Sat Ma­haraj

For more than 150 years, Hin­dus in Trinidad had to face their re­li­gious and colo­nial crit­ics, who de­scribed them as pa­gans with no sense of hy­giene.Their worst crit­ics were the con­verts from Hin­duism who nev­er took the time to study the deep philoso­phies of ei­ther the four Vedas (Rig, Athar­va, Sama and Ya­jur) or any or the sa­cred scrip­tures. In fact, our pun­dits and teach­ers were the ob­ject of fun and ridicule.

But to­day, Hin­duism is be­ing stud­ied in near­ly every uni­ver­si­ty in North Amer­i­ca and Eu­rope, and some of the finest and most re­veal­ing the­ses are writ­ten in the Eng­lish lan­guage by non-In­di­an au­thors.In the Lon­don-pub­lished month­ly mag­a­zine Hin­du To­day, is­sue No 44 of Oc­to­ber 2011, writ­ing of the phi­los­o­phy of Swa­mi Vivekanan­da: "For west­ern thinkers, man is ei­ther an an­i­mal or a ma­chine. Hin­dus on the oth­er hand be­lieve that he is es­sen­tial­ly di­vine.

"Sec­ond­ly, where­as west­ern sa­vants have pos­tu­lat­ed on­ly three ul­ti­mate goals for a man, viz sen­su­al en­joy­ment (ka­ma), ac­qui­si­tion of earth­ly rich­es (artha), and ful­fill­ment of so­cial oblig­a­tions (dhar­ma), the In­di­an philoso­phers have pos­tu­lat­ed a fourth and fi­nal goal: lib­er­a­tion (mok­sha), the state of fullest man­i­fes­ta­tion of in­nate di­vin­i­ty and per­fec­tion.

http://www.guardian.co.tt/dig­i­tal/new-mem­bers