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Posts tagged ‘Hinduism’

Oct 19

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One Have Been Made Two

From Book One of The Mahābhārata and for fathers everywhere.

“A son, the wise say, is the man himself born from himself; therefore a man will look upon the mother of his son as his own mother. The son born from his wife is as a man’s face in a mirror; and looking at him brings as much joy to a father as finding heaven brings to a saint. Men, burned by the sorrows of their hearts and sickly with disease, rejoice in their wives, as overheated people do in water. No matter how aggravated, a man should say no unkind things to his loving women, for in them he sees contingent his love, his joy, and his merit. Women are forever one’s sacred field of birth – are even the seers able to have children without one? A son stumbles and covered with dirt embraces his father – is there joy beyond that?

“And you, why do reject frowningly a son who of his own accord has come to you and fondly looks at you? Ants carry their own eggs and never break them – you, so wise in the Law, won’t keep your son? Neither clothes nor loving women nor water are so good to touch as the infant son you embrace. Of two-footed men the Brahmin is best; of four-footed beasts the cow is worthiest; of respected men the guru is first; and of all things to touch a son is the choicest. Embrace and touch your handsome son! There is no feeling on earth lovelier than to feel a son. For three full years I have borne this son, lord of kinds, for him to kill your grief. When I was giving birth to him a voice came from the sky saying, Oh Paurava ‘He shall be the offerer of a hundred Horse Sacrifices.’

“Do not men who had gone to another village take their sons lovingly on the laps and kiss their heads and feel happy? From the Vedas themselves, as you too know, the twiceborn recite these verses at the birth ceremony of their sons, ‘From each limb hast thou come forth, thou art born from my heart, thou art myself with the name of son, live thou a hundred autumns! For my nourishment lies with thee, and my eternal lineage – therefore live thou, my son, in all happiness for a hundred autumns!’ He has been born from your limbs, one man from another: look on my son as your other self, as your reflection seen in a clear pond. Just as the ahavaniya fire is carried away from the garhapatya hearth, so he is born from you, and you, being one, have been made two.

Sep 20

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Varanasi, Banaras, Kashi, and Ganga

After reading and wondering about India my whole life, I’m finally going. I will be there for about 3 weeks. My main destination is Varanasi and the many small villages between there and Delhi. Though I’ve tried to learn a bit of the impenetrable Hindi language I am lucky that most Indians speak English. So, even if I get completely lost perhaps I will be able to get back on course with some help.

Friends (especially my Indian friends) always ask: Why India? There are so many other great places on the planet to go. From what I’ve learned so far, India is just about as different from America or Europe as you can get. If there is a spiritual axis that the world spins on, its center is India. In some places, little has changed since the days of the Mahabharata 6,000 years ago. No doubt sometimes it will be tiring, annoying, miserable, disgusting, and heart wrenching but it will be different. Different is what I’m always looking for.

Here is a summary of Varanasi from Wikipedia:

According to legend, the city was founded by the Hindu deity, Lord Shiva, around 5,000 years ago, thus making it one of the most important pilgrimage destinations in the country. It is one of the seven sacred cities of Hindus. Many Hindu scriptures, including the Rig Veda, Skanda Purana, Ramayana, and the Mahabharata, mention the city. Varanasi is generally believed to be about 3,000 years old.

Why the fascination with the Hindu religion? Of all of the world’s mythologies, Hinduism is by far the most expansive, creative, and strangely accurate in describing the universe. Hinduism is less about humans and more about the universe – it’s not a personalized religion like Islam or Christianity. There is something sublime about a religion that understands that humanity is not the culmination of creation but only a small part of something much more amazing. It’s what amazed Carl Sagan about Hindu cosmology and it’s what amazes me, as well.

Why learn Hindi? Sanskrit? As Joseph Campbell said, “Sanskrit is the world’s great spiritual language.” Sanskrit shares a common ancestor with Latin. Linguists are still stumped on what that common, parent language was but the syntax of Latin and Sanskrit are so striking that it has become a race among linguists to uncover the this “mother” language. Hindi is distant offspring of Sanskrit. They both use an almost identical Devanagari alphabet. India is broken up in two linguistic regions: Devanagari and Dravidian. If you are really interested there are thousands of excellent papers out there exploring these connections. As an interesting side-note, there is a tradition that has Jesus spending his formative years in India – the so call “missing years”. Interestingly, linguists believe there is a strong connection between Brahmi (the origin of Devanagari) and Aramaic (the language that Jesus spoke). That sounds like a pretty exciting reason to me.

I will post pictures and journal during the trip. I will be leaving Dec 29. And for those that don’t believe I’ll dunk myself in the Ganges, I’ll take pictures. Wish me luck.

Nov 3

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Fall ’08 Reading List

I’ve compiled quite a list for the rest of this year. I’ve actually finished a few of these but I wanted to write them down so that I can keep the list up to date. Not that anyone really cares what I’m reading, but I go back to these lists to find conscious and unconscious themes in my interests. I’m still tackling a lot of religious themes and also took a detour last month to read a few books by Barack Obama.

I also decided to read Mahabharata from beginning to end. I’ve read a greatly abridged version but the full version will probably take 2 years to finish. The unabridged translation of the Mahabharata contains 74,000 verses, long prose passages, and about 1.8 million words in total. Put another way, it is roughly ten times the size of the Iliad and Odyssey combined. It’s going to take me a while. I’ve also being pulled back into physics and I have picked up a few new interesting books. Of course, I’m still making an unsuccessful effort to learn Hindi – and, as always, I am re-reading some old favorites like Catcher and Pale Blue Dot. Anyway, this is the list.

I’m also going to try to get through a few Teaching Company courses by the end of the year:

Aug 23

Gandhi on God (1931)

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Nov 16

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Hindu Holiday Calendar

I missed Diwali this year so I hunted around the internet looking for an .ics or .vcs file that I could import into my Outlook calendar. I couldn’t find any and the default holiday tool that comes with Outlook 2007 doesn’t include any Hindu holidays either. So, I made one for 2008 – 2009 (based on the dates from here) if you want to download it. It includes most of the major celebrations:

Update (9/22/2008): I’ve updated the .ics file. You can grab it here. The new file includes the remaining holidays for this year through the end of 2011. So, 2008 – 2011.

hindu-holidays-calendar.zip

Sep 12

Some Sheldrake Stuff

It’s interesting that the deeper I dive into ancient Hinduism, the closer I come to the same view that Sheldrake expresses in his first book, A New Science of Life. Most people don’t know this, but Rupert has a copy of the original manuscript he submitted for publication. It was reject as far to mystical and far reaching in its scope. A revised, toned down version was eventual sent to press. That’s the version I want to read. He wrote the book while living in an ashram in Hyderabad, India where perspective on the universe is a little different that in downtown London. He’s promised to dig up this version for me someday when he finds it.
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Aug 20

Sheldrake at the Temple in Thanjavur

Not that I am trying to establish any spiritual or epistemological ancestry in my view of the world … but here is another hero/friend of mine at the Shiva Temple in Thanjavur. You may not know that from 1974 to 1985 Dr. Sheldrake worked at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad, India. While in India, he also lived for a year and a half at the ashram of Fr Bede Griffiths in Tamil Nadu, where he wrote his first book, A New Science of Life. Interesting how the ley lines of our life intersect at the most unusual spaces.

Aug 17

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Carl Sagan on Hinduism

I’ve written before about how influential Carl Sagan was in my childhood. Not only his views of science and philosophy but also his views on religion. My interest in Hinduism goes far back into my elementary school years when I discovered that there was a religion that had such a enormous vision of cosmos.

I had to find out more. Rather than the universe being only a few thousand years old (as I had learned in church), Hindus believed that the universe was billions and billions of years old – and that there were an infinite number of universes previous to this one! That was a view of the world that truly encompassed the scale of a divine creator; not a small god that had only been around for a few years, interested only in the affairs of a few, special people on one small planet. I had discovered that there was another way of thinking.

It was Carl Sagan that helped me first awaken that sense of complete awe at the scale of universe. Though Sagan was an agnostic, I get the feeling if he were to have chosen a religion, Hinduism would have been it. Here is the clip from Cosmos that I saw when I was a kid. His sense of child-like wonder and fascination is as infectious today as it was then. Enjoy!

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