ARTICLE: Modern article on a fact that happened

UNESCO Honors Vedic Chanting

From Subhamoy Das,
Your Guide to Hinduism.
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Nov 15 2003

An ‘Intangible Heritage of Humanity’

The oral tradition of Vedic chanting has been declared an intangible heritage of humanity by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In a meeting of jury members on November 7, 2003 at Paris, UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura declared the chanting of Vedas in India an outstanding form of cultural expressions.
The proclamation says, “In the age of globalization and modernization when cultural diversity is under pressure, preservation of the oral tradition of Vedic chanting - a unique cultural heritage - has great significance.” A total of 80 entries were received for this purpose from all over the world and the jury members included Dr. Richard Kurin, Director of the Center for Folklore and Cultural Heritage of the Smithsonian Institution (United Nations), Spanish author Juan Goytisolo, Yoshikazu Hasegawa from Japan,
Ms. Olive W.M. Lewin, pianist, ethnomusicologist, and director of the Jamaica Orchestra for Youth.
The UNESCO declaration will bring international recognition to the excellence of the Vedic chanting tradition of India, which have survived for centuries encoding the wisdom contained in the Vedas through an extraordinary effort of memorization and through an elaborately worked out mnemonic methods. The purity and fail-safe technique devised for Vedic chanting in the ancient times has given us access to this invaluable ancient literature of humanity in its entirety.
India’s Department of Culture, Ministry of Tourism and Culture took the initiative to put up the candidature of the Vedic chanting to the UNESCO. A presentation was prepared by Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts in New Delhi. The Department has also created a five year action plan to safeguard, protect, promote and disseminate oral tradition of Vedic tradition in terms of their uniqueness and distinctiveness, encourage scholars and practitioners to preserve, revitalize and promote their own branch of Vedic recitation and direct the efforts primarily to help the tradition survive in its own context.
Website
http://hinduism.about.com/cs/vedasvedanta/a/aa111503a.htm

 ARTICLE: From Vivekananda volume 1 – Past article

 BUDDHISM, THE FULFILMENT OF HINDUISM
26th September, 1893

I am not a Buddhist, as you have heard, and yet I am. If China, or Japan, or Ceylon follow the teachings of the Great Master, India worships him as God incarnate on earth. You have just now heard that I am going to criticise Buddhism, but by that I wish you to understand only this. Far be it from me to criticise him whom I worship as God incarnate on earth. But our views about Buddha are that he was not understood properly by his disciples. The relation between Hinduism (by Hinduism, I mean the religion of the Vedas) and what is called Buddhism at the present day is nearly the same as between Judaism and Christianity. Jesus Christ was a Jew, and Shâkya Muni was a Hindu. The Jews rejected Jesus Christ, nay, crucified him, and the Hindus have accepted Shâkya Muni as God and worship him. But the real difference that we Hindus want to show between modern Buddhism and what we should understand as the teachings of Lord Buddha lies principally in this: Shâkya Muni came to preach nothing new. He also, like Jesus, came to fulfil and not to destroy. Only, in the case of Jesus, it was the old people, the Jews, who did not understand him, while in the case of Buddha, it was his own followers who did not realise the import of his teachings. As the Jew did not understand the fulfilment of the Old Testament, so the Buddhist did not understand the fulfilment of the truths of the Hindu religion. Again, I repeat, Shâkya Muni came not to destroy, but he was the fulfilment, the logical conclusion, the logical development of the religion of the Hindus.

The religion of the Hindus is divided into two parts: the ceremonial and the spiritual. The spiritual portion is specially studied by the monks.

In that there is no caste. A man from the highest caste and a man from the lowest may become a monk in India, and the two castes become equal. In religion there is no caste; caste is simply a social institution. Shâkya Muni himself was a monk, and it was his glory that he had the large-heartedness to bring out the truths from the hidden Vedas and through them broadcast all over the world. He was the first being in the world who brought missionarising into practice — nay, he was the first to conceive the idea of proselytising.

The great glory of the Master lay in his wonderful sympathy for everybody, especially for the ignorant and the poor. Some of his disciples were Brahmins. When Buddha was teaching, Sanskrit was no more the spoken language in India. It was then only in the books of the learned. Some of Buddha's Brahmins disciples wanted to translate his teachings into Sanskrit, but he distinctly told them, "I am for the poor, for the people; let me speak in the tongue of the people." And so to this day the great bulk of his teachings are in the vernacular of that day in India.

Whatever may be the position of philosophy, whatever may be the position of metaphysics, so long as there is such a thing as death in the world, so long as there is such a thing as weakness in the human heart, so long as there is a cry going out of the heart of man in his very weakness, there shall be a faith in God.

On the philosophic side the disciples of the Great Master dashed themselves against the eternal rocks of the Vedas and could not crush them, and on the other side they took away from the nation that eternal God to which every one, man or woman, clings so fondly. And the result was that Buddhism had to die a natural death in India. At the present day there is not one who calls oneself a Buddhist in India, the land of its birth.

But at the same time, Brahminism lost something — that reforming zeal, that wonderful sympathy and charity for everybody, that wonderful heaven which Buddhism had brought to the masses and which had rendered Indian society so great that a Greek historian who wrote about India of that time was led to say that no Hindu was known to tell an untruth and no Hindu woman was known to be unchaste.

Hinduism cannot live without Buddhism, nor Buddhism without Hinduism. Then realise what the separation has shown to us, that the Buddhists cannot stand without the brain and philosophy of the Brahmins, nor the Brahmin without the heart of the Buddhist. This separation between the Buddhists and the Brahmins is the cause of the downfall of India. That is why India is populated by three hundred millions of beggars, and that is why India has been the slave of conquerors for the last thousand years. Let us then join the wonderful intellect of the Brahmins with the heart, the noble soul, the wonderful humanising power of the Great Master.

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ARTICLE: An interpretation of a verse from the Bhagwad Gita

The Essence of the Bhagavad Gita

Explained by Paramhansa Yogananda
As Remembered by His Disciple, Swami Kriyananda
(2:70) Contentment is his who, like the ocean, calmly absorbs into himself all the rivers of desire. One (on the contrary) whose desires trickle outward (as if from a pond) is soon drained (of energy).

Generous desires - for example, to bring joy to others - do not drain your reservoir of peace, but add to it by the joy they awaken.

Whenever you feel pleasure, let it remind you of soul-bliss, inwardly. Whenever you see beauty, take into yourself the joy you feel in it. Let every worldly happiness remind you of the much greater happiness of the Self.
Some yogis recommend complete indifference to the world. What a dry outlook! Far better is it, my Guru taught, to enjoy with God the beauties and the pure delights of this world, by focusing on the inner joy you feel during experiences that uplift the heart's feelings. Raise those feelings toward God, rather than suppressing them with dry, intellectually "inspired" apathy. In this way, too, one can absorb into himself, instead of leaking outward, whatever joys and pleasures the world gives him.

Website: http://www.essenceofthegita.com/excerpts.html