QUOTES ON SCRIPTURES - VI
QUOTES ON
SCRIPTURES - VI
George Harrison (1943-2001) former Beatle and rocker. He was the most instrumental Beatle member who led the rock band's spiritual quest in the 1960s, which brought them to
India. In 1965, he discovered the Indian string instrument, the
sitar, and learned to play it under the renowned sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar पंडित रवि शंकर. Harrison reminds people of the era when the West turned to India for inspiration and
enlightenment.
In his 1992 interview he stated why he became interested in India. He said, "India unlocked this enormous
big door in the back of my consciousness".
Eventually he became a devotee of God
Krishna, donating large sums of money to the International Society
for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON - also called the 'Hare Krishna Mission') and even donating a 23-acre site outside London to
the movement. He also incorporated the trademark Hare Krishna chants in
his music. 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."
Harrison
became deeply interested in India. The late George Harrison, a longtime
devotee of Hinduism, left £700,000 to build a temple in the holy city of
Varanasi in India according to Hare Krishna devotees हरे कृष्ण भक्त. His real interest remained Indian spirituality. In 1976, he said that the most influential
book he had ever read was Yogananda
Paramahansa’s योगानंद परमहंस 'Autobiography of a Yogi' (एक योगी की जीवनी). “None of this will
last. In the end, there’s only God-consciousness.”
George Harrison "Beatle yogi" who linked
Western pop to the strains of the sitar, wanted to be
remembered as the man who spread the message of Indian spirituality to the
decadent West. The 'Quiet Beatle' was the most Indian of the quartet. It was his spiritual yearning that
brought the Fab Four to the banks of the Ganga (Ganges-गंगा) and to the feet of Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi - महर्षि महेश योगी and Pandit Ravi Shankar. Harrison introduced a whole generation of
western performers and entertainers to Indian music and mysticism following a
1966 visit to Rishikesh ऋषिकेश where he drank deeply of ragas and religion.
At a time before Westerners were flocking to yoga
classes, Harrison became one of the first proponents of Eastern culture,
studying meditation and Indian
In 1973, he came up with a neatly arranged album
aptly titled, Living in the Material World. The songs reflect the Hindu view of
the world and a culmination of his quest for self-realisation. The song, The
Art of Dying for instance, deals with the philosophy of Karma-कर्म and
reincarnation. He even inculcated in himself the orthodox-Hindu way of life by
waking up at the crack of dawn, bathe in cold water and study Bhagvad-Gita. He passed
away to the sonorous tone of Hare Krishna chants. He was a lifelong follower of Hinduism and was closely associated with
the Hare Krishna movement. Harrison had produced the Chants of India, a recording of Indian religious music.
A collection of mantras and prayers from the Vedas वेद, Upanishads -उपनिषद्, and other
scriptures powerfully transports the listener to a place of peace where it's
possible to be one with the universe.
In an
Interview in Henley-On-Thames, Oxfordshire, 1982, this is what the rocker
said on His Personal Spirituality: "I always felt at home with Krishna. You see it was already a part of me. I think
it's something that's been with me from my previous birth…. I'd rather be one
of the devotees of God than one of the straight, so-called sane or normal
people who just don't understand that man is a spiritual being, that he has a
soul."
 |
| The Mansarovar lake and Mount Kailash in the background (the abode of God Shiva) कैलाश पर्वत और मानसरोवर झील |
It is the perfect end to a final album of the man who took the world to the feet of the Maharishi and became Krishna’s most famous devotee. "Namah Parvati" was appended it as the album's spiritual benediction, a touching reminder that while musicians come and go, music can truly embody their spirit forever. The album is dedicated to the Yogis of Hinduism.
***
Rizwan Salim - reviewer, New York Tribune, Capitol Hill
reporter, Engineering
Times, assistant editor, American Sentinel, published in Hindustan
Times has wisely observed:
 |
| Muslim invaders destroyed thousands of temples. A great treasure of classical Hindu architecture has been lost forever. |
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."
 |
| The Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi (Benaras/Kashi) which is built on the original site where the original Vishwanath Temple stood. |
"The descendants of those who built the magnificent temples of Bhojpur and Thanjavur, Konark and Kailas, invented mathematics and urban
surgery, created mind-body disciplines (yoga) of astonishing power, and built
mighty empires would almost certainly have attained technological superiority
over Europe."
***
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.
Rodin described the statue of Nataraja or King of
Dance - as the perfect embodiment of rhythmic
movement.
He
was overwhelmed when he saw the Chola sculptures in 1913. "There are things that other people do not see:
unknown depths, the wellsprings of life," he said. "There is grace in
elegance; above grace, there is modelling; everything is exaggerated; we call
it soft but it is most powerfully soft! Words fail me then."
***
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."
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."
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."
***
Dorothea Chaplin mentions in her book, Matter, Myth and Spirit or Keltic and Hindu Links:
"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."
"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."
***
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."
***
Rev. William Robertson: He
could not but praise "the ancient and high civilization of the inhabitants
of India."
***
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 in his statement "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."
***
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." also known as Pandit Vamadeva
Shastri, the 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 which the
need for a new intelligentsia, 'intellectual kshatriya' or
intellectual warrior class trained in Vedic dharma, to handle challenges was
emphasized."
 |
| Nature! It is considered as God's greatest creation and blessing to all mankind and living beings on Earth! |
He further 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."
DAVID FRAWLEY: A Westerner who has sloughed off the Western world view, Frawley looks Eastwards, finding in the ancient Indo-European tradition of the Vedas spiritual nourishment and superior insights into the moral, environmental and political questions faced by all mankind. He sees in Western monotheism the basis for the present commercial monoculture of "globalisation". That is to say, the singularity and certainty underlying so much of the Judaeo-Christian mindset is finding new and secular outlets. Those who promote Western notions of "democracy" and "human rights" above all other forms of social organisation, who regard "market forces" as all-powerful (surely a modern superstition) and who wish to impose a politically-correct blandness on the world are "secular missionaries" as fanatical as their religious antecedents, if not far more so.
***
DAVID FRAWLEY: A Westerner who has sloughed off the Western world view, Frawley looks Eastwards, finding in the ancient Indo-European tradition of the Vedas spiritual nourishment and superior insights into the moral, environmental and political questions faced by all mankind. He sees in Western monotheism the basis for the present commercial monoculture of "globalisation". That is to say, the singularity and certainty underlying so much of the Judaeo-Christian mindset is finding new and secular outlets. Those who promote Western notions of "democracy" and "human rights" above all other forms of social organisation, who regard "market forces" as all-powerful (surely a modern superstition) and who wish to impose a politically-correct blandness on the world are "secular missionaries" as fanatical as their religious antecedents, if not far more so.
Frawley values the ancient wisdom of the Vedas above
the mainstream Judaeo-Christian tradition because the latter has falsely
enthroned man over nature. The Vedic tradition, by contrast, is pluralistic and
ecologically aware. Frawley,
whose native "civilisation" (the USA ) is ethically challenged, calls
for a renaissance of Indian culture. He believes that there should be a new
form of "truth struggle", or satyagraha, to use Gandhi's word,
against the soul-destroying influence of global monoculture.
He
considers Hinduism to be a religion of the Earth, because, as he describes
beautifully: "…it honors the Earth as the
Divine Mother and
encourages us to honor her and help her develop her creative potentials. The
deities of Hinduism permeate the world of nature…they don't belong to a single
country or book only. It is not necessary to live in India to be a Hindu. In
fact, one must live in harmony with the land where one is located to be a true
Hindu."
"I
see Hinduism as a religion eminently suited for all lands and for all people
because it requires that we connect with the land and its creatures - that we
align our individual self with the soul of all beings around us. Hinduism finds
holy places everywhere, wherever there is a river, a mountain, a large rock, or
big tree, wherever some unusual natural phenomenon be it a spring, a cave, or a
geyser."
"True
religion, whether it predominates in the Eastern or Western parts of the world,
is not a matter of geography," says Frawley. "All the religions of
the world are followed in areas far beyond the geographical locale of their
origin. Religion speaks of the ultimate issues of life and death and should
orient us to the Eternal and the Universal. In this respect, Hinduism with its universal view has greater relevance for all human
beings than any belief system, which divides humanity into believers and
non-believers."
The Indian tradition is pluralistic and has always offered freedom of worshiping the divine in the name and form of one's choice and according to one's individual samskaras (cultures/traditions-संस्कार). It is pluralistic both at the level of religious practices as well as philosophical teachings. For this reason we find more religions inside Hinduism than among all of the world's religions put together.
The Indian tradition is pluralistic and has always offered freedom of worshiping the divine in the name and form of one's choice and according to one's individual samskaras (cultures/traditions-संस्कार). It is pluralistic both at the level of religious practices as well as philosophical teachings. For this reason we find more religions inside Hinduism than among all of the world's religions put together.
Pluralism
means freedom. It means that we should accept religious differences as a fact
of life, like other natural variations. We need freedom to arrive at the truth.
The pursuit of dharma, the urge for self-realization and desire for liberation
are common to all paths. Rather than as a cause for confusion, I see Indian
pluralism as constructively facilitating an individual's spiritual quest.
David
Frawley has convincingly argued, the central value of Hinduism is not “tolerance”
(as interested parties try to make Hindus believe) but truth.
***
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 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!"
***
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.
***
Paul Hubert, a French Theosophist, was to write in
glowing terms of Charles Wilkins translation the Bhagavad Gita. In
his book Histoire de la Bhagavad Gita he
said it was one of the 'striking events in the universal history of
philosophy'
***
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 of God"). It was
completed in 1657, together with paraphrases and excerpts from commentaries
which in various cases, though by no means thorough, can be traced back to
Shankaracharya.
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.
His
personal fate is well-known: in 1659, two years after the completion of the
Sirr-i-Akbar, he was executed by order of his brother, Aurangazeb, and with the
consent of the Islamic orthodoxy community (Ulama), who claimed that he was a
heretic and a danger to the state, the faith and the public order.
He translated the Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita and Yoga-Vashishtha into Persian directly from Sanskrit and called it Sirr-e-Akbar (The Great Mystery). Titled "The Upanishads: God's Most Perfect Revelation" and then into Latin by Anquetil Duperron (1801 and 1802) under the titleOupnekhat, contained about fifty. This translation introduced Western readers to the Upanishads. Schopenhauer's reaction to it is well-known.
The
Quran itself, he said, made veiled references to the Upanishads as
the "first heavenly book and the fountainhead of the ocean of
monotheism."
"After gradual research; I have come to the
conclusion that long before all heavenly books, God had revealed to the Hindus,
through the Rishis of yore, of whom Brahma was the Chief, His four books of
knowledge, the Rig Veda, the Yajur Veda, the Sama Veda and the Atharva
Veda."
Dara
Shikoh, wrote in his Persian translation of the Upanishads. "After gradual research; I have come to the
conclusion that long before all heavenly books, God had revealed to the Hindus,
through the Rishis of yore, of whom Brahma was the Chief, His four books of
knowledge, the Rig Veda, the Yajur Veda, the Sama Veda and the Atharva
Veda."
In
his Majma al-Bahrain, he sought to reconcile the Sufi theory with the Vedanta.
He
was able to affirm that Sufism and Advaita Vedantism (Hinduism) are essentially the same, with a
surface difference of terminology.”
And
in introduction to this work he says that one finds in Upanishads the concept
of tawhid (the doctrine of Unity of God, the most fundamental doctrine of
Islam) after the Qur'an and perhaps the Qur'an refers to Upanishad when it
refers to Kitab al-Maknun (The Hidden Book). His work Majma`ul Bahrayn
(Mingling of the Two Oceans i.e. Hinduism and Islam) is very seminal work in
the history of composite culture of India.
Two years after the completion of the Sirr-i-Akbar, Dara was executed on the orders of his
brother - Aurangazeb.
***
More to come....
Siddharth S. Sinha
ssselan@yahoo.in
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