We can scan the length and breadth of Vedic literature, but we won’t find the term “Universal Truth”. Everywhere, we find the term Param-Satyam, which has three meanings—(a) Highest Truth, (b) Original Truth, and (c) Best Truth. The highest truth controls everything. The original truth creates everything. The best truth enjoys everything. Param-Satyam is the creator, controller, and enjoyer of everything....
The separation of religion and economics, like so many other separations in modern thinking, is the gift of the Western reductionist methodology of drawing arbitrary boundaries within reality and treating them as isolated systems. These separations never occurred in Vedic thinking. Wealth, for instance, is one of the qualities of Lord Viṣṇu, personified as Lakśmi. Thus, when Viṣṇu is worshipped, Lakśmi...
There are several ways in which the soul in Vedic philosophy differs from the soul in other religions: (a) It establishes unity in diversity, and it is detected by that unity, (b) Its immortality is exactly the same as the immortality of matter, (c) It goes from body to body every moment, not merely at death, (d) Matter is treated as...
Contrary to common belief, “monotheism” is not a comprehensible word and every translation of this word given by monotheists (i.e., the followers of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism) results in self-contradiction. In this post, I will discuss the contradictions resulting from translating monotheism as “one God” or “God is one”, by successively applying first-order logic, second-order logic, set theory, operator theory, and...
One of the comments after the last post—which spoke about the polytheistic origins of monotheism—was that these narratives are an academic’s opinion, different from the believer’s viewpoint. The believers have an orthodox view of their religion while the academics have a heterodox view of the same religion. This deviation between the orthodox and the heterodox views, the commenter alleged, is a...
There are widespread misconceptions about monotheism at present—(a) that it is about a transcendent God, (b) that it has had no connections to polytheism, and (c) that it has always been monotheistic. These are far from the truth. The truth is that monotheism emerged out of polytheism, that its “God” was originally a low-level demigod but later transformed into an all-powerful...
In Chaitanya Caritāmrita 20.117, Lord Chaitanya instructs Sanātana Goswami as follows: kṛṣṇa bhuli’ sei jīva anādi-bahirmukha ataeva māyā tāre deya saṁsāra-duḥkha. Śrila Prabhupāda translates this verse as “Forgetting Kṛṣṇa, the living entity has been attracted by the external feature from time immemorial. Therefore, the illusory energy [māyā] gives him all kinds of misery in his material existence”. The contentious issue here...
Many people at present see similarities between Abrahamic monotheism and Vedic personalism and contrast these two philosophies to impersonalism and voidism. Personalism is similar to monotheism in some superficial ways but different from it in essential ways. Likewise, personalism is different from impersonalism in one way—accepting or rejecting an eternal personality of a person—but in many other ways, personalism is similar...
Some religions accept a soul without reincarnation while others accept reincarnation without a soul. In this post, I will talk about why a soul without reincarnation is problematic but reincarnation without a soul is not. We will divide ideologies into four—(a) reincarnation with a soul, (b) reincarnation without a soul, (c) soul without reincarnation, and (d) no reincarnation and no soul....
I came across a denigrating portrait of Mahābhārata, written by Audrey Truschke, an associate professor of South Asian history at Rutgers University, Newark. Reading through, I noticed three things—(a) ignorance of Mahābhārata in particular and Vedic philosophy in general, (b) laziness to resolve the obvious contradictions in the article’s narratives, and (c) arrogance to judge others with a lens of revulsion...
Lord Kṛṣṇa describes four classes of Duṣkṛti (those who have done bad deeds) and Sukriti (those who have done good deeds) one after another in Bhagavad-Gita. They are defined by a single criterion—surrender to Lord Kṛṣṇa. Four kinds of good people surrender to Kṛṣṇa, and four kinds do not. Since these verses are adjacent to each other, therefore, we can contrast...
