Should we not know the significance of Indian philosophies in the words of western scholars ? —-
Albert Einstein
“We owe a lot to Indians who taught us how to count, without which
no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made.”
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
“Land of religions, cradle of human race, birthplace of human speech, grandmother of legend, great grandmother of tradition. The land that men with intellectual bent desire to see and having seen once even by a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of the rest of the globe combined.”
Julius Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) One of the world’s greatest physicists, known as “the father of the atomic bomb”
“Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.”
——– T. S. Eliot
” Indian philosophers’ subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys.”
George Bernard Shaw, (1856-1950) Dramatist, Nobel Laureate in Literature
“The Indian way of life provides the vision of the natural, real way of life. We western veil ourselves with unnatural masks. On the face of India are the tender expressions which carry the mark of the Creators hand.”
H. G. Wells (1866-1946), English author and political philosopher
There is space in its philosophy for everyone,
which is one reason why India is a home to every single religion in the world.
Sir William Jones, English philologist
“Wherever we direct our attention to Hindu literature, the notion of infinity presents itself.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) American author, essayist, lecturer, philosopher, Unitarian minister
“I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad-Gita. It was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us.”
•
• Andrew Tomas (1906- 2001) an Australian UFO pioneer, author of several physics, astronomy and spiritual books
The atomic structure of matter is mentioned in the Hindu treatises Vaisesika and Nyaya. The Yoga Vasishta says: —– there are vast worlds within the hollows of each atom, multifarious as the specks in a sunbeam —– which we have now assumed as true.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), great German philosopher and writer
“In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life; and it will be the solace of my death. They are the product of the highest wisdom.”
Francois Marie Voltaire (1694-1774) France’s greatest writers and philosophers
” I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganga — astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc.”
” It is very important to note that some 2,500 years ago at the least Pythagoras went from Samos to the Ganga (Ganges) to learn geometry…But he would certainly not have undertaken such a strange journey had the reputation of the Brahmins’ science not been long established in Europe…”
Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), great German philosopher
“India has created a special momentum in world history as a country to be searched for knowledge.”
Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), great German philosopher
“It strikes everyone in beginning to form an acquaintance with the treasures of Indian literature, that a land so rich in intellectual products and those of the profoundest order of thought…”
Roger-Pol Droit French philosopher, and Le Monde journalist,
“The Greeks loved so much Indian philosophy that Demetrios Galianos had even translated the Bhagavad-Gita”. There is absolutely not a shadow of a doubt that the Greeks knew all about Indian philosophy.”
Frederich von Schlegel, (1772-1829), German philosopher, critic, and writer, the most prominent founder of German Romanticism
“There is no language in the world, even Greek, which has the clarity and the philosophical precision of Sanskrit,” adding that ” India is not only at the origin of everything she is superior in everything, intellectually, religiously or politically and even the Greek heritage seems pale in comparison.”
—– Voltaire, (1694-1774), France’s greatest writers and philosophers
“the Veda was the most precious gift for which the West had ever been indebted to the East.”
Alfred North Whitehead, British Mathematician
The vastest knowledge of today cannot transcend the buddhi of the Rishis in ancient India; and science, in its most advanced stage now, is closer to Vedanta than ever before.
Dr. Fritjof Capra, American physicist
To the Indian Rishis the divine play was the evolution of the cosmos through countless aeons. There is an infinite number of creations in an infinite universe. The Rishis gave the name kalpa to the unimaginable span of time between the beginning and the end of creation.
Herman Hesse (1877-1962) German poet and novelist, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946 says:
“The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life’s wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion.”
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), American Philosopher, writer, Unitarian, social critic, transcendentalist:
“In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny.”
•
•
• John Archibald Wheeler, (1911 - 2008) American physicist, the first involved in the theoretical development of the atomic bomb and first to coin the ‘Black Hole’ who later occupies the chair that was held by Einstein.
It is curious that people like Schroedinger, Niels Bohr, and Oppenheimer were Upanishad scholars.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox, (1850-1919) famous American poetess and journalist
” India - the land of Vedas, the remarkable works contains not only religious ideas for a perfect life, but also facts which science has proved true. Electricity, radium, electronics, airship, all are known to the seers who founded the Veda.
Hans Torwesten, German philosopher and writer
The Vedas and the Upanishads are India’s proudest and most ancient possessions. They are the world’s oldest intellectual legacies. They are the only composition in the universe invested with Divine origin, and almost Divine sanctity. They are said to emanate from God, and are held to be the means for attaining God. Their beginnings are not known. They have been heirlooms of the Hindus from generation to generation from time immemorial.
Professor F. Max Muller, German philosopher , philologist
“The Vedic literature opens to us a chapter in what has been called the education of the human race, to which we can find no parallel anywhere else.”
Jean-Sylvain Bailly, great French Astronomer
“The motion of the stars calculated by the Hindus before some 4500 years vary not even a single minute from the tables of Cassine and Meyer (used in the 19-th century). “The Hindu systems of astronomy are by far the oldest and that from which the Egyptians, Greek, Romans and - even the Jews derived from the Hindus their knowledge.”
—— Aldous Huxley
“Hinduism, the perennial philosophy” that is at the core of all religions.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), German philosopher and writer
“How entirely does the Upanishad breathe throughout the holy spirit of the Vedas! How is every one, who by a diligent study of its Persian Latin has become familiar with that incomparable book, stirred by that spirit to the very depth of his Soul !”
Romain Rolland (1866-1944) French Nobel laureate, Historian
“Religious faith in the case of the Hindus has never been allowed to run counter to scientific laws, moreover the former is never made a condition for the knowledge they teach, but there are always scrupulously careful to take into consideration the possibility that by reason both the agnostic and atheist may attain truth in their own way. Such tolerance may be surprising to religious believers in the West, but it is an integral part of Vedantic belief.”
Julius Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) Nuclear physicist, philosopher, developer of the atomic bomb
“The Gita, the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.”
H. G. Wells (1866-1946), English author and political philosopher
Hinduism is synonymous with humanism. That is its essence and its great liberating quality.”
Lord Curzon (1859-1925) British statesman, Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905, and later became chancellor of Oxford University
” India has left a deeper mark upon the history, the philosophy, and the religion of mankind,
than any other terrestrial unit in the universe.”
William Butler Yeats (1856-1939) Irish poet, dramatist, and essayist and Nobel Laureate
“It was only my first meeting with the Indian philosophy that confirmed my
vague speculations and seemed at once logical and boundless.”
Mark Tully former BBC correspondent in India, author
But I do profoundly believe that India needs to be able to say with pride,
“Yes, our civilization has a Hindu base to it.”
Paul William Roberts Professor at Oxford , award-winning television writer, producer, journalist, critic and novelist.
“India is the only country that feels like home to me,
the only country whose airport tarmac I have ever kissed upon landing.”
Pierre Simon de Laplace ( 1749-1827) French mathematician, philosopher, and astronomer, a contemporary of Napoleon. Laplace is best known for his nebular hypothesis of the origin of the solar system.
” It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by ten symbols, each receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value, a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity, the great ease which it has lent to all computations, puts our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions, and we shall appreciate the grandeur of this achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Appollnius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.”
Why as yet our Indian academicians have not incorporated the these secular thoughts into the academic curriculum ? Is speaking truths about the mother land a treachery and unethical?
Could you put your efforts such that these thoughts are taught in all the academic institutions ? Your efforts in this direction will be nothing but a great tribute to this ancient land of knowledge and spiritualism.
AJAY CHOWDARY KANDULA
INDIA
Email: mailajayck@gmail.com
+91-9860783217
