Word: radhakrishnan
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Cause & Effect. Oxford-trained Philosopher Radhakrishnan had behind him a career as vice chancellor of Benares Hindu University and professor of eastern religions and ethics at Oxford when he became India's Ambassador to Russia in 1949. Today, at 68, he is his country's Vice President. But Protestant Moses is sure he will be remembered far longer for his effect on Hinduism. His neo-Vedantism, says Moses, "has newly interpreted the basic conceptions of Hinduism." Since the classic commentators of the 13th century and before, "we have not had anyone in the intervening centuries equal to this...
...these new interpretations is that of Maya. Reality, says the classic Vedanta doctrine, is one-hence all plurality (Maya) is illusion. And if all man experiences is illusion, why worry about anything? This interpretation is widely blamed for the traditional passivity of Indians and their unconcern with social injustice. Radhakrishnan argues, says Moses, that "the spatiotemporal world is no empty dream or inexplicable illusion. It is only a lower order of reality, an order which has no being in itself but only in God." Consequently, this world becomes real, ethical behavior serious, and human history meaningful...
...Radhakrishnan has also sharply revised the doctrine of Karma. This belief teaches that each man is bound to an endless series of reincarnated lives, in each of which he expiates the sins accumulated in the life before. It has been criticized, writes Moses, "as implying an inescapable fatalism, as not allowing for any real freedom or forgiveness, and as being at the root of the terrible evil of untouchability." Radhakrishnan conceives Karma "as nothing more than the law of cause and effect in the moral world. 'Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.' " Karma, then, merely...
...Radhakrishnan's interpretation of Karma, says Dr. Moses, "is of tremendous practical significance. It comes to undergird the many efforts that are being made by the government and the people of India to lift the fallen, to remove untouchability and in general to help the less fortunate to help himself...
Beyond the Signpost. Dr. Radhakrishnan himself turns his face to the West in a new book out next week-a series of lectures delivered at Montreal's McGill University in 1954-under the title East & West, the End of their Separation (Harper; $2.50). To Westerners he stresses the movement of the heart rather than that of the head. "The essential religious experience is not a matter of belief in a set of propositions but is a movement of the whole self to the daily challenge of actual human relations." True to the essence of Hinduism, he sees many ways...