Daily Challenge Day to Day 108

P1026120.3.jpg
Join to see EXIF info for this image (if available)
 
When you see what has become of this spiritual beacon that gave mankind the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Puranas long time before the start of the three great Western religions and the Greek Pantheon and has deeply influenced Tao, Buddhism and Zen, you are saddened. The Bhagavad-Gita is one of the important sources of the Bible and was read by Einstein, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Hesse, Huxley, Thoreau, von Humboldt and Oppenheimer - just to mention a few.
 
Last edited:
This is very true. I only read some of this material because I took a group of students to India once to study the health care system. It was so eye-opening to see a non-western religious tradition. More to the point, to realize the ancient and vast collection of thinking abound the nature of the universe of which so few in the west are aware. Of course, I also learned that the sentence from the Bhagavad Gita that Oppenheimer quoted as "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" is actually (or at least typically) translated as "I am Time, the destroyer of worlds." This certainly made more sense to me.
 
My bottom bracket arrived today from the UK. I'm still waiting on a couple of small bits to complete the build. Speaking of which, building a bike a la carte is not the best approach to getting another bike. My first choice would have been to find an older bike and strip it down to the bare frame and rebuild it, but I just couldn't find what I wanted. I did find a couple of old ratty frames that I had planned to refinish, but they both turned out to have fairly serious issues that made them unusable. Buy cheap, buy twice.

DSCF0216.JPG
Join to see EXIF info for this image (if available)
 
This is very true. I only read some of this material because I took a group of students to India once to study the health care system. It was so eye-opening to see a non-western religious tradition. More to the point, to realize the ancient and vast collection of thinking abound the nature of the universe of which so few in the west are aware. Of course, I also learned that the sentence from the Bhagavad Gita that Oppenheimer quoted as "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" is actually (or at least typically) translated as "I am Time, the destroyer of worlds." This certainly made more sense to me.
The second translation is by far better.
A friend of mine read some of the ancient Indian books on maths and astronomy and was absolutely baffled. He was already quite well-read in Pythagoras and some other Greeks. As to the Bhagavad-Gita: there is no other book that shows people the way to either just living a good life or to tread the spiritual path. Absolutely no dogmatism or narrow-mindedness. I like this Indian view that there are many ways leading to the goal because people are different. Anybody who seriously searches will find. And this is quite different from new-age shopping-mall spiritualism.
 
Back
Top