Word: vedanta
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Huxley and Waugh share many things apart from talent and an interest in drugs and religion (in Huxley's case mescaline and Vedanta, in Waugh's wine and Roman Catholicism). Each has a deep artistic integrity and an interest in odd characters -almost, unlike modern young men, to the exclusion of his own. If the '20s and '30s are remembered as nothing more than a dismal tract of history leading to present discontents, it will be partly because two wondrously articulate Fools were wiser than the lugubrious Lear of the tottering old order, whose motley they...
Under the impact of rationalism and religious competition, reform began. Its first leaders were Ramakrishna (1836-86) and his disciple, Vivekananda (1863-1902). Mystical Ramakrishna, who said he reached union with God through Islam and Christianity as well as Hinduism, presented Vedanta as a religion of direct experience rather than mere traditional observance. Vivekananda injected a new sense of social responsibility by stressing Hinduism's teaching that God is in every man. Mahatma Gandhi (whom Agnostic Nehru once called "terribly Hindu") showed India how practical and effective religion could be even in the field of politics. Nehru carried...
...most important of 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...
Actress Byington sees an even more important message. Primed by extensive off-camera reading ("Books to me are my favorite stuff of the world"), with a working knowledge in psychology that ranges from Vedanta to Karen Homey, Spring believes that her role of Lily Ruskin in Bride proves that "Lily hasn't lost her appetite for life and is now free to do ridiculous things. She can play with life much more because she is mature of heart. She isn't stopped because other people are not doing it. She drives to Mexico alone. If something appeals...
...this is said mildly--as Ingalls says most things --but with a certain vehemence of authority. For Daniel Ingalls sees in the unfolding of modern India the echoes of the Nyaya's, the Veda's, and Vedanta's--the Indian philosophies he loves, and knows, so well...