Most of this website's content can be downloaded. Just right-click on "rm" or "mp3"
link and select "save target as" on the menu.
AlOchanaamR^itaM
AlochanaamR^itaMYoga and the West
It
is becoming imperatively necessary that Indian knowledge should reveal in the
Western way its scientific foundations. For if we do not do it
ourselves, the Europeans will do it for us and do it badly,
discrediting the knowledge in the process.
For this society
of European and European-led inquirers [Max-Mueller, Theosophists etc.]
arose from an impulse on which
the Time-Spirit itself insists; their
object, vaguely grasped at by
them, was at bottom the systematic coordination,
explanation and practice of Oriental religion and Oriental mental and
spiritual discipline.
Unfortunately, as always happens to a
great effort in unfit hands, it stumbled at the outset and went
into
strange paths. ...
A vain attempt to thrust in modern physical
science into the explanation of psychical movements, - to explain
for instance pranayam in the terms of
oxygen and hydrogen! ... to
make a hopeless
amalgam and jumble of science, religion and philosophy all
expressed in
the terms of the imagination - this
has been the scientific method of
Theosophy. The result is that it lays its hands on truth and
muddles it so badly that it comes out to the world as an untruth. And
there now abound other misstatements of Indian truth, less elaborate
but almost as wild and wide as Theosophy's.
From this growing confusion we must deliver
the future of humanity.
This webpage gives you a feel for sanskrit as a spoken language.
Here we present a collection of audio renderings of simple spoken sanskrit in
the form of short stories, speeches and other literature by various
people for your listening pleasure.
In general, people are accustomed to hearing sanskrit only in Hindu devotional
hymns (stotras). This webpage attempts to present another side of spoken
sanskrit.
If you have any recordings of sanskrit in spoken form (anything other than
stotras and devotional songs), or are willing to read out interesting
articles/stories and record them, please let me know.
We inaugurate this webpage on the auspicious occasion of makara sankranti,
Jan 14, 2002.