[Advaita-l] shaDdarhana and other unorthodox schools

[Sylvain]

As an Occidental, I am quite sure that advaita is slowly being discovered 
and appreciated in Occident.

- Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) a christian who is not recognized by the 
christian religious institutions was very close with the advaita point of 
view.  He is (only today!) being translated in modern German, English, 
French and certainly other languages.

- Arnaud Desjardins, still among us, greatly contributed to present advaita 
in French speaking world.  I think he was the first westerner to film MA 
AnandamayI.

- Many westerners are discovering advaita nowadays because they realise 
advaita is « open », « tolerant ».

I see a great future for advaita.

Sylvain


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ramakrishnan Balasubramanian" <rama.balasubramanian at gmail.com>
To: "A discussion group for Advaita Vedanta" 
<advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2007 3:07 PM
Subject: Re: [Advaita-l] shaDdarhana and other unorthodox schools


> On 1/22/07, Ram Garib <garib_ram at yahoo.co.in> wrote:
>>
>> Sri Ramakrishnan Balasubramanian wrote:
>>
>> > Just wondering. Why do we need to justify - to
>> > ourselves or anyone
>> > else - the value of "indian philosophy"?
>>
>> Let me make it clear that my intention was never to
>> question the value of Indian philosophy. The point of
>> contention was whether a differentiation is justified
>> between sectarian ideologies and philosophical schools
>> in the context of hinduism. Surely someone yearning
>> for a spiritual experience can hardly be bothered by
>> the classification. Unfortunately, discussion veered
>> to a completely unintended direction (and I accept
>> full responsibility for that).
>
> Dear Sri Ram Garib,
>
> In my experience, it pays to be very careful about what Western
> writers write about India/Philosophy/Customs/Whatever. Sometimes you
> get really good stuff such as the book on Ganapti or any of his other
> books by Grimes, The artful universe by Mahony, etc.
> Sometimes it is pure, 100%, unadulterated garbage such as "Dreams,
> Illusions and Reality", by Wendy Doniger.
>
> Sometimes it is works by people like Jan Gonda, which are excellent
> philological studies and very useful references. However, since he was
> not acquainted with the practical vedism, you just have to be on the
> watch out for speculative thoughts versus real analysis.
>
> Sometimes nonsense is written by people, since they are basically
> Christian apologists in "multi-cultural" disguise (this is about 80-90
> percent of the time IMO). Some are even borderline/actual racists. One
> particular discussion in the old Indology list comes to mind - where
> one gentleman dismissed all Indian engineers as of poor quality (based
> on perhaps some bad experiences). An indian posted the results of a
> survery of deans in US schools about the best 25 univs in Asia and all
> the IITs were listed. So one venerable professor from an ivy league
> school was kind enough to inform that Japan had more good schools on
> the list inspite of a lower population! And our very own Vidyasankar
> pointed out that the venerable humanities and social sciences scholar
> had fogotten to normalize for socio-ecomomic criteria. Nary a word of
> apology from our good professor. If he had made a comment like this on
> some African studies list or women studies list, you can be sure his
> rear-side would have hit the curb practically instantaneously. Look at
> Lawrence Summers.
>
> It's our own fault that this is happening. Foreign authors have to
> prove to *us* about their capability. The sorry state of affairs is
> *we try to prove to foreign authors* that we also know about India!
> IMO, foreign authors have to prove to us why their conception of
> philosophy is better than us. Someone pointed out Sanskrit as a
> foreign language. Does the good professor in UT Austin know that
> Panini was smack in the Indian sub-continent when he wrote his
> suutras? Why not take a step back and say everything is from Africa,
> since Lucy is from Africa? But our good professors of European origin
> wouldn't want to do that, would they?
>
> The problem is the lack of self-respect we have. Will any Tibetan
> Buddhist scholar dare to say nothing is from Tibet, everything is
> actually from India? Not really, we wouldn't want to annoy Richard
> Gere would we?
>
> Rama
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