The mind is the enemy, heh?
A fellow named Panini created a grammar/rule book standardizing Sanskrit word formation and grammar back in the 4th century, BCE.
[www.google.com]
Genuine Advaita scholars wrote and taught in Sanskrit and Panini's grammar and its commentaries were standard.
Turns out that when Panini's work was discovered by Western linguists in the 18th and 19th centuries, Panini's theories were found to excel anything previously available to Western language analysts.
Panini's work became foundational for modern Western linguistic theory and was
then used to create today's high level computer coding languages!
[www.google.com]
By coincidence, I found out about this two days ago, while reading a book entitled Geek Sublime
[www.google.com]
The mind is the enemy, eh?
No.
What made these bogus neo advaita teachers possible, was a movement called the Hindu Renaissance/reform movement.
This started among a small group of Indians who had received Westernized education, but had not been educated within the system of genuine Indian scholarship which was a closed shop controlled by Sanskrit literate upper caste Brahmins, Khastriayas and Vaisyas.
Vivekananda and other political activists were ashamed of how India had been conquired by just a few hundred thousand technologically advanced European barbarian types.
So Vivekandanda and those influenced by him, created a dumbed down version of Hindu nationalist history and spirituality.
They did this by postiting that India was once perfect and powerful, and Hinduism scientific perfect, pristine, that even nuclear weapons were once created and owned by Vedic Hindu Indians, but that once all this was taken away from the Vedic rishis, seers and taken over by the Sanskrit scholastic elite, Hinduism degenerated, became corrupt, Indians became corrupt and weak and mentally and physically degenerate and that the way to rescue Hinduism and restore it to purity and power was to take it away from the Sanskrit scholastics, wean people away from corrupt Sanskrit intellectual jugglery
and rely on just a few books such as the Bhagavad Gita and Puranas.
Any use of intellect, any reference to responsible scholarship and regard for factual evidence, any questioning of this dumbed down Hinduistic ideology was dismissed as intellectual jugglery.
All this found popularity among those Indians who had no access to the genuine
intellectual and artistic heritage of India. It was also popular with Westerners
who wanted access to orientalist Indianized spirituality but who did not want to go to the effort of learning Sanskrit and learning to understand the original source material.
This in turn left a large audience hungry for sustenance but without the background information needed to fact check charlatans claiming to be gurus and who reassuringly teach that the mind is the enemy.
A fellow named Panini created a grammar/rule book standardizing Sanskrit word formation and grammar back in the 4th century, BCE.
[www.google.com]
Genuine Advaita scholars wrote and taught in Sanskrit and Panini's grammar and its commentaries were standard.
Turns out that when Panini's work was discovered by Western linguists in the 18th and 19th centuries, Panini's theories were found to excel anything previously available to Western language analysts.
Panini's work became foundational for modern Western linguistic theory and was
then used to create today's high level computer coding languages!
[www.google.com]
By coincidence, I found out about this two days ago, while reading a book entitled Geek Sublime
[www.google.com]
The mind is the enemy, eh?
No.
What made these bogus neo advaita teachers possible, was a movement called the Hindu Renaissance/reform movement.
This started among a small group of Indians who had received Westernized education, but had not been educated within the system of genuine Indian scholarship which was a closed shop controlled by Sanskrit literate upper caste Brahmins, Khastriayas and Vaisyas.
Vivekananda and other political activists were ashamed of how India had been conquired by just a few hundred thousand technologically advanced European barbarian types.
So Vivekandanda and those influenced by him, created a dumbed down version of Hindu nationalist history and spirituality.
They did this by postiting that India was once perfect and powerful, and Hinduism scientific perfect, pristine, that even nuclear weapons were once created and owned by Vedic Hindu Indians, but that once all this was taken away from the Vedic rishis, seers and taken over by the Sanskrit scholastic elite, Hinduism degenerated, became corrupt, Indians became corrupt and weak and mentally and physically degenerate and that the way to rescue Hinduism and restore it to purity and power was to take it away from the Sanskrit scholastics, wean people away from corrupt Sanskrit intellectual jugglery
and rely on just a few books such as the Bhagavad Gita and Puranas.
Any use of intellect, any reference to responsible scholarship and regard for factual evidence, any questioning of this dumbed down Hinduistic ideology was dismissed as intellectual jugglery.
All this found popularity among those Indians who had no access to the genuine
intellectual and artistic heritage of India. It was also popular with Westerners
who wanted access to orientalist Indianized spirituality but who did not want to go to the effort of learning Sanskrit and learning to understand the original source material.
This in turn left a large audience hungry for sustenance but without the background information needed to fact check charlatans claiming to be gurus and who reassuringly teach that the mind is the enemy.