Pride of Hinduism - Views of foreigners

[talwan]

Share:

Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn WhatsApp Email Share Link

Sir John Malcolm (1829-1896) Was the Governor of Bombay and author of A Memoir of Central India including Malwa and Adjoining Provinces and also worked for the East India Company and he remarked: "The Hindoo...are distinguished for some of the finest qualities of the mind; they are brave, generous, and humane, and their truth is as remarkable as their courage. "

(source: The Invasion That Never Was - By Michel Danino and Sujata Nahar p. 17).

 

[talwan]

David Frawley ( ? ) also known as Pandit Vamadeva Shastrithe American eminent teacher and practitioner of Ayurvedic medicine and Vedic astrology and author of several books, including Arise Arjuna : Hinduism and the modern world and Awaken Bharata: A Call for India's Rebirth - in whichthe need for a new intelligentsia, "intellectual kshatriya" or intellectual warrior class trained in Vedic dharma, to handle challenges was emphasized.

He writes: "The Hindu mind represents humanity's oldest and most continuous stream of conscious intelligence on the planet. Hindu sages, seers, saints, yogis and jnanis have maintained an unbroken current of awareness linking humanity with the Divine since the dawn of history, and as carried over from earlier cycles of civilization in previous humanities unknown to our present spiritually limited culture."
"The Hindu mind has a vision of eternity and infinity. It is aware of the vast cycles of creation and destruction that govern the many universes and innumerable creatures within them."

 

[talwan]

Pierre Loti (1850-1923) pseudonym of Louis-marie-julien Viaud, a novelist whose exoticism made him popular in his time and whose themes anticipated some of the central preoccupations of French literature between World Wars. Loti's career as a naval officer took him to the Middle and Far East, thus providing him with the exotic settings of his novels and reminiscences. Some of his books include Voyages 1872-1913 and L'Inde sans les Anglais. He expressed his esteem for India in the following pregnant words:
"And now I salute thee with awe, with veneration, and wonder, ancient India, of whom I am the adept, the India of the highest splendor of art and philosophy. May thy awakening astonish the Occident, decadent, mean, daily dwindling, slayer of nations, slayer of Gods, slayer of souls, which yet bows down still, ancient India, before the prodigies of thy primordial conceptions!"
(source: Sanskrit Civilization - G. R. Josyer International Academy of Sanskrit Research. p. 1)

 

[talwan]

William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838-1903) Irish historian, essayist, author of The Substance of History of European Morals (From Augustus to Charlemagne). He quotes an old tradition in Greece that Pythagoras himself had come to India and learnt philosophy from the gymnosophists. It seems he believed in an "all-pervading soul" which is at least one important attribute to Hindu atman. Pythagoras believed in rebirth or transmigration ; he taught and practiced harmlessness or no-injury, he taught silence; he taught that the end of man is to "become like God". Orphic mysteries taught release (lysis) from all material entanglements, which is close to moksha of the Hindus.
(source: On Hinduism Reviews and Reflections - By Ram Swarup p. 197)

 

[talwan]

Prince Muhammad Dara Shikoh (1627-1658 AD) the favorite Sufi son of Moghul emperor, Shah Jehan. Known the world over for his unorthodox and liberal views. He was a mystic and a free thinker. Dara Shikoh's most important legacy is the translation of fifty Upanishads, known under the title of Sirr-i-Akbar ("The Great Secret"). It was completed in 1657, together with paraphrases and excerpts from commentaries which in various cases, though by no means throughout, can be traced back to Sankara. He had learned Sanskrit and studied the Hindu scriptures in the original. He studied the Torah, the Gospels and the Psalms, but it is the "Great Secret" (Sirri-i-Akbar) of the Upanishads which, in his view, represents the most original testimony of the oneness of God or the Absolute.

 

[talwan]

Professor Kakuzo Okakura (1862 -1913) a Japanese philosopher, art expert, curator and author of The Book of Tea and The Ideals of the East, with Special Reference to the Art of Japan says:

"We catch a glimpse of the great river of science which never ceases to flow in India. For India has carried and scattered the data of intellectual progress for the whole world, ever since the pre-Buddhist period when she produced the Sankhya philosophy and the atomic theory; the fifth century, when her mathematics and astronomy find their blossom in Arya Bhatta; the seventh when Brahmagupta uses his highly-developed Algebra and makes astronomical observations; the twelfth, brilliant with the glory of Bhaskaracharya, and his famous daughter, down to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries themselves with Ram Chandra the mathematician and Jagdish Chandra Bose the physicist.
Okakura adds that in this scientific age: India had faith.
"Such a faith in its early energy and enthusiasm was the natural incentive to that great scientific age which was to produce astronomers like Aryabhatta, discovering the revolution of the earth on its own axis, and his not less illustrious successor Varamihira; who brought Hindu medicine to its height, perhaps under Susruta; and which finally gave to Arabia the knowledge with which she was later to fructify Europe.

 

[talwan]

Sir Michael Sadler (1861-1943) authority on education, wrote in 1919: "One cannot walk through the streets of any center of population in India without meeting face after face which is eloquent of thought, of fine feeling, and of insight into the profound things of life. In a very true sense the people of India are nearer to the spiritual hearts of things than we in England are. As for brain power, there is that in India which is comparable with the best in our country."
(source: India and British Imperialism - By Gorham D. Sanderson p. 49).

 

[talwan]

Dr. Arthur Versluis (1959 - ) Associate Professor of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University, a scholar and researcher of several currents of the hermetic, gnostic, theosophic and mystic traditions and author of The Egyptian Mystery, has said: "It is necessary that we turn to the Vedanta....because the Upanishads provide the purest metaphysics available to us from the primordial past."
(source: The Egyptian Mystery - By Arthur Versluis SBN 014019018X).

 

[talwan]

Count Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) was a Belgian writer of poetry and a wide variety of essays. He won the 1911 Nobel Prize for literature. In his book Mountain Paths, in the doctrine of Karma, he finds "the only satisfactory solution of life's injustices." "he falls back upon the earliest and greatest of Revelations, those of the Sacred Books of India with a Cosmogony which no European conception has ever surpassed."
(source: Mountain Paths - By Maurice Maeterlinck ISBN 1589632532).

 

[talwan]

ohn Adam Cramb (1862-1913) author of The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain says: "India is not only the Italy of Asia, it is not only the land of romance of art and beauty, it is in religion, earth's central shrine. India is religion."
(source: Ancient Indian Culture At A Glance - By Swami Tattwananda p.76).

 

[talwan]

James Bissett Pratt (1875-1944) American author of Why Religions Die and India and its Faiths, makes these observations about Hinduism, which according to him, is the only religion which tends to survive the present crisis in the life of all religions. Hinduism, which he calls the "Vedic Way" is a "self perpetuating" religion. The Vedic way...the way of constant spiritual re-interpretation.. leads to life - life which is self perpetuating, self-renewing and which for the individual and for the world may be eternal. "
Unlike other religions "not death, but development" has been the fate of Hinduism. "that which in it was vital and true cast off the old shell and clothed itself in more suitable expression, with no break in the continuity of life and no loss in the sanctity and weight of its authority." Generalizing on the secret of longevity of the Vedic religion, Professor Pratt says: "If a religion is to live it must adapt itself to new and changing conditions; if it is to feed the spiritual life of its children, it must have the sensitivity and inventiveness that shall enable it to modify their as their needs demand."
Another secret of the vitality of Hindu religion, is its catholicity. He says: "Mutually contradictory creeds can and do keep house together without quarrel within the wide and hospitable Hindu family." "Hindu thought....because of its ingrained conclusiveness, its tolerance, and its indifference to doctrinal divergences, stressed the essential unity of all Indian Dharmas, whether Hindu or Buddhist, and minimized differences."

 

[talwan]

William Harten Gilbert (1904 - ) author of Peoples of India has said: "In the history of human culture the contribution of the Indian peoples in all fields has been of the greatest importance. From India we are said to have derived domestic poultry, shellac, lemons, cotton, jute, rice, sugar, indigo, the buffalo, cinnamon, ginger, pepper, sugar-cane, the games of chess, Pachisi, Polo, the Zero concept, the decimal system, the basis of certain philological concepts, a wealth of fables with moral import, an astonishing variety of artistic products, and innumerable ideas in philosophy and religion such as asceticism and monasticism."

 

[talwan]

Prof. Brian David Josephson (1940 - ) Welsh physicist, the youngest Nobel Laureate has said: "The Vedanta and the Sankhya hold the key to the laws of mind and thought process which are co-related to the Quantum Field, i.e. the operation and distribution of particles at atomic and molecular levels."
"He has turned to meditation and Indian Philosophy especially the Vedanta and Smakhya philosophy to find" scientific explanations" for the laws of mind and thought processes and their correlation to the quantum field in physics, which deals with creation and destruction of particles at atomic and molecular levels. 'Indian philosophy shows the relationship between mind and matter. Mind as seen in Indian philosophy enables one to describe subjective reality or the process of decision making as a wave function in terms of quantum physics".
Samkhya and Vedanta propound the evolution of universe in it inanimate and animate aspects, more comprehensively than modern science does. Vedananta derives it from primal Divine Energy or Sakti and Samkhya from proto-Nature or Prakriti.

 

[talwan]

Michael Wood (1948 - ) British historian/host/writer of The Barbarian West public TV documentary. At the heart of the Western Civilization, says Wood, lies a deep streak of violence which drives them to exploit nature and mankind. "Usually it is said that the East is hopelessly backward and needs to catch up with the West. But, a consideration of the legacy of these great civilizations suggests, says wood, that the West has some catching up to do. It needs to learn from the East a way of cultivating its inner space, of accepting limits and desires in an increasingly finite world. "In the past 200 years one form of civilization, that of the West, has changed the balance of nature for ever. And now it is civilization itself which has become a central problem of our world."

Taking the Eastern perspective of life, Wood leads us through Western history from its Greco/Roman beginnings to Sir Francis Bacon's and momentous treatise declaring science's supremacy over God. Wood says this is where the West really got off-track, into matter, away from spirit. Final frames of this uncomplimentary portrait of Western societies-and their claims of superiority over Eastern cultures-are cuts from NASA spaceships to a worship scene in Meenaskhi temple, South India, where Wood suggests real civilization has been flourishing for millennia.

 

[nannilam_balasubramanian]

There is no coercion on Hindus that he/she would be penalized/punished for not
praying or believing in God. Hinduism is only a Dharma (a sort of Discipline)
and just not a Religion alone as such. Hinduism is the very oldest and active amongst
all the Religions, which have very large number of followers in the world. Can any
one tell the exact date of birth of this religion. That itself shows that this religion
is very very old and it has its own holiness and sanctity. Above all that, Hinduism does
not invent God. The Hindu Scriptures have the sole authority in this aspect. Hinduism
instead of defining a specific way as to how one should live, it plays a supporting
or a guiding role through its Vedas, Puranas, Itihasas, etc. for the individual to decide
or choose the course of line and stand by that.

Balasubramanian
Ambattur

 

[talwan]

Gary Zukav (?) author of The Dancing Wu Li Masters: an overview of the new physics says, "Hindu mythology is virtually a large scale projection into the psychological realm of microscopic scientific discoveries." "The Wu Li Masters know that physicists are doing more than 'discovering the endless diversity of nature.' They are dancing with Kali, the Divine Mother of Hindu mythology."
(source: The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An overview of the new physics ASIN 0553249142).

 

[talwan]

Dr. Koenraad Elst (1959 -) Dutch historian, born in Leuven, Belgium, on 7 August 1959, into a Flemish (i.e. Dutch-speaking Belgian) Catholic family. He graduated in Philosophy, Chinese Studies and Indo-Iranian Studies at the Catholic University of Leuven. He is the author of several books including The Saffron Swastika, Decolonising The Hindu Mind - Ideological Development of Hindu Revivalism and Negationism in India: Concealilng the Record of Islam

During a stay at the Benares Hindu University, he discovered India’s communal problem and wrote his first book about the budding Ayodhya conflict.

 

[talwan]

Edmund Burke (1729-1797) British statesman, parliamentary orator and political thinker, played a prominent part in all major political issues for about 30 years after 1765, and remained an important figure in the history of political theory.In all his speeches in Parliament on India - those made in connection with his Impeachment of Warren Hastings and others - Edmund Burke invariably represented the civilization of India as high. In his speech on the East India Bill, he said:
"This multitude of men (the Indian nation) does not consist of an abject and barbarous populace, much less of gangs of savages; but of a people for ages civilized and cultivated; cultured by all the arts of polished life while we (Englishmen) were yet dwelling in the woods. There have been in (India) princes of great dignity, authority and opulence. There (in India) is to be found an ancient and venerable priesthood, the depositary of laws, learning and history, the guides of the people while living and their consolation in death. There is a nobility of great antiquity and renown; a multitude of cities not exceeded in population and trade by those of the first class in Europe; merchants and bankers who vie in capital with the banks of England; millions of ingenious manufacturers and mechanics; and millions of the most diligent tillers of the earth."
(source: India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom - By Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland p. 325).

 

[Naina_Marbus]

Philip Goldberg is a spiritual counselor, InterfaithMinister, and author of a book titled:
American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga andMeditation : How Indian Spirituality Changed the West.
Goldberg

He has a written a column in The Huffington Post, titled: Hindu Jesus: A Different Kind of Christianity

Excerpts from Philip Goldberg's column:

"I grew up hearing about three kinds of Jesus..

1)...the only begotten son of God, Savior of all Mankind.
2)...the laudable ethical teacher -- a nice Jewish boy who met with a terrible fate -- and
3)...as the founder of a religion that perpetrated horrors in his name.

Then came the 60s, and I was introduced to a different Jesus, by way of India.

I read the sacred texts of Hinduism and Buddhism as well as modern interpreters such as Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts and Huston Smith. It was called mysticism, but I found it, ironically, non-mysterious and eminently rational.

... Throughout my explorations, the name of Jesus cropped up surprisingly often, and always with respect. In Paramahansa Yogananda's seminal memoir, Autobiography of a Yogi,the rabbi of Nazareth is treated with such reverence that I thought I must be missing something.

So I bought a New Testament, and it blew my mind. Because my spiritual reference point was more Hindu than Judeo-Christian, the Gospels seemed more like the Upanishads or the Bhagavad Gita than the churchy dogma I expected to find. The main character was a master teacher, a guru who prodded his disciples not just to better behavior but to union with the divine. His term for the Ground of Being was "Father," but it was easy to evoke the language of the Vedic seers and substitute Brahman or Self. When he tells the crowd at the Sermon on the Mount not to pray conspicuously like the hypocrites, but to "go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret," I saw a guru directing his disciples to meditate. This was a Jesus I could live with: exalted in a way that befits agiant of history, but without the grandiose, cosmos-altering triumphalism thatrelegates non-believers to either irrelevance or damnation.

I soon learned that Hindus in general, and the swamis andyoga masters who came to the West in particular, saw Jesus in much the same way,as a sadguru and a jivanmukti of the highest order. Some afforded him the status of avatar, placing him on the same level as Krishna, Rama, and otherbdivine incarnations. In keeping with their pluralistic tradition, they considered the teachings of Christ, when followed properly, to be a legitimate pathway to the unified consciousness that is yoga's true aim.

...For a great many angry or alienated Christians, seeing Jesus in this way enabled them to reconcile with their religious heritage; many returned to active participation on terms they could live with, although theirChristianity was often closer to that of mystics like Meister Eckhart or Thomas Merton than to the mainstream church. Even Christians whose spiritual lives were, for all practical purposes, more Hindu than anything else have been encouraged by their own gurus to remain connected to their Christian roots.This often entailed seeing Jesus as their ishta devata . That these prodigalsons and daughters found their way back to the Jesus they love by way of atradition that has been besieged by missionaries for centuries is one of thegreat ironies of religious history. "

 

[nannilam_balasubramanian]

Hinduism nowhere states that it has monopoly either on Truth or God.
"Sathyameva Jayathe" Truth alone Triumphs and Falsehood Never.
Further Hinduism never uses coercion to convert other religious people
to Hinduism like other Religions do. Even Atheists can proudly announce
that they are Hindus.

Balasubramanian
Ambattur

 

[talwan]

Fredrick von Schiller (1759-1805) was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's friend, who otherwise took little interest in Indian literature, was also moved to enthusiastic praise of Shakuntala, which he found in some respects un paralled in the classical literature of Greece and Rome. He published part of the Shakuntala in Thalia, and in a letter to Wilhelm von Humboldt he wrote that: "in the whole of Greek antiquity there is no poetical representation of beautiful love which approaches Sakuntala even afar."
(source: India and World Civilization - By D. P. Singhal Pan Macmillan Limited. 1993 ASIN 0870131435 p. 230-231).

 

[talwan]

H. M. Hyndman (1842-1921) the eminent British publicist thus describes the important place of India in the world's history and civilization:"Many hundreds of years before the coming of the English, the nations of India had been a collection of wealthy and highly civilized people, possessed of a great language with an elaborate code of laws and social regulations, with exquisite artistic taste in architecture and decoration, producing beautiful manufactures of all kinds, and endowed with religious ideas and philosophic and scientific conceptions which have greatly influenced the development of the most progressive races of the West. One of the noblest individual moralists who ever lived, Sankya Muni was a Hindu; the Code of Manu, dating from before the Christian era, is still an essential a study for the jurist....and there are in India, in this later age, worthy descendants of the great authors of the Vedas, of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana."
"and yet, nine-tenths of what has been written by the British about India is so expressed that we are made to believe the shameful falsehood that stability and civilized government in Hindustan began only with the rule of the British."
(source: India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom - By Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland p. 350).

 

[talwan]

Ernest E. Kellett (1864-1950) author of A Short History of Religions: "On the other hand there seems to be an increasing number of persons who have been led by natural and acquired sympathy to adopt in some form one of the Eastern religions." The new German faith is said to have for its main source of interpretation Eckhart and the Bhagavad-Gita.

(source: Eastern Religions & Western Thought - By S. Radhakrishnan p. 251 South Asia Books 1990ISBN 0195624564).

 

[talwan]

Sister Nivedita - Margaret Noble (1867-1911). Her first literary achievement was Kali the Mother, in which she expounds the conception of Kali. There are many 'educated Indians - of Christian missionaries we need not speak - who think that Kali is some blood-thirsty deity worshipped by barbarous people. to such people this book ought to be a revelation. The Web of Indian Life, may be at once said that it is the greatest in the English language upon India. It is not a travel book, but a revelation of the soul of a people. Sister Nivedita probed into the heart of Indian womanhood and reflected in her rhythmic and eloquent prose the natural simplicity and spiritual fervor of the women of India. Women, she contended, are the embodiment and repository of the ancient wisdom of the East. They are the inheritors of a radiant orthodoxy, unspoilt by age and undimmed by the passing fashions of the day to which men so easily succumb.
"Hinduism would not be eternal were it not constantly growing and spreading, and taking in new areas of experience. Precisely because it has this power of self addition and re-adaptation, in greater degree than any other religion that the world has even seen, we believe it to be the one immortal faith."
(source: The Complete Works, Vol III).

 

[talwan]

Sir Edwin Arnold (1832-1904) poet and scholar. Author of The Song Celestial, which is a translation of the Bhagavad Gita. It has great elevation of tone and majesty and dignity of style. There are many translations of the Gita but Arnold's translation has a place apart among them by its accuracy and the grave harmony of the verse. The translation is dedicated by the poet to India. The dedicatory verses are in Arnold's own translation:
"So have I read this wonderful and spirit-thrilling speech,
By Krishna and Prince Arjuna held, discoursing each with each;
So have I writ its wisdom here, its hidden mystery,
For England; O our India! as dear to me as she!
He wrote in his preface:

"This famous and marvelous Sanskrit poem occurs as an episode of the Mahabharata, in the sixth - or "Bhishma" - Parva of the great Hindu epic. It enjoys immense popularity and authority in India, where it is reckoned as one of the "Five Jewels" - pancharatnani - of Devanagari literature. In plain but noble language it unfolds a philosophical system which remains to this day the prevailing Brahmanic belief blending as it does the doctrine of Kapila, Patanjali, and the Vedas."