Replies

Lovely thread! Thank you, Bhavana!

I’m not a fan of any nationalism. My first book is on this topic, though it’s a bit of a dense read.

Looking forward to discussing all of these things this evening!

Thank you, Dennis, for your comment, and I apologize for the density of my writing twenty years ago! Trust me, it’s gotten better in the intervening time. I was still relatively fresh from graduate school, and writing for an audience of three experts. Teaching undergrads, most of whom know nothing about these traditions, has helped me learn to present ideas in a way that is clearer and more relatable for a general audience. That said, the ideas themselves can be fairly in-depth, so some confusion is probably inevitable.
I look forward to clarifying anything that remains unclear in our class this evening!

This is a great point, Brian, and one I’ve explored in some of my more recent works. (This article is twenty years old. If it were my child, it would already be in college! I can’t believe so much time has passed…)

Anyway, the short version is that I agree with you. The idea of Sanātana Dharma is not to create a “super religion,” but to point to something we are all experiencing each in our own way, and even in different ways over the course of a lifetime, or lifetimes. “The many become one and are increased by one,” as Whitehead says.

Thank you for this thoughtful comment, Doug! The “everyone is a Hindu” claim is not really an historical claim, but rather an affirmation that all living beings are somewhere on the spiritual path as it is understood in Hindu traditions. No one is excluded. So a Christian, for example, can be seen from a Hindu perspective simply as a person on a path of bhakti yoga (devotion to a personal form of divinity) whose devata (deity) is Jesus. There is no “other” in any ultimate sense.

I think your observation about nature is close to what I refer to when I speak of spirituality oriented toward the cosmos itself. But perhaps you are making a distinction that I’m not catching. We may get to talk about this in class today!

I gave a talk a few months ago at the Vedanta Society of New York called “The Cosmos as Ishta-Devata.” It unpacks my thinking on this topic better than the brief reference I gave in the reading for today.