First Quote Added
April 10, 2026
Latest Quote Added
"The BAPS case should serve as a cautionary tale for policymakers, journalists, and activists. Trafficking laws are essential tools for protecting vulnerable populations, but when wielded indiscriminately, they can become instruments of cultural and religious repression. Minority religions, already stigmatized by labels like “cult,” are especially at risk. In the end, the dismissal of the trafficking charges against BAPS is a victory for common sense applied to religion. It is a reaffirmation of the principle that religious liberty includes the right to define one’s own spiritual path, even when that path involves sacrifice, discipline, and communal labor."
"Moments drag on for ages Eyes shower storms of tears The whole world is an empty void Without you, Govinda"
"Yuga-yitam nimo-shena Chakshusha pravrisha-yitam Shunya-yitam jagat sarvam Govinda-virahena me"
"Manu, however, has one verse that in connection with this subject is of interest, and deserves to be translated, though till now it never has been rendered into English. I refer to ii. 17, and translate in paraphrase: "The country divinely meted out by the rivers Sarasouti and Ghuggar, and lying between them, is where the (Rig, etc.) Veda arose, and hence is called brahmavarta or 'home of the Veda' in the tradition of the learned.""
"The Swami Narayan order is probably the best organized Hindu sect, as well as the most modern in its technology and media resources. At the same time it is probably the best disciplined and the most ascetic of modern Hindu monastic orders... Most important was my visit to their Cultural Festival of India in 1997 in Mumbai, which marked Pramukh Swami’s seventy-fifth birthday, on which occasion I gave a short talk. The Swami Narayan Order had taken a piece of land in the slums of Mumbai and turned it into a modern temple and garden complex showing a futuristic Hinduism with the power to solve all the world’s problems. Such is the power of real devotion."
"In the great philosophy of Brahma, such violent turns of the scale are quite unknown. It embraces vast stretches of time, cycles of human ages, whose successive lives gravitate in concentric circles, and travel ever slowly towards the center...."
"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the cosmos itself undergoes an immense and indeed an infinite number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond […] to those of modern scientific cosmology."
"In the beginning there was darkness hidden in darkness, all this universe was an unillumined sea (X. 129.3)."
"This life of yours which you are living is not merely apiece of this entire existence, but in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear; tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as "I am in the east and the west, I am above and below, I am this entire world.""
"The Aitareya Brāhmana (VII.15.4), describing the merits of exertion, has the picturesque phrases: "A man while lying is the Kali; moving himself he is the Dvāpara; rising, he is the Tretā; walking, he becomes the Krita.'""
"All the universe rests within your nature, in the ocean, in the heart, in all life."
"Endless wide paths encompass Heaven and Earth from all sides. The bull, the ocean, the radiant bird, has entered into the home of the original Father (V.47.2-3)."
"Hinduism’s cosmology was prodigious in scope and depth, but India did not stop there. She went on to advance what was probably the most daring hypothesis man has ever conceived. We ourselves are the infinite, the very infinite from which the Universe proceeds. Everything in Hinduism works to drive the point home... While the West was still thinking, perhaps, of a 6000-year-old universe—India was already envisioning ages and eons and galaxies as numerous as the sands of the River Ganges. A universe so vast that modern astronomy slips into its folds without a ripple."
"The creative Sun upheld the Earth with lines of force. He strengthened Heaven where there was no support. As a powerful horse he drew out the atmosphere. He bound fast the ocean in the boundless realm. Where the ocean overflows its boundaries, the creative Sun, as the Son of the Waters knows that. Thence came the world and the upper region, thence Heaven and Earth were extended (X. 149.1-2)."
"From the ocean the blissful wave has arisen, together with its wave it attained immortality.... All the universe rests within your nature, in the ocean, in the heart, in all life. That which is borne in the confluence of the waters, may we attain that blissful wave of yours, oh Gods (IV.58.1, 11)."
"The waning strength and stability of Dharma in the four yugas is graphically depicted by representing it as a majestic bull which stood firm on its four legs in the golden age of the world (krtayuga) and lost one of its legs to [ either of] the succeeding two yugas, Tretā and Dvāpara, to stand tottering on a single leg during the present kaliyuga."
"A hundred to you, ten thousand years, two Yugas, three Yugas, four we make."
"When the Gods stood together in the sea. Then as dancers they generated a swirling dust. When, like ascetics, the Gods overflowed the worlds, then from hidden in the ocean, they brought forth the Sun (X.72.6-7)."
"Law and truth from the power of meditation were enkindled. Thence the night was born and thence the flooding ocean. From the flooding ocean the year was born. The Lord of all that moves ordained the days and nights. The Creator formed the Sun and Moon according to previous worlds; Heaven and Earth, the atmosphere and the realm of light (X. 190)."
"We may legitimately conclude: There were a number of Saka Eras. Two of them were much older than that of 78 A.D ., and one of them which both Bhattotpala and Varahamihira have used to indicate the epochs of their works went back to the middle of the 6th century before Christ: the year 551-550."
"Over time, apparent misunderstandings have arisen over the origins of Jainism and relationship with its sister religions of Hinduism and Buddhism. There has been an ongoing debate between Jainism and Vedic Hinduism as to which revelation preceded the other. What is historically known is that there was a tradition along with Vedic Hinduism known as Sramana Dharma. Essentially, the sramana tradition included in its fold, the Jain and Buddhist traditions, which disagreed with the eternality of the Vedas, the needs for ritual sacrifices and the supremacy of the Brahmins."
"As to Jains being Hindu dissenters, and, therefore governable by Hindu law, we are not told this date of secession [...] Jainism certainly has a longer history than is consistent with its being a creed of dissenters from Hinduism."
"In view of deliberate attempts in recent decades to project Buddhism and Jainism as separate religions, distinct from Hinduism, it would be in order to deal with them in passing. the attempts have clearly been motivated by the design to separate their followers from the parent body called Hinduism just as Sikhs have been to an extent. Though not to the same extent as in the case of Sikhs, the attempts have succeeded in as much as neo-Buddhists and at least some Jains have come to regard themselves as non-Hindus. In reality, however, Buddhisms and Jainism have been no more than movements within the larger body of Hinduism, not significantly different from Lingayats, Saktas or Bhaktas of more recent times."
"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, no doubt by accident, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much longer time scales still."
"To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas, (A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it... It is, indeed, a remarkable circumstance that when Western civilization discovers Relativity it applies it to the manufacture of atom-bombs, whereas this Oriental civilization applies it to the development of new states of consciousness."
"A millennium before Europeans were willing to divest themselves of the Biblical idea that the world was a few thousand years old, the Mayans were thinking of millions and the Hindus billions."
"Long before it became a scientific aspiration to estimate the age of the earth, many elaborate systems of the world chronology had been devised by the sages of antiquity. The most remarkable of these occult time-scales is that of the ancient Hindus, whose astonishing concept of the Earth's duration has been traced back to Manusmriti, a sacred book."
"You should not be taken aback if you find that the practice of applying sindura (vermilion) to the simanta/manga partition of the hair on the head) by Hindu womenfolk is rooted back in the Harappan Civilization itself."
"[A female figurine from the Indus valley civilization has hair which] is painted black and parted in the middle of the forehead, with traces of red pigment in the part. This form of ornamentation may be the origin of the later Hindu tradition where a married woman wears a Streak of vermilion or powdered cinnabar (sindur) in the part of her hair."
"Sara grass, Darbha, Kuśara, and Sairya, Muñja, Vīraṇa, Where all these creatures dwell unseen, with poison have infected me."
"In Greece the name rbhu appears as Orpheus, the famous poet and musician from Thrace who gave rise to the Orphic cult and mysteries. The later story about his descent into Hades to recover Eurydice may well be an echo of a rejuvenation attempt, while the shamanist aspect of the myth is maintained. Orpheus’s poetry and music links well with the rbhus’ poetic power in [the Rigveda]. It is therefore very curious that many philologists refuse to see this connection... There is no substantial reason, philological or semantic, why Greek Orpheus and Germanic elf should not be related to Sanskrit rbhu."
"A thousand heads hath Puruṣa, a thousand eyes, a thousand feet. On every side pervading earth he fills a space ten fingers wide. This Puruṣa is all that yet hath been and all that is to be."
"We need not agree with the Śāstrakāra-s that the varnāśramadharma is truly “Vedic”, for we do not find it in the first nine books of the Rg-Veda. Even in the tenth book, the last and youngest one, we find it mentioned only once, and there only in the vaguest use, viz. the Purusa Sūkta’s recognition of the existence of four functions in society, without any details of how their personnel is recruited nor of how they should conduct themselves vis-à-vis one another, the very stuff that is the main focus of the Śāstra-s. Like medieval and contemporary Hindus, the Śāstra composers may have considered as ”Vedic” everything they held sacred, regardless of whether a particular norm or custom is indeed traceable to the Veda-s."
"“ That remarkable hymn (the Purusha Sukta) is in language, metre, and style, very different from the rest of the prayers with which it is associated. It has a decidedly more modern tone ; and must have been composed after the Sanskrit language had been refined, and its grammar and rhythm perfected. The internal evidence which it furnishes serves to demonstrate the important fact that the compilation of the Vedas, in their present arrangement, took place after the Sanskrit tongue had advanced from the rustic and irregular dialect in which the multitude of hymns and prayers of the Veda was composed, to the polished and sonorous language in which the mythological poems, sacred and profane (puranas and kavyas), have been written.”"
"“ There can be little doubt, for instance, that the 90th hymn of the 10th book ... is modem both in its character and in its diction. It is full of allusions to the sacrificial ceremonials, it uses technically philosophical terms, it mentions the three seasons in the order of Vasanta, spring, Grishina, summer and Sharad, autumn; it contains the only passage in the Rig Veda where the four castes are enumerated. The evidence of language for the modern date of this composition is equally strong. Grishma, for instance, the name for the hot season, does not occur in any other hymn of the Rig Veda ; and Vasanta also, the name of spring does not belong to the earliest vocabulary of the Vcdic poets. It occurs but once more in the Rig Veda (x . 101 . 4), in a passage where the three seasons are mentioned in the order of Sharad, autumn ; Hemanta, winter ; and Vasanta, spring.”"
"“ That the Purusha Sukta, considered as a hymn of the Rig Veda, is among the latest portions of that collection, is clearly perceptible from its contents. The fact that the Sanaa Samhita has not adopted any verse from it, is not without importance (compare what I have remarked in my Academical Prelections). The Naigeya school, indeed, appears (although it is not quite certain) to have extracted the first five verses in the seventh prapathaka of the first Archika, which is peculiar to it.”"
"He [Jacobi] thinks that the Rigveda shows that the winter solstice took place in the month Phalguna, and on the ground of the precession of the equinoxes this must mean that the observation thus recorded was made in the third millenium B.C. This view ... he supports by the fact that in the Grhya Sitras, or manuals of domestic ritual, of much later date, the ceremonial of the wedding includes an injunction to the wife to look at a star called Dhruva, “fixed,” and this can only have originated at a time when « Draconis was in the vicinity of the pole, there being no other star which could be called fixed at any period coincident with the probable age of the Rigveda: further he contends that the fact that Krttikas, the Pleiades, are placed at the head of the list of twenty-seven or twenty-eight Naksatras, “lunar mansions,” in the Yajurveda and Atharvaveda Samhitas means that Krttikas marked the vernal equinox when the list was compiled, and this date fell in the third millenium B.C.'"
"...a reference in Satapatha Br II, 1, 2, 2-3 to the effect that the Krttikás/Pleiades are fixed in and do not swerve from the east. This reference has been examined, analysed, interpreted and discussed ad nauseam yielding all kinds of results according to the scholar’s desires. S. Kak arrived at a date 2950 (1994:35). This comes very close to what Achar finds, namely that such astronomical events could have been observed only c 3000. Achar mentions that S. B. Dikshit had propounded the very same idea about 100 years earlier but later Western scholars rejected it by claiming that the ÍB phrase "never swerve from the east" means something else."
"They establish the consecration soma-pressings before(hand). They should consecrate themselves one day after the new moon of Taisa, or of Magha, so they say. Now, either (view) is widely proclaimed; but that of Taisa is more (commonly) proclaimed, as it were. They obtain this thirteenth, additional month. So great indeed is the year as this thirteenth month. So here the entire year is obtained."
"“The observations on which the astronomy of India is founded, were made more than three thousand years before the Christian era. (…) Two other elements of this astronomy, the equation of the sun’s centre and the obliquity of the ecliptic (…) seem to point to a period still more remote, and to fix the origin of this astronomy 1000 or 1200 years earlier, that is, 4300 years before the Christian era”."
"A few things can be established with certainty, others with a good degree of likelihood, and yet others remain entirely uncertain."
"If we exclude the possibility of every astronomical notice in Vedic literature being a record of ancient tradition, which is extremely unlikely, we can say that there is strong astronomical evidence that the Vedas are older than B.C. 2500. They might be as old as B.C. 4000. There is some support for this date, but it is not convincing."
"He (the sun) rests at the new moon of Magha, about to turn northward; these (the priests) rest (too), about to sacrifice with the introductory atiratra; so they obtain him first . . . [A clear reference to the winter solstice, after which the sun “turns northward,” i.e. begins to rise farther and farther to the north each day] He goes northward for six months; him they follow with six-day sacrifices in correct order. Having gone north for six months, he stays, about to turn south; they rest, about to sacrifice with the vifuvat ( midsummer) sacrifice; so they obtain him a second time. [A clear reference to the summer solstice, after which the sun “turns south,” i.e. begins to rise farther and farther to the south each day] He goes south for six months; they follow him with six-day sacrifices in reverse order. Having gone south for six months, he stays, about to return north; they rest, about to sacrifice with the mahavrata sacrifice; so they obtain him a third time [a clear reference to the winter solstice again]."
"The season was the Mother. From her work, instantly born, he entered into the plants in which he grew (11.13.1)."
"He speaks according to the seasons the words that must be said (VII.9.3)13"
"They guard the Divine order of the twelve months. The men do not violate the seasons. When the day of the rains comes in the year, havin cooked the offerings, they gain their release (VII. 103.9)."
"The Sun Gods (Adityas) ordain in harmony the year, the month and the day, the sacrifice, the night and the chant (VII.66.11).17"
"When the Brahmins, in the Atiratra rite of Soma, sing like a lake that is full, on that day the year ends; when the frogs become desirous of the commencement of the rains, the Soma-drinking Brahmins raise their voice, accomplishing the year-long rite (VII. 103.7-8).21"
"He arises from his rest and divides the seasons. The Divine holy Sun has come (II.38.4)."