How Vedic Are We Today

 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chauvinism No Answer To Hindutva

Outlook Magzine Latest Issue P.A. Krishnan UPDATED: 29 OCT 2022 7:12 PM What indeed was the religion of the Tamil land during Rajaraja’s days, which were in the 10th and 11th centuries of the Common Era? What was its religion in earlier times, say, in the early centuries of the Common Era? The answers to these questions are easily available to all those who care to read some basic history books, written by real scholars. But Tamil Nadu is a strange place. In the popular imagination, its history is conjured, right out of thin air, by scores of regional and linguistic chauvinists.  But in the jejune world of media, chauvinism is often mistaken for serious scholarship and most in the media unerringly choose those who often make spectacular statements about the antiquity and the uniqueness of Tamil. Since these statements give Tamil a high, unapproachable and hoary pedestal, they are seldom questioned. Religion in the Sangam period Without doubt, Tamil is an ancient language with an enviab
Read more

Different Images of Buddha

Listening to the Buddha’s hands | Published on 31st December, 2017, in Mid-day | Devdutt Pattanaik In the early days of Buddhism, Buddha was represented by a symbol: a footprint or a wheel or a pot or a tree. Later, less than 2,000 years ago, we see the earliest images of the Buddha in the Gandhara region (modern Pakistan and Afghanistan) as a Greek god. Simultaneously, Buddha images started appearing in the Gangetic plains around Mathura, where red stone was used. Unlike the Gandharan Buddha, where the shoulders were covered with cloth, in Mathura, the upper garment was draped only over the left shoulder, suggesting the influence of the Brahmin thread that hung over the left shoulder. In Mathura, Buddha was made to sit on a lotus, with a serpent behind him. Since then, Buddha images have been crafted around the world, from Central Asia to China, to South East Asia. While, to the untrained eye, all Buddha images look similar, with languid eyes and long ears, a sensitive eye w
Read more

Patanjali ‘s Mindfulness- The 7 Steps to Self-Fullness: by Raghu Ananthanarayanan

Who centres the universal wheel? How may we touch this centre in our selves? The divine manifests itself in order and rhythm, we touch the divine when we experience order within. How do we learn to live with order and rhythm so that the divine may manifest itself in our lives? These are great questions to ponder over.  Patanjali says that we can live our life in a way that enables us to embody the answers to these questions. This is the Yogic quest. Patanjali sets out for us a set of practices through which we can transform our everyday life into one that is full of truth and beauty. These practices start from mindfulness directed to our everyday interactions. They move through stages, each of which becomes firm ground from which we can ascend to the next step. Each step is a deepening and strengthening of the mindfulness practice. The practise becomes a way of life, and this constancy of mindfulness prepares our psyche to invite the transcendent Self to shine thr
Read more