Path of devotion
The Hindu
The Bhagavad Gita teaches both meditation on the formless
Absolute (Nirgun Brahman) and worship of the Supreme Being
with form (Sagun Brahman) for the benefit of different
levels of seekers. As it is human nature to always draw
comparisons, Arjuna wanted to know which of the two was
superior to find out which he ought to follow. Lord
Krishna, who had decided that Saguna worship was suitable
for him, started elaborating on the path of devotion to
inspire him to adopt it.
In his discourse, Shri N. Veezhinathan said it was to
emphasise the fact that all seekers could not at the outset
contemplate on the Absolute that Krishna stated that
devotion to God was superior of the two. Krshn told Arjuna,
"Those I consider as the most perfect in Yog, who, with
their minds fixed intently on Me in steadfast love, worship
Me with absolute faith." Why is the Lord glorifying
devotion? Madhusoodan Saraswati provides insight into how
devotion enables the mind to dwell on the Lord without
difficulty by giving the example of sealing wax. When
vermillion colour is added to molten wax it retains the
colour even after it solidifies. Similarly, the mind that
melts in loving devotion to God is transformed forever. The
objective of spiritual practice being purification of the
mind, devotion achieves it without much effort on the part
of the devotee.
Having said that, the Lord immediately endorsed that one
who meditated on the Absolute reached Him without fail
drawing attention to the fact that this required restraint
of all the senses, equanimity of mind and the intent of the
welfare of all beings always. This path is certainly higher
and it is obvious that only a few would qualify for this.
What is the difference between the two then? Strain indeed.
For those who are attached to the body, it is difficult for
their mind to become centred on the Absolute. Even with
restraint the mind will easily succumb to ego and
attachment due to the imprint of the latent tendencies it
has acquired from earlier births.
Is there difference in the end then? While liberation is
here and now in Nirguna worship, by following the path of
devotion to God the devotee reaches the divine abode and
through His grace is liberated.
More at:
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TRIBUTES TO HINDUISM
1. Mahatma Gandhi:
"Hinduism has made marvelous discoveries in things of
religion, of the spirit, of the soul. We have no eye for
these great and fine discoveries. We are dazzled by the
material progress that western science has made. Ancient
India has survived because Hinduism was not developed
along material but spiritual lines.
"India is to me the dearest country in the world, because
I have discovered goodness in it. It has been subject to
foreign rule, it is true. But the status of a slave is
preferable to that of a slave holder."
2. Henry David Thoreau:
"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.
"What extracts from the Vedas I have read fall on me like
the light of a higher and purer luminary, which describes
a loftier course through purer stratum. It rises on me
like the full moon after the stars have come out, wading
through some far stratum in the sky."
3. Arthur Schopenhauer:
"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 — it will be the solace of my death."
4. Ralph Waldo Emerson said this about the Gita:
"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."
The famous poem "Brahm" is an example of his Vedanta
ecstasy.
5. Wilhelm von Humboldt pronounced the Gita as:
"The most beautiful, perhaps the only true philosophical
song existing in any known tongue … perhaps the deepest
and loftiest thing the world has to show."
6. Lord Warren Hastings, the Governor General, was very
much impressed with Hindu philosophy:
"The writers of the Indian philosophies will survive,
when the British dominion in India shall long have ceased
to exist, and when the sources which it yielded of wealth
and power are lost to remembrances."
7. Mark Twain:
"So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left
undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most
extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds.
Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked.
"Land of religions, cradle of human race, birthplace of
human speech, grandmother of legend, great grandmother of
tradition. The land that all men 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."
8. Rudyard Kipling to Fundamental Christian Missionaries:
"Now it is not good for the Christian’s health to hustle
the Hindu brown for the Christian riles and the Hindu
smiles and weareth the Christian down; and the end of the
fight is a tombstone while with the name of the late
deceased and the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here who
tried to hustle the east".
9. Jules Michelet, a French historian, said:
"At its starting point in India, the birthplace of races
and religions, the womb of the world." This is what he
said of the Raamyana in 1864: "Whoever has done or willed
too much let him drink from this deep cup a long draught
of life and youth .. . Everything is narrow in the West –
– Greece is small and I stifle; Judea is dry and I pant.
Let me look toward lofty Asia, and the profound East for
a little while. There lies my great poem, as vast as the
Indian ocean, blessed, gilded with the sun, the book of
divine harmony wherein is no dissonance. A serene peace
reigns there, and in the midst of conflict an infinite
sweetness, a boundless fraternity, which spreads over all
living things, an ocean (without bottom or bound) of
love, of pity, of clemency."
10. Shri Aurobindo:
"Hinduism…..gave itself no name, because it set itself
no sectarian limits; it claimed no universal adhesion,
asserted no sole infallible dogma, set up no single
narrow path or gate of salvation; it was less a creed or
cult than a continuously enlarging tradition of the
Godward endeavor of the human spirit. An immense many-
sided and many staged provision for a spiritual self-
building and self-finding, it had some right to speak of
itself by the only name it knew, the eternal religion,
sanaatan dharm…."
11. Will Durant would like the West to learn from India,
tolerance and gentleness and love for all living things:
"Perhaps in return for conquest, arrogance and
spoliation, India will teach us the tolerance and
gentleness of the mature mind, the quiet content of the
unacquisitive soul, the calm of the understanding spirit,
and a unifying, a pacifying love for all living things."
12. Joseph Campbell:
"It is ironic that our great western civilization, which
has opened to the minds of all mankind the infinite
wonders of a universe of untold billions of galaxies
should be saddled with the tightest little cosmological
image known to mankind? The Hindus with their grandiose
Kalpas and their ideas of the divine power which is
beyond all human category (male or female). Not so alien
to the imagery of modern science that it could not have
been put to acceptable use.
"There is an important difference between the Hindu and
the Western ideas. In the Biblical tradition, God creates
man, but man cannot say that he is divine in the same
sense that the Creator is, where as in Hinduism, all
things are incarnations of that power. We are the sparks
from a single fire. And we are all fire. Hinduism
believes in the omnipresence of the Supreme God in every
individual. There is no ‘fall’. Man is not cut off from
the divine. He requires only to bring the spontaneous
activity of his mind stuff to a state of stillness and he
will experience that divine principle with him."
13. Sir Monier-Williams:
The Hindus, according to him, were Spinozists more than
2,000 years before the advent of Spinoza, and Darwinians
many centuries before Darwin and Evolutionists many
centuries before the doctrine of Evolution was accepted
by scientists of the present age.
14. Carl Sagan, (the late scientist), asserts that the
dance of Nataraj signifies the cycle of evolution and
destruction of the cosmic universe (Big Bang Theory). "It
is the clearest image of the activity of God which any
art or religion can boast of."
15. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, a professor of Eastern
Religions at Oxford and later President of India:
"Hinduism is not just a faith. It is the union of reason
and intuition that cannot be defined but is only to be
experienced. Evil and error are not ultimate. There is no
Hell, for that means there is a place where God is not,
and there are sins which exceed his love."
Jai Maharaj
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Om Shanti
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Hindu life, principles, spirituality and philosophy
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