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RENOWNED THINKERS ON VEDANTA

NIKOLA TESLA AND SWAMI VIVEKANANDA

 

 Prof. Max Meuller

"Vedanta is the most sublime of all philosophies, and the most comforting of all religions.
If philosophy is meant to be a preparation for a happy death, or Euthanasia,
I know of no better preparation for it than the Vedanta philosophy."
Prof. Max Muller

 Dr Paul Deussen

"On the tree of Indian wisdom there is no fairer flower than the Upanishads,
no finer fruit than the Vedanta philosophy."
Prof. Paul Deussen

 Sir William Jones  

"It is impossible to read the Vedanta, or the many fine compositions in illustration of it,
without believing that Pythagoras and Plato derived their sublime theories
from the same fountain with the sages of India."
Sir William Jones

 Sir Monier Monier Williams

"Indeed if I may be allowed the anachronism, the Hindus were Spinozites more than 2000 years before the existence of Spinoza; Darwinians many centuries before the doctrine of evolution was accepted by the scientists of our time, and before any word like evolution existed in any language of the world."
Sir Monier Monier Williams

 

 Friedrich von Schlegel

"Even the loftiest philosophy of the Europeans, the idealism of reason, as it is set forth by Greek philosophers, appears in comparison with the abundant light and vigor of Oriental idealism, like a feeble Promethean spark in the full flood of heavenly glory of the noonday sun—faltering and feeble, and ever ready to be extinguished."
Friedrich von Schlegel

 Peter Cooper Hewitt

"New York. Wednesday, 5 February 1896. Supper at Mrs Austin Corbin’s house. Mme. Sarah Bernhardt, the great French tragedienne, arrived at the Corbin house soon after her labors at the theatre were over, and there found Swami Vivekananda arrayed in his rather showy robes 'of office and, surrounding him was a brilliant company of young people, including Mrs. Adolf Ladenburg, Mr. and Mrs. Peter Cooper Hewitt, Lieutenant and Mrs. Gianni Bettini, M. Victor Maurel, Miss Caroline Duer, Mr. Charles Mathews, Mr. Creighton Webb, Mr. J. Norman de R. Whitehouse, Mr. Frederic H. Baldwin and Professor Nikola Tesla, the electrician."
Peter Cooper Hewitt discovered the "mercury lamp" and got a patent. This was the direct antecedent of the fluorescent lamp.


 

SCIENTISTS ON VEDANTIC CONCEPTS

Prof. Dr. Hans-Peter Dürr

Please read an interview with the world-renowned physicist on Vedanta and science:
IN GERMAN HERE                       About his thoughts: HERE

Prof. Lothar Schafer on Unity of Existence
Please watch Prof Lothar Schafer's interview in the Netherlands

on Science and Non-Duality (or Advaita). HERE

 

"In the West, major philosophical schools (such as rationalism, utilitarianism, existentialism, et. al) were each developed by a few highly individualistic thinkers in a chronological order over a relatively short period of time (2,500 years or thereabouts). In India, however, six orthodox schools developed simultaneously over thousands of years. While individuals may be associated with these schools (Shankara with Vedanta, for example), each philosophy represents centuries of development and refinement by many thinkers (not necessarily Hindu): no one genius is the guiding light behind a particular philosophy."

Linda Brown Holt (author of Viewing Meister Eckhart through the Bhagavad Gita)

"Vedanta and Buddhism are the highlights of Indian philosophical thought."

Helmuth von Glasenapp

Thinkers on Vedanta

"I knew however that the forest thinkers of Asiaitic countries had leisurely pondered this problem long before the first sarada Greeks had begun to ponder it in Europe. Moreover there was this vital difference that whereas the Western thinkers usually claimed that nobody had discovered ultimate truth and that human limitations were so narrow that nobody was likely to discover it, the authors of old Asiatic books claimed that ultimate truth was certainly discoverable and that a few sages had definitely known it."

Paul Brunton

"Yoga has been practiced in India for thousands of years as a vital part of Hinduism."

Rev. Johan D. Tangelder
[Reverend Johan D, Tangelder was born on April 16, 1936, in Amsterdam. In 1954 he immigrated to Canada with his family.]

 Dr Victor Cousin

"When we read with attention the poetical and philosophical monuments of the East, above all, those of India, which are beginning to spread in Europe, we discover there many a truth, and truths so profound, and which make such a contrast with the meanness of the results at which the European genius has sometimes stopped, that we are constrained to bend the knee before the philosophy of the East, and to see in this cradle of the human race the native land of the highest philosophy."
"The history of Indian philosophy is the abridged history of the philosophy of the world."

Dr Victor Cousin

 Henry David Thoreau

"In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial…"

Henry David Thoreau

 Dr Erwin Schrödinger

"The multiplicity is only apparent. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads. And not of the Upanishads only. The mystical experience of the union with God regularly leads to this view, unless strong prejudices stand in the West."

Dr Erwin Schrödinger

 

"Shastravid incorporates an example of the new research paradigm and at the same time facilitates further academic research based on the same approach. Its name, Śāstravid, which denotes someone knowledgeable about the commentarial treatises (śāstra), indicates its focus: to provide a key that unlocks the contents of the texts by bringing together the information contained in commentarial works, both ancient and modern, in such a way that it is easily accessible from the text itself. Śāstravid is more specific than other projects providing electronic texts since its focus is philosophical texts composed according to the root text/commentary model.

Dr Jan Westerhoff

 

Indologists from the Netherlands

1. Herman Neubronner van der Tuuk    (23 February 1824 – 17 August 1894)

 

2. Willem Caland     (August 27, 1859, Brielle - March 23, 1932)

 

3. Jan Gonda     (14 April 1905 and died in Utrecht on 28 July 1991)

 

4. Johannes Adrianus Bernardus van Buitenen     (21 May 1928 - 21 September 1979)

 

5.. Johannes Gijsbertus de Casparis (31 May 1916, Eemnes - 19 June 2002)

 

6. FRITZ STAAL , Vedic scholar

 

7. Koot van Wyk, Grammar specialist on Panini

"Let every man and woman and child, without respect of caste or birth, weakness or strength, hear and learn that behind the strong and the weak,
behind the high and the low, behind every one, there is that Infinite Soul, assuring the infinite possibility
and the infinite capasarada of all to become great and good. Let us proclaim to every soul: Uttishtata, Jâgrata--arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached."

Swami Vivekananda