to say:"Self-criticism is the fundamental part of the Indian philosophy."
"Thousands of years ago in the Rig Veda, the most important book of the Hindu religion and the first book composed in Indo-European language group, it is written,
"Only that God in highest heaven knows whence comes this universes. He only knows or perhaps he knows not" (Rig Veda Book 10, Verse 129).

 

[talwan]

Michael Comans aka Sri Vasudevacharya ( ) He is a senior disciple of Sri Swami Dayananda Saraswati, one of the great contemporary teachers of Advaita Vedanta. Michael Comans attended Swami Dayananda Saraswati's two-and-a-half year residential course in Advaita Vedanta in the early 1980s. He later received a Ph.D. from the Australian National University, Canberra, and taught in the Department of Indian Studies at the University of Sydney. He is the author of two books including The Method of Early Advaita Vedanta: A Study of Gaudapada, Sankara, Suresvara and Padmapada published by Motilal Banarsidass. He has observed that:
"Only the Hindu life's ideal based on Dharma, Artha, Kama and Moksha can save humanity from its distress. The solution to the problems of the world is not Socialism but Hindu way of life. This is such a science of life, which, while studying about life, does not divide it into bits and pieces but considers the whole life as an indivisible unit." Hinduism has a deep philosophy that appeals to me. While initially it was only the philosophy that brought me into its fold, today I am comfortable with much of its religious aspects as well.
"As regards Advaita, it has a view of tolerance. Because of the profundity of the Advaita understanding of God, it can allow others to be as they are."

 

[talwan]

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834) was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets.Wordsworth's friend, collaborator, and "his spirit's brother," Coleridge was also guided by the same vision. Indeed he went a step further in dabbling with the supernatural, as is reflected in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798). Although Coleridge did not use Indian material, he was greatly attracted by the words and pictures of old tales, some of which must have come from India. His Eastern inspiration is to some extent attested to by the elusive yet arresting images in "Kublai Khan" (1797). This influence is also displayed in his Circassian love song, "Lewti."