Is ‘Hindu’ the Right Word?
The word 'Hindu' is often objected to by many different shades of political ideologies. It is claimed that the word is foreign origin. Based on this premise it is also claimed that India is a British creation. This article delves into these questions of names and identities.
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Religious Pluralism and Freedom of Religious and Spiritual Experience
Freedom in the West, is often interpreted as the freedom of action of individual in this world. But David Frawley, in this brilliant excerpt of 'Awaken Bharata' explains how freedom has many modes and internal freedom is the freedom which Hindu Dharma has always focused upon.
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Religious Pluralism or the Unity of Religions
What does religious pluralism really mean in practice? Does it mean making all religions just the same? Does it mean an uncritical acceptance of all religions? Does pluralism, as the name sounds, actually give any choice, or is it a tyranny of an ideological dogma? David Frawley discusses these questions in this brief foray, which is an excerpt of 'Awaken Bharata'.
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A Hindu Call for Religious Pluralism
While pluralism is the by-word of today's liberalism, it is seldom practised by its own proponents. In this brief excerpt, from 'Awaken Bharata' David Frawley talks about how the offer of Hinduism is pluralist in intent and what real pluralism looks like.
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Matter or Consciousness – What Came First?
In this article, Shri Anirvan discusses the theory of material evolution that is prevalent in the modern world and he charts out how the spiritual evolution of man is different from this and one should not fall in the trap of explaining everything with the idea of Evolution.
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Nature of the Divine in Hinduism: One or Many?
This is an excerpt from the book, “Veda Mimansa – Volume 1” by Shri Anirvan. In this brief foray, Shri Anirvan describes how Hindus do not find any internal contradiction between believing in a formless, attribute-less divinity in the form of Supreme Consciousness and on the other hand, worshipping hundreds of deities with proper forms and attributes.
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The Origin and the Use of Image in India – Part 2
In this excerpt from the book “Transformation of Nature in Art” by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy explains the logic behind image worship in Hindu Dharma. he explains the apparent paradox of Hindu Dharma where the Divine is imagined as without any form or attributes on one hand and on the other multiplicity of forms and attributes are also to be seen quite prevalent in the society. Coomaraswamy explains that in reality there is no paradox.
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The Origin and the Use of Image in India – Part 1
In this excerpt from the book “Transformation of Nature in Art” by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, he explores the conception of Art in India. He analyzes icon worship in India and explains how the Hindus conceive divinity and how they worship it. He also analyzes the hypocritical attitudes of Christianity and Islam who blame Hindus of being superstitious.
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Nothing is Everything: How Buddhism and Hinduism are Two Sides of the Same Coin – 3
This is an excerpt from the book "Why Buddhism is True" by Robert Wright. It talks about Buddhism's focus on 'Nothing' and Hinduism's focus on 'Everything'. In Hindu thought, specifically within a Hindu school of thought known as Advaita Vedanta, there is the idea that the individual self or soul is actually just a part of what you might call a universal soul. To put the proposition in Hindu terminology: atman (the self or soul) is Brahman (the universal soul). Now, to say that atman is anything at all – Brahman, whatever – is to say that atman exists in the first place. And the very birth of Buddhism, its distinct emergence within an otherwise Hindu milieu, is thought to lie largely in the denial that atman exists.
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Fundamentals of Monotheism – Dharma vs. Religion – Part 3
In this brief excerpt, one of India's greatest modern historians, Sita Ram Goel discusses the fundamentals of monotheism and how it differs from the fundamentals of polytheism. This excerpt discusses the fundamentals which differentiate Dharma from Religion.
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