A tribute To Hindu Dharma Advanced concept of Hinduism The Vedas have guided Indian civilization for thousands of years. They are the pillars of Hinduism. Veda is the source of all Dharma declares Manusmirti (2.6.) There is no major religion on the planet, which has not been influenced by the Vedas. The creation stories of all major religions are based on Vedas. Though all other religions have forgotten their Vedic root or have been forgotten, there is one religion, Hinduism, that has kept the flame of the Vedic wisdom burning continuously. Vedas which means knowledge contain a good deal of scientific knowledge that was lost over millennia, which needs to be recovered. The Vedic sages had discovered the subtle nature of reality, and had coded it in the form of the Vedas. According to Raja Ram Mohan Roy, author of Vedic Physics, The knowledge contained in the Vedas is very abstruse, and is well beyond the comprehension of ordinary human beings. Therefore Vedic sages coded the knowledge in a simple form in which it could be understood by everyone. The Rig Veda itself testifies that it has a hidden meaning in verse 4.3.16. Sage Bharata in his Natyasastra 2.23 refers to the sages who knew the hidden meaning of the Vedas. This coding of knowledge proved to be very successful in disseminating the knowledge to common folks. This would also explain why extraordinary steps were taken to preserve the Vedas, and the honor given to the Vedas by Hindus, even though its meaning is little understood today. On the eve of the Mahabharata War our ancestors believed that their knowledge was in danger of being lost. They could have written it down, but writings could be destroyed. Therefore, it was memorized and passed on orally. Today, the Avesta, religious scripture of ancient Iranians, only a fraction of it is available. Alexander captured Iran in 326 B.C. and after a bloody war, destroyed each copy of the Avesta available. As in modern physics, Hindu cosmology envisaged the universe as having a cyclical nature. The end of each kalpa brought about by Shivas dance is also the beginning of the next. Rebirth follows destruction. Author Dick Teresi says Indian cosmologists, the first to estimate the age of the earth at more than 4 billion years. They came closest to modern ideas of atomism, quantum physics, and other current theories. India developed very early, enduring atomist theories of matter. Possibly Greek atomistic thought was influenced by India, via the Persian civilization. Introduction Grandiose time scales Hinduism’s understanding of time is as grandiose as time itself. While most cultures base their cosmologies on familiar units such as few hundreds or thousands of years, the Hindu concept of time embraces billions and trillions of years. The Puranas describe time units from the infinitesimal truti, lasting 1/1,000,0000 of a second to a mahamantavara of 311 trillion years. Hindu sages describe time as cyclic, an endless procession of creation, preservation and dissolution. Scientists such as Carl Sagan have expressed amazement at the accuracy of space and time descriptions given by the ancient rishis and saints, who fathomed the secrets of the universe through their mystically awakened senses. (source: Hinduism Today April/May/June 2007 p. 14). Friedrich Maximilian Müeller (1823-1900) German philologist and Orientalist. He repeatedly drew attention to the uniqueness of the Vedas and awakened interest in his book In History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature (p. 557) observed: In the Rig-Veda we shall have before us more real antiquity than in all the inscriptions of Egypt or Ninevah....the Veda is the oldest book in existence.... Louis Jacolliot (1837-1890), who worked in French India as a government official and was at one time President of the Court in Chandranagar, translated numerous Vedic hymns, the Manusmriti, and the Tamil work, Kural His masterpiece, La Bible dans lInde, stirred a storm of controversy. He praised the Vedas in his Sons of God, and said,: The Hindu revelation, which proclaims the slow and gradual formation of worlds, is of all revelations the only one whose ideas are in complete harmony with modern science. Jacolliot feels India has given to the West much more than she is credited with when he says: Besides the discoverers of geometry and algebra, the constructors of human speech, the parents of philosophy, the primal expounders of religion, the adepts in psychological and physical science, how even the greatest of our biological and theologians seem dwarfed! Name of us any modern discovery, and we venture to say that Indian history need not long be searched before the prototype will be found on record. Here we are with the transit of science half accomplished, and all our Vedic ideas in process of readjustment to the theories of force correlation, natural selection, atomic polarity and evolution. And here, to mock our conceit, our apprehension, and our despair, we may read what Manu said, perhaps 10,000 years before the birth of Christ: The first germ of life was developed by water and heat. (Manusmriti - Book I, sloka 8,9) Water ascends towards the sky in vapors; from the sun it descends in rain, from the rains are born the plants, and from the plants, animals. (Manusmriti - Book III, sloka 76) (source: Krishna and Christ - By Louis Jacolliot p. 15). Sir John Woodroffe (1865-1936) the well known scholar, Advocate-General of Bengal and sometime Legal Member of the Government of India. He served with competence for eighteen years and in 1915 officiated as Chief Justice. He has said: Ages before Lamarck and Darwin it was held in India that man has passed through 84 lakhs (8,400,000) of birth as plants, animals, as an inferior species of man and then as the ancestor of the developed type existing to-day. The theory was not, like modern doctrine of evolution, based wholly on observation and a scientific enquiry into fact but was a rather (as some other matters) an act of brilliant intuition in which observation may also have had some part. (source: Is India Civilized - Essays on Indian Culture - By Sir John Woodroffe Ganesh & Co. Publishers Date of Publication: 1922 p. 22). To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas, (A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it. It is, indeed, a remarkable circumstance that when Western civilization discovers Relativity it applies it to the manufacture of atom-bombs, whereas Oriental civilization applies it to the development of new states of consciousness. (source: Spiritual Practices of India - By Frederic Spiegelberg Introduction by Alan Watts p. 8-9). Lord Vishnu is said to rest in the coils of Ananta, the great serpent of Infinity, while he waits for the universe to recreate itself. 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. While the West was still thinking, perhaps, of 6,000 years old universe – India was already envisioning ages and eons and galaxies as numerous as the sands of the Ganges. The Universe so vast that modern astronomy slips into its folds without a ripple.”
Posted on: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 14:09:00 +0000
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