"The roots of “Vedic science” can be traced to the so-called Bengal Renaissance, which in turn was deeply influenced by the Orientalist constructions of Vedic antiquity as the “Golden Age” of Hinduism. Heavily influenced by German idealism and British romanticism, important Orientalists including H.T. Colebrooke, Max Mueller and Paul Deussen tended to locate the central core of Hindu thought in the Vedas, the Upanishads and, above all, in the Advaita Vedanta tradition of Shankara. Despite the deeply anti-rational and idealistic (that is, anti-naturalistic) elements of Advaita Vedanta, key Hindu nationalist reformers – from Raja Ram Mohun Roy and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee to Swami Vivekananda – began to find in it all the elements of modernity. Vivekananda took the lead in propagating the view that the monism of Advaita Vedanta presaged the future culmination of all of modern science. Since modern science denied the role of any supernatural force outside nature, Vivekananda claimed that only Vedantic monism was truly scientific for it treated God as an aspect of nature and did not invoke any force external to nature…."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
(Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and the Hindu Nationalism in India) 2003 (also quoted in )
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Meera_Nanda
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Meera Nanda
14 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Meera Nanda →
Related Quotes
"It is this pagan connection that has brought people like Koenrard Elst, David Frawley and many others in close collab…"
"The Hindutva literature is replete with glowing tributes to Hindu “renaissance”, which they claim to be similar to th…"
"The more prominence Hinduism gets abroad, even for wrong reasons like the new age and paganism, the more prestige it …"
"Indian government funded in part the work of ISKCON (Hare Krishna) in re-forestation of Vrindavan. Department of envi…"
"I will argue that sacredness of nature does not protect nature. Just because people venerate trees and rivers does no…"
"Pride in the achievements of your own tribe is a legitimate emotion. But when pride is fuelled by prejudice against o…"
"Far from being considered the crown jewel of Hinduism, yogic asanas were in fact looked down upon by Hindu intellectu…"
"Meera Nanda, originally a bio-technologist, crossed over to humanities... Since then, she has been writing articles a…"
"‘Meera Nanda doesn’t like India. And she hates popular Hinduism with even greater passion’."
"A recent case in point is Meera Nanda, who has been for some years on a self-appointed mission to expose all claims t…"