Now the West want to know about the Hindu way of life, ancient Hindu art of living ,its wisdom and philosophy to enjoy a better future. It is not a wonder now that the West has of late become more curious and interested about our Vedic riches.
Hinduism is not just a religion; it is a scientific way of life. Supreme Court of India in one of its judgments has accepted this reality and ruled, “Hinduism is a way of life.” Echoing the same idea noted scholar of Hinduism and the author of Hindu-Joy of life, Utpal Kumar Banerjee says, “Hinduism is a philosophy, a way of life and its celebration. It is a religious and cultural tradition where the enormous variety of beliefs and practices can ultimately be interpreted as a common view of the world.”
There are number of phenomenon, which the world perceives as being uniquely Hindu, but which are far more wide spread world wide. The most notable example concerns a thirst quencher. Ancient Hindus used to store drinking water in brass vessel for good health has been now proved scientifically by researchers. Microbiologists say that water stored in brass containers can help combat many water borne disease……” 1 Rob Reed worked for this brass study and was quoted by the Nature Magazine. Reed is a microbiologist at North Umbria University in Newcastle and witnessed villagers and religious people in India storing water in brass vessels. He himself has now found that bacteria are less to thrive in water vessel.
Reed with his co-researchers Puja Tandon and Sanjay Chibber, carried out two series of experiments. They filled brass and earthenware vessels with a diluted culture of Escherichia coli bacteria, which can cause illnesses such as dysentery. Then they counted the surviving bacteria after 6, 24, and 48 hours. “the amount of live e-coil in the brass vessels dropped dramatically over time, and after 48 hours they fell to undetectable levels. “Reed told the society of General Microbiology’s meeting.
-2
Similarly two scientists from the National Environment Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) Nagpur, Dr. Hemant J. Purohit and Manish Kulkarni, have proved through their research that clove oil has a strong antibacterial agent that can purify foul smelling and alkaline well water into sweet water with positive mineral qualities. They have also received US (Patent number 6929810) on August 16, 2005 for their work. It is needless to say that clove is also used by the Hindus in their religious rituals.
‘Gaomutra’ a cow based product can be found in Japan, chilled half – little bottles of bovine under the label of Calpis Water. Gaomutra is widely used as a medicine in Ayurvedic products in India. Cow is worshiped as mother by Hindus for her protective and useful powers .Cows has got powers to communicate and understand .
3
Women in Islamic Saudi Arabia is now dressing up according to age old Hindu Wisdom. Burques made according to Ayurvedic way are very popular in Saudi Arabia. In Ayurveda, these fabrics are called Ayurvastra. Only natural cotton and colouring is used so that they are free of toxic irritants. These are also treated with medicinal herbs as prescribed by Ayurvedic texts to improve the heeling value”, says Rajan whose family has been in the trade for 600 years. Clinical researches at the Government Ayurveda College Hospital Thiruvananthapuram India proved that the fabric was quite effective in skin ailments and arthritis. Even the curtains, liner and mattresses, says Rajan, were made as prescribed in the ancient Indian treatise Charaka Samhita.
Indian Homeopathy medicines are only hope for the ailing astronauts going on the moon. Research’s done for the NASA’s mission ‘Return to the Moon’, it was found by the scientists that alopathy and any other medical system can not cure human beings on moon. Dr. Prateek Benerjee from Calcutta and Dr. Harsh Nigam from Kanpur have sent their packages and papers in this regard. ‘Return to the Mom’ is the dream project of American President George W .Bush. Designs for the colonies on the moon are ready but there is no medical system which can work on moon. Due to the difference in the gravitational force on moon and earth alopathy medicines will neither be dissolved nor absorbed in the human body. Moreover due to the presence of poisonous elements on moon, bio products in the medicines will be destroyed. Due to this reality a symposium was organized by NASA at Rutgurds University, New Brimswik, America, and they found suggestions of Dr. Prateek Benerjee and Dr. Harsh Nigam very useful.
4
Similarly in ancient India Jamun was used as a medicine to cure various diseases by Hindu Rishis. Now medical science has found that in the treatment of metabolic syndrome a capsule was made by Jamun which supplied Flavonwide which controls metabolic syndrome. This was founded by Dr. Priyadarshani Meer working as a research scientist in Rumenant Digestive Physiology, University of Kulvata, and Canada.
-5
Jennifer Daubewmiel of the University of California found that Yoga can be image booster for women, eliminate eating disorder and kept them in shape, reported Eurek Alert. Now Yoga is taking over botox business in America. Yoga and meditation can help brain train the attention. This was found by lead author Richard Davidson, Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, Madism, which was published in the on line edition of the journal Plos Biology.6 Ron Mangum, director of the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California Davis writes, “It provides neuroscience evidence for changes in the working of brain and mental training in the case of meditation”.7 Impressed by the yoga and meditation, Hollywood celebrities, businessmen, sports personalities all has started practicising this Hindu miracle. Sting Drew Barrymore, Madonna, Nicholas Cage, Ashley Judd, Seanne Corn etc., etc., are regular performer of this art.8
Deeply impressed, corporate America is embracing Hindu philosophy in a big way. Business Week Magazine says, phrases from ancient Hindu text such as the Bhagavad Gita are popping up in management tones and on websites of consultants. Top business schools worldwide have introduced “self masterly” classes that use Hindu methods to help manage boost leadership skills and get inner peace in lives. The magazine calls it “Karma Capitalism”.
Citing one example Business Week, recounted young executives from corporate America gather in a suburban New Jersy home to hear Swami Parthasarthy one of India’s best selling author’s on Vedanta to listen about secrets to business success “concentration, consistency and co-operation.” He has addressed meetings in B schools like Wharton, Lehmann Brothers and counseling executives on the central message of the Bhagavad Gita.
9. This ancient Hindu art once banished by anti Hindu Communists leader is all set to make a home in the Kremlin next month when new Russian President Dmitry Medyedev, who practices Yoga, takes over. Encouraged by his wife Svetlana, president elect Medvedev had joined millions of Russians anxious to learn this Hindu art of Yoga. He is expert in ‘shirshasana’. Yoga, he explained, helped him relax from the stress of work,” I can even stand on my head,” Medvedev told magazine Tainy Zvyozd [Secrets of the Stars] last month.
10 Similarly researchers of Temple University’s Gait Study Center examined the gait and postural stability of elderly women in popular Iyengar Yoga programme. They found that participants had much faster stride, better flexibility, improved single leg movement and balance and confidence in walking.
11
Researchers in Latin America countries have found that recitation of Hindu Hymns and by performing Havanes according to Hindu philosophy can increase production in agriculture also.
12 Jul Boreman of Veterans Affair Sen Diago Healthcare System, has found in his studies that words like Om, Ram….etc, work like a pause button to destress and rest the brain.
In another study, research team of Professor Peter Sleight and Luciana Bernadi from Oxford University and University of Pavia found that listening to Indian classical music could help, if you are suffering from any heart ailment. They used the University of Delhi’s, star exponent Professor Debu Chaudhuri;s version of the Raga Maru Behang, while conducting the study.
Students at Harvard, MIT etc., download bhajans like Payoji Maine and Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram, and feel energetic singing these bhajans said Swami Tyagananda, Hindu chaplin at Harvard and MIT. The West is recognizing and adopting the Hindu culture. The power of Sanskrit has enchanted the West. This is the new truth. The teaching of Sanskrit in the West was started at Yale University under Professor Salisbury. Subsequently Sanskrit spread to Harvard, Berkeley, Chicago, Michigan, Pennsylvania and other campus. Beyond the campus Vedic way of life is fast changing the life at Maharshi Vedic City in Iowa, where nearly three thousand inhabitants perform Transcendental Meditation. The Indian Business Journal reports success stories in the Vedic City and explains how Transcendental Meditation enlivens unused areas of brain.
Sanskrit is not only the language of academicians and technologists, New Age sexual healers in the West are using Sanskrit as the language of quesi spiritual erotic experience. As a result of these awareness’s Indian gurus are big hit among US corporate. C.K. Prashad, Shivkheda, Vijay Govindrajan, Shree Ravi Shankar Maharaj, Swami Ramdev, Murari Bapu are world hottest business gurus. Business Week Magazine says Indian business teachers link their theories to or deriving them from Hindu philosophy.
Now a prominent institution in America, Truckee Meadows Community College Nevada will offer classes on Hinduism from next year.
13 Recognizing, Hinduism, history was made when the Senate of the US state of Nevada opened its session with Hindu prayers.
14 Governor of Nevada, Jim Gibbons welcomed this new development. Director of Interfaith Relations of the Hindu Temple of Northern Nevada Pandit Rajan Zed mesmerized the audience, chanting the Hindu prayers to open the session on auspicious Monday.
Wearing, graceful saffron robes and a rudrakah necklace and traditional Hindu sandal paste tilak on forhead Zed began with a hymn from the Rig Veda, “I open my prayer with an invocation to the divine – whatever it may be and however we may concern. “He read the next prayer from Tattiriya Upanishad, composed around 400 BC. Lieutenant Governor Brain K. Krolicki President of the senate, introduced Rajan Zed and all senate stood up as he started chanting the prayers in an impressive way. Large number of ministers, priests from various Christian denominations like Presbyterian, Episcopal, United Methodist, and Seventh Day Adventist attended the prayers, to honour and support the great event.
Following the example of Nevada Senate the US Senate made history on Thursday, 12 July 2007, with the first ever invocation of Hindu prayers in its 218 years existence. Here too, Rajan Zed from Nevada, who has been personally invited by Senate Majority leader Harry Reid for the occasion, delivered the prayer.
-15 Looking majestic in saffron robes, Zed, intoned “Let us pray, we meditate on the transcendental glory of the Deity Supreme, who is inside the heart of the Earth, inside the life of the sky and inside the soul of the heaven. May He stimulate and illuminate our mind. Lead us from the unreal to real, from darkness to light and from death to immortality. May we be protected together? May we be nourished together with great vigor? May our study be enlightening…..Peace, peace, peace, be unto all”. The text of the prayer will be introduced in the congressional record.
The Hinduism is more a higher way of life than a religion. It is not an esoteric religion designed for and followed by the specially initiated, put a popular philosophy of life. Millions and millions of people for centuries have found comfort in this great religion. Due to this superior reality a growing number of western women are flocking to India in search of love and marriage. Hindu men are sincere honest and committed due to their Hindu Sanskars.
For Russian ladies Indians top, best hubby table and it is needless to say for them Indian means Hindus only. Among the foreigners Indians make the best husband for Russian women, as they are “more open” and share an emotional relationship with family, says country’s leading feminist intellectual Maria Arbatova,
-16 she said in an interview to Russian Agrarian Gazeta.
Arbatova is a living symbol of feminist movement of post communist Rassia. Recently she has published a book The Taste of India. She became a household name in 1990’s in Russia with her feminist T.V. programme, “I can do it myself”. She has married an Indian a few years ago, “after 25 years of keeping marrying Russians”, thinks Indian man make ideal husbands.
-17
Not only spiritually, Hindu scholars have set forth precise and penetrating words for the scientists and researchers which are not contingent on ill founded facts, unscientific dogmas or arbitrary fancies. The beginning of modern maths is usually seen as a European achievement but the discoveries in medieval India between the 14th and 16th centuries have been ignored or forgotten. Dr. George Gheverghese Joseph from The University of Manchester says ‘Kerla School’ identified the ‘infinite series’, one of the basic components of calculus in about 1350, hundreds of years before Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) and Gottfried Leibnitz (1646-1716) at the end of 17th century.
-18 The research was carried out by Dr. George Gheverghese Joseph, Honorary Reader, School of Education at the University of Manchester and Dennis Almeida, Teaching Fellow at the School of Education, The University of Exeter. They made these claims while trawling through obscure Indian papers, yet to be published third edition of his best selling book The Crest of the Peacock: The Non-European Roots of Mathematics. They also reveal that the Kerla School also discovered what amounted to the Pi series and used it to calculate Pi correct to 9, 10 and later 17 decimal places.
The Manchester University research team chastises those who glorify the tradition of Shruti and laments that if only we had believed in documentation. India would have credited for more marvels of human knowledge. It is surprising that a Briton have deciphered Yuktibhasa, a medival seminal from Malayalam, to tell Indians about mathematics.
-19
These studies first occurred in the works of Kerla mathematician Madhava and were subsequently elaborated on by his followers Nilakantha Somavaji, Jyesthadeva Sankara Variyar and others between 14th and 16th centuries. Said Al Andalusi claimed “(The Indians) have acquired immense information and reached the zenith in their knowledge of the movements of stars (astronomy) and the secrets of the skies (astrology) as well as other Mathematical studies. After all that, they have surpassed all the other people in their knowledge of medical science and the strengths of various drugs, the characteristics of compounds, and the peculiarities of substances”.
-20
For Hindus concept of reincarnation and transmigration of soul is as old as life itself. Now Past Life Regression Therapy (PLRT) has became the hottest treatment for people demanding answers to all their life’s problem. First uncovered by psychiatrist Brian Wales in his best seller Many Lives, Many Masters, PLRT is now the ‘IT’ treatment abroad for anybody. “The human soul is eternal and only keeps changing the body it in habits.
-21 This idea has been elaborated in detail in The Shrimad Bhagavadgita, by Lord Krishana.( See Ch.II Sloka 22,23,24 and 25 ) In PLRT, the idea is to take the soul back to the symptoms-some times, centuries back-and deal with them”, explains Delhi based psychiatrist Dr. Sanjay Chugh.-22
Due to these great values Japan is seeing a growing craze for Indian Education,. Indian work ethic, discipline, learning, more at an early age, and emphasis on memorization, cramming and a focus on the basic, particularly maths and science, impressed Japan. Popular books claim to reveal the Indian secrets for multiplying and dividing multiple digit number are very popular in Japan specially the Vedic Maths. Now Indian methods of education are being discussed by Japan’s conservative education ministry. Japanese parents have expressed very high interest in Indian schools in Japan.
-23
Americans are also taking deep interest in Hindu’s Devbhasha (language of Gods) Sanskrit. The Washol County commission in the US observed Sanskrit Day on Jan 12, 2008.
-24 German scholar Max Muller has observed centuries ago, as Sanskrit was the greatest language of the world. Not only this the US House of Representative has for the first time passed a resolution recognizing the, “religious and historical significance” of Diwali.
-25
Now it is very clear that Hindu mythology has its roots in realism. In the great Hindu epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, all the events mentioned in these epics, actually happened. N.S. Rajaram, author of the book Search for the Historical Krishna says we are on fairly firm ground, when it comes to the historicity of Krishna and the Mahabharata war. “There are sufficient evidences available now to suggest that Krishna was indeed a historical figure, who lived about 5000 years ago. This evidence is not just literary, but also archeological , geographical as well as astronomical”. He claims.
Similarly there is sufficient information available to prove that Ram was a historical personality. Pushkar Bhatnagar author of the book, dating the era of Lord Rama, says that, Maharishi Valmiki, who wrote Ramayan was a contemporary of Lord Rama. Using modern planetary software, it is very easy to verify these planetary positions actually took place, precisely as specified in the Ramayana. Entire sequence of the planetary positioned as described by Maharishi Valmiki at various stages of Rama’s life can be verified today as having taken place.
Itihas Puran, Panini’s grammer and Chandogya Upnishad also mention Krishna and Rama and provide independent support for their historicity. Fritjof Capra, author of ‘The Tao of Physics pointed out the similarity between the modern view of the structure of an atom and the description of the dancing of Shiva Natraj is the structure of an atom as well as the cosmos.
-26
In Hindu philosophy, it is generally believed that a soul passes through 8.4 million births before it becomes a human. It is believed that the actual number of species present in the world, is between 8 and 10 million species. Each soul follows each of these forms or births in a different form.
As a result of all the developments, one can see Hindu temples every where in the world. Even cities like Cochabamba in Bolvia or Gaborone in Botswana has centre of the International Society for Krishna consciousness (ISKON). Hare Krishna Movement now has more than a million followers worldwide, including famous Ford family.
Now it can be seen that people from different religion and countries love Hinduism. People are deeply interested in creative and artistic things related with Hinduism. In an antique sculpture auction at the Christie’s London, a large bronze figure of Goddess Parvati fetched $2,728,000 (Approximately Rs. 11, 73, 04,000), a world record. Hugo Weithe, international director, Asian Art of Christie’s says, “This sale of Indian Art begins a new chapter. The figure of Parvati set a new world record for a classical Indian work of art and is the highest total ever achieved for such an auction”.
-27 Priya Pal, an art consultant trained at Sotheby’s says, “No saturation exists as far as Indian classical art is concerned. People today are looking for idols of Brahma, Parvati and Shiva fuelled by the west’s interest in Hinduism”. Even the paintings by controversial and anti Hindu painter M.F. Hussain, “Battle of Ganga and Jamuna: Mahabharata”, a painting from the Hindu epic fetched $1.6 million and, who has no regard for Hinduism setting another world record at Christie’s South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art sale.
-28
More and more foreigners are unite in one thing, that is love for India. Bosmian Vesna Pericevic Jacob has been living in India since her marriage to an Indian, three and a half years ago. She enjoys famous Hindu festival Holi. She also participates in dandiya parties. Angela Poupon, Chinese-Malay-Spanish-Indian origin, girl also like dandia. Helan Mehta, a teacher at the British Council, also join pandals, during durga puja and stays up all night and accompanies the procession for immersion of the idol. Now she is learning Gayatri Mantra. Thenny from Dominican Republic observes fasts during Navratri and follows the Hindu traditions.
-29
We have a deep need for archetypal expression of our superiority. Hindu myths and symbols represent human soul. Hinduism also represents the deepest expression of collective human imagination. Hindu myth, maya, mantra, music, art, etc., are all part of modern science in one way or the other. Hindu mythology is the best and unique expression of infinite possibilities contained in the field of pure potentiality. Hindu myths have good stories, resonant plots and clear distinction between good and evil, scared and profane, divine and diabolical. Hindu myths are basis of all the religions and science.
Hinduism is a religion and philosophy of living mythology. For example Mahabharata and Ramayana encapsulate thousands of years of human experience and imagination. Hindu gurus and cults also enjoy great popularity and people see in them somebody who can fulfill their needs. They have powers, imagination, initiation, rites and rituals. They are all parts of living mythology.
Hinduism has a rich mythology that has withstood the test of time. India must take advantage of this huge advantage. We must understand the cultural and mythological needs around the world and guide them. It is an opportune moment for India to use Hindu mythology for national interest. In this India has a huge lead over other countries. India should not follow China who destroyed its own culture and mythology. We can export fashion, food, stories, spiritualities, yoga and of course Hanuman as Spiderman and Superman. India must influence the world as a state of high consciousness. India should shed its hollow love for meaningless, suicidal, vulgar secularism and multiculturalism.
Eulogizing the greatness of Hinduism the president of Sri Lanka Mahindra Raj Panthe said Hinduism is one of the greatest religions of the world and people should learn from it and asked people to follow the teachings of Hinduism for the welfare of the world.