What Is Hinduism?

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C H A P T E R   8§

The Vedic Experience

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A Bouquet of Verses from the Vedas, Hinduism’s Most Venerated Scripture§

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imageNE OF THE BEST OF THE MANY TRANSLATIONS of the Vedas into the English language comes from an unexpected source, the famed Catholic theologian Raimon Panikkar. For twelve years, with the help of a team of Hindu pandits and Sanskrit scholars in Banaras, India, he struggled to bring the ancient texts into clear, accurate and inspired English. The result is a monumental scholarly achievement. The following seven pages of excerpts are drawn from The Vedic Experience, which Professor Panikkar wrote while living at the Catholic diocese in Banaras on the Ganga River from 1964 to 1976. The verses presented here were selected to give a sense of the variety and beauty of content throughout the Vedas. They follow Panikkar’s creative and insightful ordering of the ancient texts into seven sections, corresponding to seven parts of an Earth day, a human life and a cosmic cycle. This provides a useful structure to the extremely diverse collection of hymns which comprise the Veda. The entire text is available at www.himalayanacademy.com/books/vedic_experience/VEIndex.html. Panikkar’s seven sections excerpted over the next seven pages are:
1. Dawn: The preparation for birth into existence, fertile ground ready for planting.
2. Germination: The beginning, the striving, the affirmation of identity in the realm of existence.
3. Blossoming: The attainment of plenitude, of maturity, the zenith of a life well spent.
4. Fall and Decay: The beginning of the downward path, the natural decline of life, the discovery that nothing resists time.
5. Death: The destiny of all existing things, and the natural close of a physical life cycle.
6. New Life: The marvelous reemergence of life out of the ordeal of death, the disclosure that life is immortal, that being is unfathomable, and that bliss and reality are capable of self-renewal.
7. Twilight: The last part of the anthology, like a bouquet ribbon, binds the six in summary.
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Raimon Panikkar during a visit to Hinduism Today headquarters in Hawaii in 1991§

To illustrate these magnificent translations, special art was commissioned by HINDUISM TODAY from renowned artist S. Rajam of Chennai in South India.§

Raimon Panikkar was born in Barcelona, Spain, in 1918 of an Indian Hindu father and a Spanish Roman Catholic mother. Information on his early years is sketchy. He was a brilliant student and studied philosophy and chemistry in Barcelona, Madrid and Bonn, and theology in Madrid and Rome. He earned an astounding three doctorates in philosophy, chemistry and theology. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1946, serving as a scholar and theologian, and not, apparently, as a parish priest. In 1953 Panikkar left Spain to live in India where he taught at the Universities of Mysore and Banaras, specializing in Indian philosophy and Christian-Hindu understanding. He has been a professor at the Universities of Madrid, Rome, Harvard and the University of California at Santa Barbara.§

Panikkar played a key roll in the writing of Nostra Aetate, the “Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” released by the Second Vatican Council in 1965. Though most certainly a devout Christian, he championed the concept of respect for other faiths, so much so that some call him the “apostle of interreligious dialogue.” To this day the Catholic Church’s relationship to other religions as defined in Nostra Aetate remains a delicate issue both inside and outside the Church. It was just after participating in Vatican II, which changed the face of modern Catholicism, that he departed to India to write The Vedic Experience.§

He has written more than 30 books and 900 articles, including the following: The Trinity and the World’s Religions; Blessed Simplicity; Worship and Secular Man; The Silence of God: The Answer of the Buddha. Panikkar makes his home in the mountains of Catalunya, Spain.§