Vedanta Quotes
The Mahomedan or Islamic culture hardly gave anything to the world which may be said to be of fundamental importance and typically its own; Islamic culture was mainly borrowed from others. Their mathematics and astronomy and other subjects were derived from India and Greece. It is true they gave some of these things a new turn, but they have not created much. Their philosophy and their religion are very simple and what they call Sufism is largely the result of gnostics who lived in Persia and it is the logical outcome of that school of thought largely touched by Vedanta.... I have, however, mentioned [in The Foundations of Indian Culture] that Islamic culture contributed the Indo-Saracenic architecture to Indian culture. I do not think it has done anything more in India of cultural value. It gave some new forms to art and poetry. Its political institutions were always semi-barbaric.
Sri Aurobindo
When I approached God at that time, I hardly had a living faith in Him. The agnostic was in me, the atheist was in me, the sceptic was in me and I was not absolutely sure that there was a God at all. I did not feel His presence. Yet something drew me to the truth of the Vedas, the truth of the Gita, the truth of the Hindu religion. I felt there must be a mighty truth somewhere in this Yoga, a mighty truth in this religion based on the Vedanta.
Sri Aurobindo
So, too, in the Vedanta the whole world is seen as the lila and the maya of the Self, the first word meaning "play" and the second having the complex sense of illusion (from the Latin ludere, to play), magic, creative power, art, and measuring-as when one dances or draws a design to a certain measure. From this point of view the universe in general and playing in particular are, in a special sense, "meaningless": that is, they do not-like words and symbols-signify or point to something beyond themselves, just as a Mozart sonata conveys no moral or social message and does not try to suggest the natural sounds of wind, thunder, or birdsong.
Alan Watts
If we look deeply into such ways of life as Buddhism and Taoism, Vedanta and Yoga, we do not find either philosophy or religion as these are understood in the West. We find something more nearly resembling psychotherapy. ... The main resemblance between these Eastern ways of life and Western psychotherapy is in the concern of both with bringing about changes of consciousness, changes in our ways of feeling our own existence and our relation to human society and the natural world. The psychotherapist has, for the most part, been interested in changing the consciousness of peculiarly disturbed individuals. The disciplines of Buddhism and Taoism are, however, concerned with changing the consciousness of normal, socially adjusted people.
Alan Watts
The tradition in Hinduism is that it is not open to any Hindu, whatever be the name and mental image of the Supreme Being he uses for his devotional exercises, to deny the existence of God that others worship. He can raise the name of his choice to that of the highest, but he can not deny the divinity or the truth of the God of other denominations. The fervor of his own piety just gives predominance to the name and form he gives for his own worship and contemplation, and he treats the other gods as deriving the divinity therefrom. This reduces all controversy to a devotional technique of concentration on a peculiar name and mental form or concrete symbol as representing the supreme being. It makes no difference in the contents of Vedanta to which all devotees equally subscribe... ‘just as all water raining from the skies goes to the ocean, worship of all gods go to Keshava.'
C. Rajagopalachari
No one ever landed on English soil with more hatred in his heart for a race than I did for the English, and, on this platform, are present English friends who can bear witness to the fact, but the more I lived among them, saw how the machine is working, the English national life, mixed with them, found where the heart-beat of the nation was, the more I loved them. There is none among you here present, my brothers, who loves the English people more than I do. You have to see what is going on there, and you have to mix with them. As the philosophy, our national philosophy of the Vedanta, has summarised all misfortune, all misery from that one cause, ignorance, herein also we must understand that the difficulties that arise between us and the English people are mostly due to that ignorance; we do not know them, they do not know us.
Swami Vivekananda
Men, unacquainted with Vedanta, do not see that all things and all individual selves have Brahman as their self. They think that all terms exhaust their significance by signifying the various objects by themselves, which objects are in reality a part and not the whole of the meaning of terms. Now by the study of Vedanta, they understand that all such objects are the effects of Brahman, that Brahman is the inner ruler of them all and that they are animated by Brahman as their very soul. Therefore they come to understand that all terms signify Brahman itself having as its modes the entities, to which latter alone the terms are applied in common usage.
Ramanuja
Sri Aurobindo, for one, insisted on the radically different spirit in Sikhism as compared with Islam: 'Those ways of Indian cult which most resemble a popular form of Theism, are still something more; for they do not exclude, but admit the many aspects of God. (...) The later religious forms which most felt the impress of the Islamic idea, like Nanak's worship of the timeless One, Akla, and the reforming creeds of today, born under the influence of the West, yet draw away from the limitations of western or Semitic monotheism. Irresistibly they turn from these infantile conceptions towards the fathomless truth of Vedanta.
Koenraad Elst
As the philosophy, our national philosophy of the Vedanta, has summarised all misfortune, all misery from that one cause, ignorance, herein also we must understand that the difficulties that arise between us and the English people are mostly due to that ignorance; we do not know them, they do not know us.
Swami Vivekananda
From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low ideas of idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of the Buddhists and the atheism of the Jains, each and all have a place in the Hindu's religion.
Swami Vivekananda
But it is quite easy to express the solution in words, thus: the plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real. Vedantic philosophy, in which this is a fundamental dogma, has sought to clarify it by a number of analogies, one of the most attractive being the many-faceted crystal which, while showing hundreds of little pictures of what is in reality a single existent object, does not really multiply the object...
'You may suddenly come to see, in a flash, the profound rightness of the basic conviction of Vedanta: ... knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sentient beings.'
Erwin Schrödinger
