Standards For Different Religions My criticisms of other religions are sometimes dismissed not by a counterargument but simply by calling it an outsider’s opinion, different from the believer’s viewpoint. The critic says: Believers have an orthodox view of their religion while academics have a heterodox view of the same religion. The divergence between the orthodox …
Causes of Western Prosperity and Indian Poverty
A few months ago, I was participating in a live discussion where I could see a stream of user comments. One such comment was that people in India lead miserable lives. The implication was that Western thinking is better because the West is more prosperous. People today see poverty in India and don’t know about …
Jīva Falldown—Understanding Anādi
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 …
Spitting at the Moon
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 …
Four Kinds of Sukriti and Duṣkṛti
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 …
Seeing the West Through a Vedic Lens
For the last several centuries, the Western academic discourse on Vedic civilization has been applying Western categories to the Vedic culture, but the Vedic culture hasn’t applied its categories to the West. If we don’t apply our categories to others, we are molded by their categories. If we don’t respond to how others see us, …
Why a Person Falls from a Spiritual Path
Every now and then there are stories about a spiritual leader “falling down”. These are not limited to one religion or religious organization. They are known to occur across all religions and organizations. The reasons are simple—The spiritual journey is long, every successive stage leads to more hardship, and one must be enthusiastic, patient, and …
Politeness and Criticism in the Bhakti Tradition
There is a widespread misconception at present that those who adhere to the Bhakti tradition do not criticize others. This misconception arises because Bhakti is equated to “love”, which is then equated to non-violence and acceptance of others, which is then mixed up in the pseudo-secular woo of tolerance and equality. Many people even argue …
Judging Religions and Religious People
There are many misconceptions about what constitutes a religion and a religious person and how we should evaluate them. In this post, I will discuss two such criteria—(a) the method of judging three symptoms of love of God—morality, knowledge, and bliss, and (b) the method of two negations due to which a person or religion …
Quality vs. Quantity in Spiritual Life
Everything in Vedic philosophy is based on qualities. Since the advent of modern science, everything in modern thinking is based on quantity. The focus on qualities needs the distinction between better and worse. The focus on quantities needs the distinction between more and less. Under the influence of quantity thinking, people stop thinking about quality …
Moral Imperatives for Economists
Most people think that macroeconomics is a legitimate subject because its experts are employed by prestigious organizations like central banks, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, treasury departments, investment funds, and universities. They don’t know that macroeconomics is colonialism by another name. In this post, I will describe what macroeconomics is, and how it is used …
How Well Do You Know Vedic Philosophy?
A profound illusion of simplicity arises in studying Vedic philosophy when we speak of the whole without dwelling on its parts. In the elephant and the five blind men analogy, the elephant is the whole, while the legs, ears, tail, trunk, and stomach are the parts. We can talk about the elephant without talking about …