© 1998 VNN
| USA November 14, 1998 VNN2502 Dharma Journal - November 13, 1998 BY FRANK MORALE USA, Nov 14 (VNN) — The Electronic Newsletter of the Sanatana Dharma Student Association (The Hindu student and faculty organization of the University of Wisconsin) *** If we have injured space, the earth or heaven, or if we have offended mother or father, from that may Agni, fire of the house, absolve us and guide us safely to the world of goodness. Atharva Veda Samhita 6.120.1. Vedic Experience, pg. 636 *** Announcements and News 1) Yoga class. Beginning on Thursday, December 3rd, the SDSA will be offering a free Yoga class. It will take place every Thursday at 7:00 in Union South. Call Laura (608) 288-0266. 2) Pizza Party!!. There will be a free pizza and bowling party next Thursday, November 19th at 6:00 in the basement of Union South. All are invited! Call Sumit 256-2855. 3) Hindu Temple Dinner. On October 18th, Frank Morales, the Advisor of the Sanatana Dharma Student Association, gave the keynote speech at a fundraising dinner for the Hindu Temple of Wisconsin. Over $400,000 was raised for the temple (currently under construction just outside Milwaukee) during the event . For information about how you can help build this temple - the first Hindu temple to be built in the state of Wisconsin - please call: Dr. Kumar Iyer (414) 785-0187. 4) Dharma Darshan. Close to 400 people have seen our Dharma Darshan web site since its birth a month ago. Please consider including our site on your links page: http://www.sit.wisc.edu/~fmorale1/index.htm *** Feature Article An India Without Saraswati and Dharma By Dr. David Frawley (Nov. 1, 1998) India, a so-called secular country but Hindu majority in religion, was the first to ban Salmon Rushdie's Satanic Verses. In fact Rushdie was a citizen of India. It has since banned more books for offending minority religious sentiments, though not for offending majority religious beliefs. Recently a cry of protest has gone up from around the country against the new so-called Hindu nationalist government for daring to perform Saraswati vandana, a song in praise of Saraswati, the Hindu Goddess of wisdom, to open a state function. That such chants have routinely occurred at various government and educational functions for decades is forgotten. The real problem seems to be the Hindu government that is doing it, not what is actually done. Since it was done by a Hindu leaning government it must now become objectionable as a form of religious propaganda. Saraswati vandana is a beautiful poem to art, culture and spirituality. It is a praise of learning not the promotion of any church or prophet. There is in it no insistence on any one God, book or savior, salvation for the true believers and eternal damnation for those who think differently. The song projects lofty human ideals and nothing of religious sectarianism or exclusivism. But such a Saraswati must be suspect in modern India. The cry against Saraswati is led being led by Sonia Gandhi, the last Gandhi one could say, an Italian Catholic who has received the Gandhian mantle by widowhood alone. Sonia should remember the example of Mahatma Gandhi who regularly conducted prayer meetings, praised the Bhagavad Gita and chanted the name of Rama. Though closely associated with the Catholic church, which by its own account is still the only true religion and has an agenda to convert Hindu India to Catholicism, she finds the more liberal expressions of Saraswati vandana to be offensive. Had the Hindu government used a statement of Mother Theresa, whose recent funeral received much state and media attention, it is doubtful she would have complained about the government mixing religion with politics. The anti-Saraswati tirade is naturally promoted by the atheist and communist left, which still rules the state governments of Bengal and Kerala. India's communists, uniquely backward of all in the world, still honor Stalin and Mao, whose pictures adorn all their functions. They routinely preach against Hindu intolerance, oblivious to the fact that their standard bearers are among the most brutal tyrants of history responsible for the murder of tens of millions of people. Such politicians obviously don't have any respect for Dharma or for the Indic spiritual traditions. They are also against the Dalai Lama and the cause of Tibet and go out of their way not only to defend, but to praise the Chinese action in the region, in spite of its genocidal nature. Their hearts are not in India but in the Moscow and Beijing of previous decades! In fact Dharma is another term that is becoming an anathema in modern India. Dharma refers to the yogic traditions of meditation and living in harmony with cosmic law that prevail in the Indic systems of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, which incidentally all honor the Goddess Saraswati. Indian secularists are afraid that Hindus might impose Dharma on the country and bring back some Dharma Shastra or Dharmic law book to guide the land. For them Dharma means some sort of Hindu religious fundamentalism and sectarianism. That no Hindu group wants to resurrect such medieval law codes is totally ignored. The same leftist groups do not protest against the Sharia or Islamic law that is in effect in most Islamic countries starting with Pakistan and extending to Iran, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. The Sharia includes anti-blasphemy laws that make it a capital crime to criticize Mohammed or the Koran and anti-apostasy laws that make it a capital crime for Muslims to convert to another religion. It makes the testimony of one man equal that of two women. In fact Indian Marxists go out of their way to appear with Islamic leaders and praise Islamic law as liberal. Leftist historians meanwhile pretend that Hindus and Muslims have always gotten along well in India, that only the British divided them, and now Hindu nationalists are separating them again. That such a view totally ignores the creation of Pakistan seems lost on these myopic thinkers. The very textbooks of Pakistan laud the Islamic conquest of India as a religious war and their country was created because Muslims felt they could not live under a heathen Hindu majority government even if it was secular. Pakistan praises Islamic tyrants from Mahmud Ghaznavi, who destroyed the Somnath temple, to Aurangzeb, who destroyed hundreds of Hindu temples including Kashi Vishvanath and Krishnajanma Bhoomi, as religious heroes. It names missiles after them as Ghouri and Ghaznavi! Yet Indian leftists would make such rulers secular and turn any attempt to see them as promoting a religious agenda as Hindu fundamentalist propaganda! These leftists will not criticize Islamic terrorism either, nor the Islamic partition of other countries throughout the world, but for them Saraswati is something really dangerous. The leftists are similarly afraid of the educational agenda of the new government, which wants to promote Sanskrit and teach about the older cultural and spiritual traditions of the country. Such Sanskrit texts as the Vedas, Upanishads and Puranas are invaluable documents of history, culture, science and philosophy and are not religious tracts promoting conversion to a particular dogma or any single true faith. But the leftists would have no real study of them as part of the history of the country. What they are really afraid of is that their own propaganda about history might be questioned in the process. Textbooks on communist Bengal, for example, still laud the Russian Revolution as the greatest event in the history of the world, in spite of the fact that Russia is no longer communist, which they in their typical blindness fail to recognize as having occurred. The leftist agenda in India has always been clear, if we would but look at it. Indian communists want to first eliminate the majority religion of the country, which is Hinduism, before tackling the minority religions, which are not only less of a threat to them but can be an ally in this effort. Of course, once they have done away with Hinduism, they would probably target the other religions as well. Chinese communists similarly targeted Chinese majority religions of Buddhism and Taoism and heaped a similar scorn upon them. An India without Saraswati and against Dharma is what these people seek. This would be an India without any respect for its older spiritual and cultural traditions and against the ethical ethos of the country. But that is not surprising. The leftists have always wanted to divide India further into various small states, so that they could end up with one of them. Christian missionary groups have also sought to partition India, just as the Muslims did, to end up with a Christian majority country somewhere for them to rule, which is what they are attempting in the northeast of the country. Since the partition of India the Hindus have been eliminated almost entirely from Pakistan and have been marginalized in Bangladesh. They are in retreat in parts of India itself like Kashmir or the northeast. Yet the leftists of India would make it appear that the minorities of India are in danger from an expanding Hindu majority! Clearly an India without Saraswati and without Dharma is no India. It is not the India of Rama, Krishna, Buddha or Mahavira, of the Vedas, Upanishads or Buddhist Sutras. It is not an India that would provide refuge for the Tibetans. The West meanwhile is looking to the Dharmic traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism to provide a spiritual alternative to modern materialist culture. If so-called Indian secularists have their way, those traditions would be no more and India great gift to the world would be eliminated. What they want is a new India without Saraswati or Dharma. *** Article II Mythology as Weapon By Frank Morales The related terms "myth", "mythology", "mythological", etc., have had an interesting history and a very pointed polemic use. That the terms are rife with very negative connotations is doubted by very few. The way the terms are used today both within academia, as well as by the general public, is to denote something which is untrue, false, "primitive" (i.e., not European), a lie. Just the other day during a visit to the dentist's office, I saw a pamphlet on the table called "The Myths About Sexually Transmitted Diseases". The ultimate question that we, as committed Hindus, all need to ask ourselves is do we really want such powerfully negative terms also associated with the sacred stories, teachings and history of Sanatana Dharma? Polemically speaking, one culture's "myth" is another culture's sacred history...and visa versa. The academic field of the study of "mythological" literature was started by 18th century European Classicists who took their misconceptions about their own Greco-Roman pre-Christian religious and cultural heritage and attempted to apply them to all contemporary non-Christian cultures - including that of Bharat. These founders of "mythological" studies were convinced, as is unarguably evident in their writings, that the realm of religious story could be clearly demarcated into two radically distinct camps: 1) "Myth", that is the primitive stories about gods, goddesses, spirits, demons, magic and mysticism etc. found throughout all of the indigenous and non-Biblical cultures of the world - all certainly no more than ignorant "pre-scientific" attempts by these heathen savages (THEIR words, not mine) to explain such mysteries as natural weather phenonema. 2) "History", that is Biblical literature and everything proceeding such literature to be found throughout the history of Europe and the post-Columbian Americas. There is the wonderful saying that we have all heard, that "history" is written by the victors. Consequently, the stories of Noah's Ark, Abraham, Moses, the Judges, David, etc. are unquestioningly accepted by most European historians - and sadly by many Hindu historians! - as being incontrovertible and established fact. This, even though the evidence for these supposed historical facts are in many cases no stronger, or even less so, than the evidence supporting the historicity of the ancient stories of Sanatana Dharma. What these Western scholars and their Westernized Indian counterparts called the "mythical" Sarasvati River, for example, was discovered to be a concrete geological fact in our century by satellite photography; Krishna's "mythical" city of Dvaraka was, likewise, discovered off the coast of Gujarat about two decades ago (anyone out there have a crane?). Despite these facts, the Puranas, Itihasas and traditional histories of Bharat, unlike the Biblical "myths", are relegated by modern Western scholars to the misty realm of "myth". Bluntly: primitive fables. If you've guessed that what has brought this situation about has been nothing less than European racism and intellectual colonialism, coupled with a strong element of Hindu inferiority complex, you've guessed right! The terms "myth", "mythology", "mythological", etc., have been used as a powerful weapon by anti-Hindu bigots for decades as way of delegitamizing Hindu beliefs and the Hindu way of life. Whether such unscholarly use of these otherwise legitimate terms will be allowed to continue as a weapon against Hinduism is up to each and every person presently reading this. Such terms should be absolutely anathema to every sincere and self-respecting Hindu when speaking about the sacred stories of Sanatana Dharma. Our stories are not "myths". If we truly respect our religion, our culture, our selves, we must never use these terms again. Rather, we should do what many other formally oppressed non-Christian cultures have recently done (such as many Native American tribes), and call these "Sacred Stories". We can later, as informed Hindus, debate over the meaning of these stories - whether they are literal history (which many very clearly are), or meant to be taken allegorically, or whatever. But, please, let us all agree not to ever degrade our Sacred Stories again by calling them "myth". *** Om Krishnaya *** Om Krishnaya *** Om Krishnaya *** Appeal As a Hindu student organization the primary function of which is educational, we need literature of any kind about Sanatana Dharma to share with our members and friends. If you have any books, magazines, pamphlets, C.D.s, cassettes, or anything at all - either new or used - that you can give us, please send them to: SDSA c/o Frank Morales 1128 Morraine View Drive, #305 Madison, WI 53719 Thank you! Frank Morales (Pranakrishnan Adhikari) - Editor/Advisor fmorale1@students.wisc.edu (608) 288-0266 http://www.sit.wisc.edu/~fmorale1/index.htm |
