Pride of Hinduism - Views of foreigners

[talwan]

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Charles Seife ( ? ) a journalist with Science magazine, has also written for New Scientist, Scientific American, The Economist, Science, Wired UK, The Sciences, and numerous other publications. He holds an M.S. in mathematics from Yale University and his areas of research include probability theory and artificial intelligence. He is a mathematician and science writer, author of Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, says:
"Perhaps no one has embraced nothing as strongly as the Indians who, Seife notes,
"never had a fear of the infinite or of the void." Hinduism has embedded within it, a complex philosophy of nothingness, seeing everything in the world as arising from the pregnant void, known as Sunya."
The ultimate goal of the Hindu was to free himself from the endless cycle of pain found in continual reincarnation and reconnect with the Nothingness that is the source and fundament of the All. For Indians, the void of Sunya was the very font of all potential; nothingness was liberation. No surprise then that it is from this sophisticated culture that we inherit the mathematical analog of nothing, zero. Like Sunya, zero is a kind of place holder, a symbol signifying a pregnant space where any other number might potentially reside."

 

[prasad1]

[h=3]Roger Bertschausen[/h]

"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."​

 

[talwan]

Roger-Pol Droit ( ? ) French philosopher and journalist has remarked that the philosophy of the Vedas and spirituality, seems to disappeared from the consciousness of Europeans and the references to the Indian culture after the collapse of Nietzsche. Since then, Europe has practiced what he calls "helleno-centrism" (Greece-centered) education, which means that the West believes that all philosophical systems started with Greece and that there was nothing worth the name before them. In his remarkable book, L'oubli de l"Inde : une amnâesie philosophique (The forgetting of India) Droit explains the reasons of this "intellectual amnesia". One reason was due to the German philosopher Hegel, who did not discover the Greeks, but created them and made up for them a destiny and thoughts which they did not always have."
In India, things add up, they don't complete to replace each other. It is this gift for coexistence that we have to learn from this exuberant yet impassive civilization.
(source: Arise O' India - By Francois Gautier p. 26 and The Genius of India - By Guy Sorman - Macmillan India Ltd. 2001. ISBN 0333 93600 0back cover).

 

[talwan]

Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804) aide-de-camp to George Washington and first secretary of the Treasury, epitomized this attitude in these words: "When we read in the valuable production of those great Oriental scholars...those of a Jones, a Wilkings, a Colebrooke, or a Halhed, - we uniformly discover in the Hindus a nation, whose polished manners are the result of a mild disposition and an extensive benevolence."
(source: The Invasion That Never Was - By Michel Danino and Sujata Nahar p. 17).

 

[talwan]

Professor Arthur Holmes (1895 -1965) geologist, professor at the University of Durham. He writes regarding the age of the earth in his great book, The Age of Earth (1913) as follows: "Long before it became a scientific aspiration to estimate the age of the earth, many elaborate systems of the world chronology had been devised by the sages of antiquity. The most remarkable of these occult time-scales is that of the ancient Hindus, whose astonishing concept of the Earth's duration has been traced back to Manusmriti, a sacred book."
(source: Hinduism and Scientific Quest - By T. R. R. Iyengar p. 20).

 

[talwan]

Jean Herbert (1897- ) famous Indianist, author of several books including Ganesha, précédé d'une étude sur Dieu chez les Hindous, Spiritualité hindoue, An Introduction To Asia and Vedantisme et vie pratique et autre études. He reminds us that:
"Many many centuries before us, India had devised most of the philosophical systems which Europe experienced with later."

"They contained, at least in its essence, the philosophy of the Greeks, the Alexandrine mystique, the religious speculation of the Middle Ages, the rationalism, of the XIXth century and even the most recent incarnations of modern pantheism."
(source: Arise O' India - By Francois Gautier Har-Anand publications. p. 25)

 

[talwan]

J. Ovington ( ? ) Chaplain to the British King, the seventeenth-century English traveler, wrote in his A Voyage to Surat in the Year 1689, that: " Of all the regions of the Earth (India is) the only Public theatre of Justice and Tenderness to Brutes and all living creatures." He also found that, because of their diet, the Hindus kept a comely and proportionate body and lived a long life. The simple and meatless food made their thoughts 'quick and nimble,' their 'comprehension of things' easier and developed in them a spirit of fearlessness."
(source: Indian Vegetarian Cookery - By Jack Santa Maria p. 17).

 

[talwan]

Sir Thomas Munro (1761-1827) held various posts in the colonial administration of India, served as brigadier-general during the third Maratha War (1817–18) and was appointed Governor of Madras in 1819. A distinguished Governor of Madras, in a statement made by him before a Committee of the House of Commons, in 1813, ("Hansard's Debates, April 12), he noted:"If a good system of agriculture, unrivalled manufacturing skill, a capacity to produce whatever can contribute to convenience or luxury, schools established in every village for teaching, reading, writing and arithmetic; the general practice of hospitality and charity among each other; and above all, a treatment of the female sex full of confidence, respect, and delicacy, (if all these) are among the signs which denote a civilized people, then the Hindus, are not inferior to the nations of Europe; and if civilization is to become an article of trade between England and India, I am convinced that England will gain by the import cargo."
(source: India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom - By Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland p.324-325) and The Invasion That Never Was - By Michel Danino and Sujata Nahar p. 17).

 

[talwan]

Austin Coates ( ? ) son of composer Eric Coates, Assistant Colonial Secretary and a magistrate in Hong Kong during the World War II, and First Secretary to the British High Commission in Kaula Lumpur and Penang in 1959-62). " What we generally fail to realize is that in talking today to the Indians we are face to face with the direct descendants, as often as not, of people who were contemporaries of Ancient Egypt, and whose present culture, in most of its main essentials, is nearly the same as it was then, and is in any event directly descended from that age, and even possibly before it."
(source: China, India and the Ruins of Washington - By Austin Coates p- 20)

 

[talwan]

Sa`Id Al-Andalusi (1029 -1070) Islamic scholar, who was a prolific author and in the powerful position of a judge for the king in Muslim Spain. He focused on India as a major center for science, mathematics and culture. He wrote Kitab Tabaqat al-Uman or "Book of the Categories of Nations," which recorded the contributions to science of all known nations. He has said:
"The Indians among all nations, through many centuries and since antiquity, have been the source of wisdom, fairness and moderation. They are creators of sublime thoughts, universal apologues, rare inventions and remarkable concepts."

"... They referred to the king of India as the "king of wisdom" because of the Indians' careful treatment of 'ulum [sciences] and all the branches of knowledge.

"The Indians, known to all nations for many centuries, are the metal [essence] of wisdom, the source of fairness and objectivity. They are people of sublime pensiveness, universal apologues, and useful and rare inventions."
“The first nation (to have cultivated science) is India. This is a powerful nation having a large population, and a rich kingdom. India is known for the wisdom of its people. Over many centuries, all the kings of the past have recognized the ability of the Indians in all the branches of knowledge.”
“The Indians, as known to all nations for many centuries, are the metal (essence) of wisdom, the source of fairness and objectivity. They are peoples of sublime pensiveness, universal apologues, and useful and rare inventions.”
“To their credit, the Indians have made great strides in the study of numbers and of geometry. They have acquired immense information and reached the zenith in their knowledge of the movements of the stars (astronomy) and the secrets of the skies (astrology) as well as other mathematical studies. After all that, they have surpassed all the other peoples in their knowledge of medical science and the strengths of various drugs, the characteristics of compounds and the peculiarities of substances [chemistry].”

 

[talwan]

Gustav Oppert (1836-1908) born in Hamburg, Germany, he taught Sanskrit and comparative linguistics at the Presidency College, Madras for 21 years. He was the Telugu translator to the Government and Curator, Government Oriental Manuscript Library. He writes of his high esteem for the Bharatas, the original inhabitants of India: " I venture to suggest that the inhabitants of this country would do well if they were to assume the ancient, honorable, and national name of Bharata, remembering that India has become famous as Bharatvarsa, the land of the Bharats."

 

[talwan]

Vincent Arthur Smith (1848 - 1920) Britishhistorian, and author of The Oxford History of India, says:

" India ...beyond all doubt possesses a deep underlying fundamental unity, far more profound that that produced either by geographical isolation or by political suzerainty. That unity transcends the innumerable diversities of blood, color, language, dress, manners and sect."​

"Hinduism has never produced an exclusive, dominant, orthodox sect, with a formula of faith to be professed or rejected under pain of damnation."​

(source: Essays on National Idealism - By Ananda K. Coomaraswamy p. 131).
​

 

[talwan]

Richard Bernstein ( ? ) a former New York Times correspondent in China, book critic, author of The book, Ultimate JourneyOn a visit to India, was struck by how Hinduism is so detached from materialistic values. A meeting with the Shankaracharya of Kanchipuram, a leading figure of Hinduism, was particularly enlightening. "With his entourage, the kind of conspicuous anti-materialism of it, really kind of brought home to me that Hinduism really is an ascetic religion," he said.
"It is a religion which encourages people to look into themselves for truth as the goal of life rather than to get rich or to acquire power." As evidence of this, Bernstein compared the Shankaracharya of Kanchipuram to the Pope, who, he said, holds a comparable spiritual position in Roman Catholicism. Yet, "their appearance to the world is utterly, utterly different", he said. "One is surrounded by the trappings of splendor -- vast cathedrals and palaces and fabulous museums full of zillion-dollar paintings and sculptures... and all the trappings of power. I couldn't show up in Rome and say 'Gee, could I come and see the Pope?' and be welcomed, but there I was in India, asking if I could meet the Shankaracharya of Kanchipuram and I was welcomed."
"One of the elements of India that is most difficult for the Western mind to grapple with is the depth and power of Hindu spirituality," Bernstein said. "It's both troubling and inspiring that so many people who are so poor have time and energy for very, very thorough-going, intense and profound spiritual searches."

(source: Rediff.com - Down The Road With Huien Tsang - rediff.com US edition: Down the Road with Huien Tsang).

 

[talwan]

Dr. Ernest Binfield Havell (1861-1934) principal to the Madras College of Art in the 1890s and left as principal of the Calcutta College of Art some 20 years later. He wrote several books, including his book, Indian Architecture - Its Psychology, Structure and History from the First Mohammedan Invasion to the Present Day. He has said:"India, whether regarded from a physical or intellectual stand-point, is herself the great exemplar of the doctrine of the one in the many, which her philosophers proclaimed to the world."
(source: The History of Aryan Rule in India - E. B. Havell).

 

[talwan]

Rene Grousset (1885-1952) French art historian. Author of several books including Civilization of India and The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia.He gives a fine interpretation of the image of Nataraja:
“Whether he be surrounded or not by the flaming aureole of the Tiruvasi (Pabhamandala) – the circle of the world which he both fills and oversteps – the King of the Dance is all rhythm and exaltation. The tambourine which he sounds with one of his right hands draws all creatures into this rhythmic motion and they dance in his company. The conventionalized locks of flying hair and the blown scarfs tell of the speed of this universal movement, which crystallizes matter and reduces it to powder in turn. One of his left hands holds the fire which animates and devours the worlds in this cosmic whirl. One of the God’s feet is crushing a Titan, for “this dance is danced upon the bodies of the dead”, yet one of the right hands is making a gesture of reassurance (abhayamudra), so true it is that, seen from the cosmic point of view…the very cruelty of this universal determinism is kindly, as the generative principle of the future. And, indeed, on more than one of our bronzes the King of the Dance wears a broad smile. He smiles at death and at life, at pain and at joy, alike, or rather,..his smile is death and life, both joy and pain…

 

[talwan]

George Harrison (1943-2001) former Beatle and rocker, who was the impetus for the group's spiritual quest of the 1960s which brought them to India. In 1965, he discovered the Indian string instrument, the sitar. Harrison was in India, to learn how to play the instrument under the renowned sitar maestro Ravi Shankar. But for some, Harrison brings back memories of a time when the West turned to India for inspiration and enlightenment. One reason he became interested in India, he was to say in a 1992 interview, was because "it unlocked this enormous big door in the back of my consciousness". Eventually he became a devotee of Hindu God Krishna, donating large sums of money to the International Society for Krishna Consciousness and even donating a 23-acre site outside London to the movement. He also incorporated the trademark Hare Krishna chants in his music. Harrison had been close to the International Society of Krishna Consciousness since the 1960s. The ISKCON in a statement said, "During his last days, Krishna devotees were by his side and he left his body to the sounds of the Hare Krishna Mantra."

 

[talwan]

Christopher W. B. Isherwood (1904-1986) Translator, biographer, novelist, and playwright, he is the author of over twenty books, including Vedanta for the Western World and My Guru and His Disciple - a book about Swami Prabhavananda, who guided Isherwood for some thirty years. During the 1940s his interests turned from Christianity to Hinduism. With his guru Swami Prabhavananda Isherwood translated from the Sanskrit The Bhagavad-Gita and The Yoga Aphorism of Patanjali. Isherwood broke from the strictly chronological format to create a spiritual autobiography wherein the values of Vedanta Hinduism counter his life as a Hollywood scriptwriter. "I believe the Gita to be one of the major religious documents of the world. If its teachings did not seem to me to agree with those of the other gospels and scriptures, then my own system of values would be thrown into confusion, and I should feel completely bewildered. The Gita is not simply a sermon, but a philosophical treatise."

 

[talwan]

Dr. D. T. Suzuki (1870-1966) Japanese Buddhist and Zen scholar, who has written several books, including Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture (1938, rev. ed. 1959), An Introduction to Zen Buddhism. He has said:

"The study of Japanese thought is the study of Indian thought."​

(source: India: Mother of Us All - By Chaman Lal p. 25).

 

[talwan]

Rizwan Salim ( ? ) reviewer, New York Tribune, Capitol Hill reporter, Engineering Times, assistant editor, American Sentinel, published in Hindustan Times has wisely observed:

"Given the reality that Hindustan is the longest surviving ancient civilization and Hindus have to their credit so many unaccountable and such astonishing achievements of architecture and painting, music and dance, poetry and drama, epics and narratives, intellectual systems and philosophical doctrines, healing systems and mind-body disciplines, Hindus of every caste and class today should have possessed a well-informed and well-developed, intense and, fully conscious cultural pride.
But one of the principal tragedies of contemporary India is that the majority of even the educated and otherwise affluent Hindus do not possess a deep and extensive knowledge of their culture-and do not give evidence of an intensely felt cultural pride.' Lacking profound cultural knowledge and intense cultural pride, India's intellectuals regard the fashionable ideas and ideologies from Europe and America as unquestionably superior to Bharat's thousands of years old Hindu culture and wisdom."
There are not very many scholars of high ability and international reputation in India today who illuminate Hindu culture and Hindus' past great accomplishments. It is an embarrassing truth that the best Indologists are found in the Netherlands and Sweden, Germany and France, Japan and Italy-not in Delhi and Ujjain, Varanasi and Puri, Madurai and Mysore."
"It is clear that India at the time when Muslim invaders turned towards it (8 to 11th century) was the earth's richest region for its wealth in precious and semi-precious stones, gold and silver; religion and culture; and its fine arts and letters. Tenth century Hindustan was also too far advanced than its contemporaries in the East and the West for its achievements in the realms of speculative philosophy and scientific theorizing, mathematics and knowledge of nature's workings. Hindus of the early medieval period were unquestionably superior in more things than the Chinese, the Persians (including the Sassanians), the Romans and the Byzantines of the immediate preceding centuries. The followers of Siva and Vishnu on this subcontinent had created for themselves a society more mentally evolved - joyous and prosperous too - than had been realized by the Jews, Christians, and Muslim monotheists of the time. Medieval India, until the Islamic invaders destroyed it, was history's most richly imaginative culture and one of the five most advanced civilizations of all times."

 

[talwan]

François-Auguste-René Rodin (1840-1917) French sculptor, who imbued his work with great psychological force, which was expressed largely through texture and modeling. He is regarded as the foremost sculptor of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In a magnificently poetic outburst about the Mahesamurti (Trimurti) of the Elephanta Caves:
"This full, pouting mouth, rich in sensuous expressions, these lips like a lake of pleasure, fringed by the noble, palpitating nostrils."
(source: Civilizations of the East - By Rene Grousset Vol. II, p. 245-246).
Rodin described the statue of Nataraja or King of Dance - as the perfect embodiment of rhythmic movement.

 

[talwan]

Gerald James Larson, An American scholar who points out that there are in a manner of speaking almost as many Gitas as there are readers of it and that:

"What the Gita is, finally is inseparable from its many contextual environments, ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, scholarly and popular, corporate and personal, secular and sacred - contextual environments that have emerged in an on-going historical process and will continue to emerge as that historical process unfolds." and he adds:

" An interesting monograph could be written on the Gita as symptomatic of trends in nineteenth-and twentieth-century European and American scholarly thought."
( source: The Universal Gita: Western Images of the Bhagavad Gita a Bicentenary Survey - By Eric J. Sharpe p. 14).

 

[talwan]

Dorothea Chaplin mentions in her book, Matter, Myth and Spirit or Keltic and Hindu Links (pp. 168-9),

"Long before the year 460 B.C. in which Hippocrates, the father of European medicine was born, the Hindus had built an extensive pharmacopoeia and had elaborate treatises on a variety of medical and surgical subjects...The Hindus' wonderful knowledge of medicine has for some considerable time led them away from surgical methods as working destruction on the nervous system, which their scientific medical system is able to obliviate, producing a cure even without a preliminary crisis." (source: Matter, Myth and Spirit or Keltic and Hindu Links - By Dorothea Chaplin p. 168-9).

 

[talwan]

Alexandra David-Neel (1868-1969) French explorer, writer, Orientalist and mystic. She had studied Sanskrit and Buddhism at the Sorbonne University and made her first journey alone to India. Though educated in a convent, she became interested in spiritualism and theosophy and joined a group with similar interests, one of this group was Mirra Richard, the future "Mother" of Pondicherry. She had remarked that the role Gods play in India is remarkable. She has said: "because the images of statues are like a battery which is charged over the ages by the adoration of the devotees, who in turn can draw energy, inspiration, or grace from these statues." She goes on: "As a battery, the energy in the statue will not get discharged, as long as the faithful continue to worship it by their adoration." And she concludes: " Gods are thus created by the energy given out by the faith in their existence."
(source: Arise O' India - By Francois Gautier p. 15).

 

[nannilam_balasubramanian]

Hinduism being the world's oldest living religion, enveloping a broad spectrum
of philosophies, beliefs and customs, it prompts and influences every one including
a number of foreigners having great attraction and charm in its values.

Balasubramanian
Ambattur

 

[talwan]

Professor Rudolph Otto (1869-1937 Was associate professor at Göttingen. Eventually he became a professor of systematic theology, first at Breslau in 1915, then at Marburg in 1917. He is emphatic that the idea of a Son of God is certainly not from Israel....The figure of a being who had to do with the world, is of high antiquity among the Aryans....and points back in some way to influences of the Aryan East. "These materials are found in India, in more primitive forms not merely as a late period but in the remotest pre-Christian Kausitaki Upanishad." (source: Eastern Religions and Western Thought - By Sir Sarvapelli Radhakrishnan. p. 161).