Kapil Kapoor Saturday Keynote Speaker
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ต.ค. 2024
- SATURDAY INTERNATIONAL KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Kapil Kapoor, PhD |Former Pro-Vice Chancellor, Jawaharlal Nehru University | INDIA
TITLE: De-subjugating Timeless Vocabularies -- Swami Vivekananda as Intellectual Catalyst
To say Vedas are not sacred and one can tear them up and no one in India will say a thing is deeply wrong. This is what Kapilji is saying in this video.
+Meera Cruz But in the same breath he says Vedas are important and central to Hindu society and culture because they are knowledge texts. Of course they are sacred, but not in the sense of the Bible or Quran. Vedas can interpreted in the light of the times while keeping their essential core teaching intact.This cannot be done with Bible of Quran.
People in India will be hurt by such an act obviously. But those who are knowledgeable in tradition will have no problem with it. Indian religion is not book based. It is experience based. The vedic utterances will be heard by anyone who has reached the right level of consciousness. The Hindu mythology says that Vishnu will come to the help of Dharma when it is in danger, by being the driving force of living creatures on this planet. In the very first avatar, Vishnu rescued the vedas. This is not because of protecting the vedas (which need no protection), but due to his love for the living creatures of this world, which need Vedic guidance.
Also in the end he dismisses Swami Vivekananda's works as mere trifle. Saying he is probably not all that relevant...the professor could not be more wrong in this ridiculous view. Which Indian today could even attempt to understand Vedanta if it was not for Swami Vivekananda's enormous body of works. This is an attempt by the Professor to dismiss a great and vast body of commentary on Vedanta by Swami Vivekananda. It shows that Prof Kapoor has a poor understanding of Vedanta - the very philosophy he is trying to defend.
Of course, it is not a disservice to Vivekananda to say he is less important than Adi Shankara. This is obvious. Shastra is not mere commentary on books. That is what people do in Christian seminaries. Hindu tradition is not like that. Shastra can be produced only by a Rishi - a seer. Vivekanada admitted that he is not a Rishi. He is a Manishi, one who worked with mental framework of argumentation. As Prof. Kapoor argues here, Vivekanada has been of great help in the rising consciousness of India, but his importance need not be overstated. The only people who overstate his importance are western Indologists who want to build a theory that "modern Hinduism" is simply the ideological contribution of Vivekananda, and that it never existed before. They are obviously having nefarious reasons for this argumentation. They are also utterly hopelessly wrong, as Prof. Kapoor shows here.
Bad videography. USC should be embarrassed at such poor shaky and drifting video.