Become a living example of what can be attained by attaining it.
That is what attracted maximum intellectuals, seekers, philosphers from all over the world , from time immemorial. These wonderful people know how to sift the fine contents from superficial appearances. There is no need to spread this 'way of life'. It can survive on its own! We need it for our personal salvation.
But please see... it is 'others' who have contributed more to spread this wonderful 'way of life called Hinduism', more than Hindus themselves!
I wish to quote a rather lengthy 'forward' but a quick glance through it would prove the point...
quote:
Very very interesting and thought provoking discussions indeed ! There are points where, according to me, you are right and there are areas where perhaps you could be wrong! It is essential to differentiate between God and religion as rightly brought out by both of you!
Instead of indulging in the thesis I believe in, I am forwarding here some "quotable quotes" from some high intellectuals, respectable world renowned persons for your reading pleasure please !!
I would like you to kindly remember the following aspects before you read them, if you may !!
(1) Each one of these person is famous well respected professional, known world over for their work in diverse fields like science, art, politics and so on
(2) Each one has achieved far more in their lives -- than all of us put together can claim -- and hence their views deserve respect and consideration to that extent!
(3) None of these are professional religious Pundits, paid to promote the interests of any given religion for money or livelihood, but giants in their own profession and hence their views are not financially or otherwise motivated!
(4) I have deliberately excluded the very many quotes from Hindu monks, priests, who may have a vested interest to promote Hindu religion! Thus each one whose quote you are going to read is from Non-Hindu scholars and nothing more can be said about objectivity or bias!
(5) Many ridicule God or religion on grounds of science and technology! As soon as logic and scientific explanations are available God is given a go-by, and His influence questioned! Fair enough!! But these quotes from world class scientists, Nobel Laureates on religion--not necessarily on God --especially the Hindu religion -- need to be considered in that light !!
(6) Don't just read the quotes but Introspect a little! Believe me it is too difficult to gather the full impact of what is being stated ! To make this kind of profound observations or express an opinion how much reading and getting to know about an alien religion ( Hinduism) was necessary for them, given their own busy schedule in their diverse fields!
(7) It goes without saying that when you read the scriptures of another religion-you do subconsciously compare and analyze what you read and reject especially if that does not find favour! Your speaking favorably is indicative of your genuine appreciation/ acceptance in some cases if not all !!
Quotes on HINDUISM
The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn – Alwin Toffler
Quotes by eminent persons of great repute & Nobel Laureate
1. Albert Einstein, (1879-1955) physicist. In 1905 He published his theory of Relativity.
When I read the Bhagavad Gita and reflect about how God created this universe, everything else seems so superfluous. We owe a lot to Indians who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made.
2. . George Bernard Shaw, (1856-1950) a vegetarian and Nobel Laureate in Literature.
The Indian way of life provides the vision of the natural, real way of life. We veil ourselves with unnatural masks. On the face of India are the tender expressions which carry the mark of the Creators hand.
The apparent multiplication of gods is bewildering at the first glance, but you soon discover that they are the same GOD. There is always one uttermost God who defies personification. This makes Hinduism the most tolerant religion in the world, because its one transcendent God includes all possible gods. In fact Hinduism is so elastic and so subtle that the most profound Methodist, and crudest idolater, are equally at home with it.
3. Annie Besant { Annie Wood Besant (1847-1933) was an active socialist on the executive committee of the Fabian Society along with George Bernard Shaw.
After a study of some forty years and more of the great religions of the world, I find none so perfect, none so scientific, none so philosophic, and none so spiritual as the great religion known by the name of Hinduism. The more you know it, the more you will love it; the more you try to understand it, the more deeply you will value it. Make no mistake; without Hinduism, India has no future. Hinduism is the soil into which India's roots are struck, and torn of that she will inevitably wither, as a tree torn out from its place. Many are the religions and many are the races flourishing in India, but none of them stretches back into the far dawn of her past, nor are they necessary for her endurance as a nation. Everyone might pass away as they came and India would still remain. But let Hinduism vanish and what is she? A geographical expression of the past, a dim memory of a perished glory, her literature, her art, her monuments, all have Hindudom written across them. And if Hindus do not maintain Hinduism, who shall save it? If India's own children do not cling to her faith, who shall guard it? India alone can save India, and India and Hinduism are one.
Nobel laureates
4. Niels Bohr, (1885-1962) Danish nuclear physicist who developed the Bohr model of the atom. His received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1922, for his theory of atomic structure
I go into the Upanishads to ask questions.
5. Werner Heisenberg
After the study of Indian philosophy (derived from Vedas), some of the ideas of Quantum physics that seemed so crazy, suddenly made much more sense (father of Quantum Physics Werner Heisenberg).
6. Erwin Schrödinger (1887--1961) Austrian theoretical physicist, was a professor at several universities in Europe. He was awarded the Nobel prize Quantum Mechanics, in 1933. During the Hitler era he was dismissed from his position for his opposition to the Nazi ideas and he fled to England. He was the author of Meine Weltansicht
This life of yours which you are living is not merely apiece of this entire existence, but in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear; tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as "I am in the east and the west, I am above and below, I am this entire world."
The unity and continuity of Vedanta are reflected in the unity and continuity of wave mechanics. In 1925, the world view of physics was a model of a great machine composed of separable interacting material particles. During the next few years, Schrodinger and Heisenberg and their followers created a universe based on super imposed inseparable waves of probability amplitudes. This new view would be entirely consistent with the Vedantic concept of All in One.
Vedanta teaches that consciousness is singular, all happenings are played out in one universal consciousness and there is no multiplicity of selves.
Nirvana is a state of pure blissful knowledge.. It has nothing to do with individual. The ego or its separation is an illusion. The goal of man is to preserve his Karma and to develop it further – when man dies his karma lives and creates for itself another carrier.
There is no kind of framework within which we can find consciousness in the plural; this is simply something we construct because of the temporal plurality of individuals, but it is a false construction....The only solution to this conflict insofar as any is available to us at all lies in the ancient wisdom of the Upanishad.
The multiplicity is only apparent. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads. And not of the Upanishads only. The mystical experience of the union with God regularly leads to this view, unless strong prejudices stand in the West.
7. Alfred North Whitehead
Science in the most advanced stage now is closer to Vedanta than ever before -- (Alfred North Whitehead)
8. Romain Rolland (1866-1944) French Nobel laureate, professor of the history of music at the Sorbonne and thinker.·
If there is one place on the face of the earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India....For more than 30 centuries, the tree of vision, with all its thousand branches and their millions of twigs, has sprung from this torrid land, the burning womb of the Gods. It renews itself tirelessly showing no signs of decay.
9. Octavio Paz (1914-1998) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990.
The Hindu genius is a love for abstraction and, at the same time, a passion for the concrete image. At times it is rich, at others prolix. It has created the most lucid and the most instinctive art. It is abstract and realistic, sexual and intellectual, pedantic and sublime. It lives between extremes, it embraces the extremes, rooted in the earth and drawn to an invisible beyond.
10. Dr. Carl Sagan, (1934-1996) famous astrophysicist.
The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much longer time scales still.
The most elegant and sublime of these is a representation of the creation of the universe at the beginning of each cosmic cycle, a motif known as the cosmic dance of Lord Shiva. The god, called in this manifestation Nataraja, the Dance King. In the upper right hand is a drum whose sound is the sound of creation. In the upper left hand is a tongue of flame, a reminder that the universe, now newly created, with billions of years from now will be utterly destroyed.
A millennium before Europeans were wiling to divest themselves of the Biblical idea that the world was a few thousand years old, the Mayans were thinking of millions and the Hindus billions.
11. Julius R Oppenheimer- (1904-1967--Father of Atom bomb)Scientist, philosopher, bohemian, and radical. A theoretical physicist and the Supervising Scientist for the Manhattan Project, the developer of the atomic bomb. Graduating from Harvard University, he traveled to Cambridge University to study at the Cavendish Laboratory.
Modern Physics is an exemplification and a refinement of old Hindu wisdom- contained in Vedas
12. Julius Robert Oppenheimer
Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.
The general notions about human understanding… which are illustrated by discoveries in atomic physics are not in the nature of things wholly unfamiliar, wholly unheard of or new. Even in our own culture they have a history, and in Buddhist and Hindu thought a more considerable and central place. What we shall find [in modern physics] is an exemplification, an encouragement, and a refinement of old wisdom.
The juxtaposition of Western civilization's most terrifying scientific achievement with the most dazzling description of the mystical experience given to us by the Bhagavad Gita, India's greatest literary monument.
13. Robert R. C. Zaehner (1913-1974) British historian of religion.
In the family of religions, Hinduism is the wise old all-knowing mother. Its sacred books, the Vedas, claim, 'Truth is one, but sages call it by different names.' If only Islam, and all the rest of the monotheistic 'book' religions, had learned that lesson, all the horror of history's religious wars could have been avoided. Which other religion has its God say, as Krishna does in the Bhagavad Gita, 'All paths lead to me.'
If only the Church had the sense to allow so many different and seemingly contradictory approaches to God, how much saner its history would have been!
It was the sublime ancient tolerance of Hinduism that he often stressed, that was the true proof of the wisdom and mature dignity of the Hindu tradition.
14. Klaus L. Klostermaier professor of Religious Studies at the University of Manitoba.Hinduism has proven much more open than any other religion to new ideas, scientific thought, and social experimentation. Many concepts like reincarnation, meditation, yoga and others have found worldwide acceptance. It would not be surprising to find Hinduism the dominant religion of the twenty-first century. It would be a religion that doctrinally is less clear-cut than mainstream Christianity, politically less determined than Islam, ethically less heroic than Buddhism, but it would offer something to everybody. It will appear idealistic to those who look for idealism, pragmatic to the pragmatists, spiritual to the seekers, sensual to the here-and-now generation. Hinduism, by virtue of its lack of an ideology and its reliance on intuition, will appear to be more plausible than those religions whose doctrinal positions petrified a thousand years ago.
15. Sir Charles Eliot (1862-1931), British diplomat and colonial administrator, a famous scholar and linguist of Oxford. ·
Let me confess that I cannot share the confidence in the superiority of Europeans and their ways which is prevalent in the West. European civilization is not satisfying and Asia can still offer something more attractive to many who are far from Asiatic in spirit.
I do not think that Christianity will ever make much progress in Asia, for what is commonly known by that name is not the teaching of Christ but a rearrangement of it made in Europe and like most European institutions practical rather than thoughtful. And as for the teaching of Christ himself, the Indian finds it excellent but not ample or satisfying. There is little in it which cannot be found in some of the many scriptures of Hinduism..."
The claim of India to the attention of the world is that she, more than any other nation since history began, has devoted herself to contemplating the ultimate mysteries of existence and, in my eyes, the fact that Indian thought diverges widely from our own popular thought is a positive merit.
Hinduism has not been made, but has grown. It is a jungle, not a building. It is a living example of a great national paganism such as might have existed in Europe if Christianity had not become the state religion of the Roman Empire, if there had remained an incongruous jumble of old local superstitions, Greek philosophy, and oriental cults such as the worship of Sarapis or Mitras.
Compared to Islam and Christianity, Hinduism’s doctrines are extraordinarily fluid, and multiform. India deals in images and metaphors. Restless, subtle and argumentative as Hindu thought is, it is less prone than European theology to the vice of distorting transcendental ideas by too stringent definition. It adumbrates the indescribable by metaphors and figures. It is not afraid of inconsistencies which may illustrate different aspects of the infinite, but it rarely tries to cramp the divine within the limits of a logical phrase.
The Hindu has an extraordinary power of combining dogma and free thought, uniformity, and variety. Utmost latitude of interpretation is allowed. In all ages Hindus have been passionately devoted to speculation. It is also to point out that from the Upanishads down to the writings of Tagore in the present day literature from time to time enunciates the idea that the whole universe is the manifestation of some exuberant force giving expression to itself in joyous movement.
16. Queen Fredricka of Greece (1931- 1981) The wife of King Paul of Greece.
It was my advanced research in physics that had started me on a spiritual quest. It culminated in me accepting the non-dualism or absolute monism of Shankara as my philosophy of life and science.
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.
17. Alfred B. Ford grandson of Henry Ford (founder of the Ford Motor), and Trustee member of Ford Motor Company.
For me the most important thing is to spread the Hindu knowledge about the soul. This is more important than any other knowledge and is my main priority.
18. Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804) aide-de-camp to George Washington and first secretary of the Treasury.
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.
19. Christopher W. B. Isherwood (1904-1986) Translator, biographer, novelist, and playwright.
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.
20. David Frawley
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.
21. Muhammad Dara Shikoh (1627-1658 AD) the favorite Sufi son of Moghul emperor, Shah Jehan.
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.The Quran itself made veiled references to the Upanishads as the first heavenly book and the fountainhead of the ocean of monotheism.
22. Sylvain Levi (1863-1935) French scholar, Orientalist who wrote on Eastern religion, literature, and history.
From Persia to the Chinese Sea, 'from the icy regions of Siberia to the islands of Java and Borneo, from Oceania to Socotra, India has propagated her beliefs, her tales and her civilization.
She has left indelible imprints on one fourth of the human race in the course of a long succession of centuries. She has the right to reclaim in universal history the rank that ignorance has refused her for a long time and to hold her place amongst the great nations summarizing and symbolizing the spirit of humanity.
23. Solange Lemaitre author of several books, including Le Mystère de la mort dans les religions d'Asie and Râmakrishna et la vitalité de l'hindouism
The civilization of India, at root purely religious, is only now becoming known in Europe; and as the mystery surrounding it is unveiled it emerges as one of the highest achievement in the history of mankind. By the very breadth of the outlook it affords on to the destiny of man the Vedic religion offers in abundance the spiritual experience that has inspired the Indian people since the dawn of their history. The vocation of India is to proclaim to the world the efficacy of religious experience.
Stephen Cross, in his book on Hinduism, pg 1, says, It is no secret that we in the West live in a time of spiritual crisis. Western civilization has been guided by Christianity. Now it appears that this period is drawing to a close. Both religious institutions and social structures are in disarray. A great many things that were considered basic assumptions of western thought are being challenged. The reality of the external world, the soul, the linear nature of time.
25. W. J. Grant India indeed has a preciousness which a materialistic age is in danger of missing. Some day the fragrance of her thought will win the hearts of men. This grim chase after our own tails which marks the present age cannot continue for ever. The future contains a new human urge towards the real beauty and holiness of life. When it comes Hinduism will be searched by loving eyes and defended by knightly hands.
26. Will Durant (1885-1981) American historian.
It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to us such questionable gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all our numerals and our decimal system. But these are not the essence of her spirit; they are trifles compared to what we may learn from her in the future.
Perhaps in return for conquest, arrogance and spoliation, India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of the mature mind, the quiet content of the unacquisitive soul, the calm of the understanding spirit, and a unifying, a pacifying love for all living things.
India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all. Nothing should more deeply shame the modern student than the recency and inadequacy of his acquaintance with India....This is the India that patient scholarship is now opening up like a new intellectual continent to that Western mind which only yesterday thought civilization an exclusive Western thing.
"As flowing rivers disappear in the sea, losing their name and form, thus a wise man, freed from name and form, goes to the divine person who is beyond all." Such a theory of life and death will not please Western man, whose religion is as permeated with individualism as are his political and economic institutions. But it has satisfied the philosophical Hindu mind with astonishing continuity.
Even in Europe and America, this wistful theosophy has won millions upon millions of followers, from lonely women and tired men to Schopenhauer and Emerson.
