Is Yoga Hinduism?

Spirituality Religion
#301

I am actually discovering new quotes myself now as I read more on this. I think this all needs to be compiled and published in a book to show the world just how evil the British were to India:

According to Karl Marx writing in 1853, the British had “a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating”. They had accomplished the destructive in a way that unveiled before our eyes "all the profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization…turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked.”

Writing about the outbreak of the Great Rebellion, he discussed “the official Blue Books on the subject of East India torture, which was laid before the House of Commons during the seasons of 1856 and 1857”. These reports established “the universal existence of torture as a financial institution of British India .”

Karl Marx pointed out:

“From the real history of British rule in India. In view of such facts, dispassionate and thoughtful men may perhaps be led to ask whether a people are not justified in attempting to expel the foreign conquerors who have so abused their subjects.”

What did this torture involve? It ranged from rough manhandling through flogging and placing in the stocks and then on to more extreme measures:

“Searing with hot irons….dipping in wells and river till the victim is half suffocated…squeezing the testicles…putting pepper and red chillies in the eyes or introducing them into the private parts of men and women….prevention of sleep…nipping the flesh with pincers…suspension from the branches of a tree…imprisonment in a room used for storing lime…”

What is remarkable is how little this regime of torture has figured in accounts of British rule in India.

It is a hidden history that has been unremarked on and almost completely unexplored. Book after book remains silent on the subject. This most surely calls into question the whole historiography of the Raj. One last point is worth noting here: the extent to which everyday relations between the British and Indian subjects were characterized by abuse and violence. Servants were routinely abused as “niggers” and assaulted and beaten by their masters, something that worsened during and after the Great Rebellion.

Lord Elgin (1811- 1863) writing in August 1857, described British feelings towards the Indians as consisting of “detestation, contempt, ferocity.” This everyday abuse and violence continued until the end of the British Raj.

#302

[B]The evil holocaust of the Indian people by the British: How the British turned the most wealthiest and advanced country in the world to one of the poorest and backwards[/B]

As the great Indian political economist Romesh Chunder Dutt pointed out in one of his Open Letters to Lord Curzon British Progress was India’s Ruin. The railroads, ports and canals which enthused Karl Marx in the 1850s were for resource extraction, not indigenous development. The taxes that financed the railroads and the Indian army pauperised the peasantry. Not surprisingly, there was no increase in India’s per capita income during the whole period of British overlordship from 1757 to 1947. Celebrated cash-crop booms went hand in hand with declining agrarian productivity and food security. Moreover, two decades of demographic growth (in the 1870s and 1890s) were entirely wiped out in avoidable famines, while throughout that ‘glorious imperial half century’ from 1871 to 1921 immortalised by Kipling, the life expectancy of ordinary Indians fell by a staggering 20 per cent.

Nick Robins in his article titled “Loot” has said: “The East India Company found India rich and left it poor.”

And for many Indians, it was the Company’s plunder that first de-industrialized that country and then provided the finance that fuelled Britain’s own industrial revolution." There was no increase in India per capita income between 1757 and 1947" In the beginning, Britain was buying cloth made in India. In the end, India was buying cloth made in Britain, paying for it not only with money but with the blood of its people. History teaches us that history must never be forgotten.

(source: East India Company - By Omar Kureishi )

According to Francois Gautier: " The British did impoverish India: according to British records, one million Indians died of famine between 1800 and 1825, 4 million between 1825 and 1850, 5 million between 1850 and 1875 and 15 million between 1875 and 1900. Thus 25 million Indians died in 100 years! (Since Independence, there has been no such famines, a record of which India should be proud.)

William Samuel Lilly, in his India and Its Problems writes as follows:

“During the first eighty years of the nineteenth century, 18,000,000 of people perished of famine. In one year alone – the year when her late Majesty assumed the title of Empress – 5,000,000 of the people in Southern India were starved to death. In the District of Bellary, with which I am personally acquainted, – a region twice the size of Wales, – one-fourth of the population perished in the famine of 1816-77. I shall never forget my own famine experiences: how, as I rode out on horseback, morning after morning, I passed crowds of wandering skeletons, and saw human corpses by the roadside, unburied, uncared for, and half devoured by dogs and vultures; how, sadder sight still, children, ‘the joy of the world,’ as the old Greeks deemed, had become its ineffable sorrow, and were forsaken by the very women who had borne them, wolfish hunger killing even the maternal instinct. Those children, their bright eyes shining from hollow sockets, their nesh utterly wasted away, and only gristle and sinew and cold shivering skin remaining, their heads mere skulls, their puny frames full of loathsome diseases, engendered by the starvation in which they had been conceived and born and nurtured – they haunt me still.” Every one who has gone much about India in famine times knows how true to life is this picture.

Says Sir Charles Elliott long the Chief Commissioner of Assam, “Half the agricultural population do not know from one half year’s end to another what it is to have a full meal.” Says the Honorable G. K. Gokhale, of the Viceroy’s Council, “From 60,000,000 to 70,000,000 of the people of India do not know what it is to have their hunger satisfied even once in a year.”

(source: India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom - By Jabez T. Sunderland p. 11-12).

#303

I really hope all Indians reading this sit up and take notice of the evil, atrocities and persecution inflicted on your people. You owe it to yourself to let the world know what happened, just as the blacks have kept the memory of the slave trade alive and the Jews the holocausts. What was done to Indians was infinitelty worse.

The West are responsible for India’s poor and downtrodden. They have never compensated us for 400 years of rape, plunder, pillaging, starvation and cultural poisoning. Not even a formal apology.

The West are condemned by their history. And karma will catch up.

#304

is hinduism yoga?

#305

Myth: British liberated women

Fact: British raped Indian women out in the open in public:

In a ‘letter to a Member of the National Assembly,’ written in 1772, Edmund Burke (1729-1797) British statesman, parliamentary orator and political thinker, played a prominent part in all major political issues for about 30 years after 1765, and remained an important figure in the history of political theory, describes the colonial relationship between England and India as poised between courtship and rape: 1767, he declared, marked the year when the “administration discovered that the East India Company were guardians to a very handsome and rich lady in Hindostan.

" Virgins, who had never seen the sun, were dragged from the innocent sanctuaries of their houses, and in the open court of justice…(but where no judge or lawful magistrate had long sat, but in their place the ruffians and hangmen of Warren Hastings occupied the bench), these virgins, vainly invoking heaven and earth, in the presence of their parents…publicly violated by the lowest and wickedest of the human race. Wives were torn from the arms of their husbands, and suffered the same flagitious wrongs, which were indeed hid in the bottoms of the dungeons in which their honor and their liberty were buried together…But it did not end there. Growing from crime to crime, ripened by cruelty for cruelty, these fiends….these infernal furies planted death in the source of life, where that modesty, which more than reason, distinguished men from beasts, retires from the view, and even shrinks from the expression, there they exercised and glutted their unnatural, monstrous, and nefarious cruelty."

In short, Burke charged Hastings with implementing policies that destroyed “the honor of the whole female race” in India.

(source: Writing Under The Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination 1830-1947 - By Nancy L. Paxton).

#306

You are not coming to the point. Leave the british rule and come back to proving that Hinduism is the greatest religion (which you have said again and again and again)
Read the main issue again which is that High class Hindus, including hindu gods and so called Maryada Purshottams sinned against humanity, they treated other people as lesser humans, even worse than animals. I quote myself again.

[QUOTE=whatsinaname;37454]What a web of delusion! The sad part is that people like blame Britishers for their own shortcomings. Britishers did invade India and they did rule for two centuries and they did exploit us. But So did other muslim rulers for one thousand years. Britishers never had a chance to change the very grass-root nature of village people in India. It never happened.

India changed tremendously during the British rule but the top layers of administration, polity. The social evils of Hindus like sati, child marriage, caste system, oppression of women, condemning widows to a life of wretchedness all this was already there. In fact Britishers brought in several social reforms. They banned Sati, made it a legal offence.
None of the great Hindus ever made a law against it. Britishers did. A fact is a fact.

It is a well known fact that Raja Ram Mohan Roy, one of the pioneers of social reform in India was thoroughly in favour of western education and social ideals.

Let me just quote from wikipedia what Sri Ambedkar had to face in life.

This is the kind of inhuman treatment which Millions of ‘low castes’ suffered for thousands of years. And you are soooo lying when you say before Britishers came

I am so deeply insulted when people like you now come forward and give tall speeches of how great Hinduism is. If it was this great it would have not done what they did.

Hindus followed caste system down to the last word! They did that. And it was done long before the britishers came on the scene.
In fact there are evidences that caste system was prevalent in many earlier periods like Gupta dynasty.
The brahmins should hang their heads in shame over what they did to the dalits.

Self Sacrifice? He sacrificed not himself but another human being. Where is all the rationality now?

Doing injustice just to keep the gossip down! Condemning a woman to years and years of jungle life! Is that the kind of rationality and a scientific attitude which Hinduism promotes? Can such a person be considered as an Ideal man? If not then how is hinduism superior over other religions? Say one thing and practice another? How is that right?

Do not try to fool westerners into thinking that ‘Oh things were not that bad!’ because they were not just bad they were the worst possible.

Britishers did not create the problem. Problem was there since thousands of years and Brahmins and Kshatriyas, the ones who read and listened to Vedas, they sinned against a large part of humanity for thousands of years![/QUOTE]

Saints like Ravidass raised their voice against this. If you say British played up the caste system problem then what about the medieval period saints who denounced the caste system? why did they do that if it was not a big problem?
Here is what wikipedia says (there is no need for me to quote great books and authors for things which are widely accepted facts in indian society)

During the 14-17th centuries, a great bhakti movement swept through Central and Northern India, initiated by a loosely associated group of teachers or sants. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Vallabha, Surdas, Meera Bai, Kabir, Tulsidas, Ravidas, Namdeo, Dnyaneshwar, Tukaram and other mystics spearheaded the Bhakti movement in the North. They taught that people could cast aside the[B] heavy burdens of ritual and caste[/B], and the subtle complexities of philosophy, and simply express their overwhelming love for God. This period was also characterized by a spate of devotional literature in vernacular prose and poetry in the ethnic languages of the various Indian states or provinces.

The truth is that Hinduism was the most degraded form of religion before these saints from so called low castes came to fore. And they denounced vedas! they denounced pundits and their rituals.
The Veda and other scriptures are just flights of fancy of well-fed ruling classes. There is nothing scientific about them nor rational.

These saints practiced yoga YET they denounced vedas.

Therefore this proves beyond doubt that YOGA and Hinduism are not one and the same thing. Hinduism is just a system of ruling and exploitation of other humans of the so called ‘lower classes’

#307

You are not coming to the point. Leave the british rule

However, that is exactly the point. You want to know ther source of your angst and I am telling you what it is. The British. Your community of Dalits would not have been impoverished or oppressed today otherwise. Like I said, the entire population of India was starved to death. It’s industries were destroyed. It’s traditional systems were outlawed. Prior to the British coming to India, your community was prosperous. All of India was prosperous. It was the wealthist and most advanced nation in the world and its goods were of excellent quality that it exported around the world.

I am not saying Pre-colonial India was utopia. It was not a perfect society by any means, but compared to any other society in the world it was a prosperous, civil and advanced society. Prior to pre-Islamic India, when India was under Hindu rule, India was an even greater society. Like I said it had a 32.9% share of the worlds GDP. No nation in the history of humanity has ever been so powerful and prosperous. Even America today does not have that much power.

If what you are saying about Hinduism is true then India would have never created such prosperity. The truth is you are only looking at Indian history from the periods between 1000AD and 2000AD when India was not a Hindu country. It was invaded by Muslims, who killed during their reign 50 million Hindus. It is during this period the practice of child marriage and sati is most prevalent. Then it was invaded by the British and they killed just as many Hindus. It is during this period that the practice of caste oppression reaches its pinnacle and dowry murders take place. So you are judging Hinduism during a period when India was occupied by other religions: Islam and Christianity? You are saying social practices during those times belong to Hinduism, when in reality they are the resultant of Islam and Christianity.

In India’s approx 10,000 years of history you are only looking at the last 1000 years when India was occupied and Hindus had to live in constant terror, lest they get raped, murdered, beaten up by their colonizers, and you are generalizing that to Hinduism. This is hardly sensible. There are approx 9000 years of Hindu history when India was actually fully under Hinduism you are not looking at: The Indus valley period, the Maurayan period, the Gupta period, the Chola period.

There is no evidence that in these 9000 years the caste system was ever an endemic problem in Indian society. On the other hand, there is evidence that class prejudices existed(this is evident as early as the Mahabharata period) which is hardly surprising, as class prejudice exists today as well in every society in the world.

The exaggeration of caste system problems was British propoganda against the Brahmin community because the Brahmins were a highly educated class in Indian society and they were highly critical of the British and Christian theology which missionaries were trying to feed to the Indian masses. The Brahmins were involved all various social upliftment projects to help the Indian masses against the onslaught by British missionaries and oppression, and this is why the British failed to convert Indians to Christianity. The East India company eventually recalled all the missionaries saying they had failed. Instead in order to demean the Brahmins they enlisted the help of scholars in Oxford and tried to depict them as oppressors and a clergy of Hinduism. They tried to turn Indian people against the Brahmins by spreading propoganda. One of the biggest pieces of propoganda was the Brahmins are a foreign race(Aryan) that invaded the poor Indians in 1500BCE. The classic divide and rule tactic that the British admitted they used.

The truth is Hinduism has never had any clergy or organized religious institution. In fact, Hinduism was never an organized religion.

What I find interesting is how you uncritically accept propoganda from 19th century British who everybody knows in the world were racist, hated non-whites, called them heathens and exterminated many of them. Do you also believe that black people have low IQ’s and black slaves trying to run away suffer from a mental disease, and that whites are a superior race?

#308

A religious system which is created for the ruling classes is unacceptable to any modern rational mind.

Yoga is the path of union with God/Supreme-Being. This path was practiced by some individuals all over the world. Some happened to be amongst the ancient Indians. But yoga was never hinduism.

Anybody who walked on the path of self realisation and union with God was and is a yogi. Be it christian or a buddhist. That is why yoga was quite a common term used in buddhist scriptures in India, China as well as Japan.

And similarly Jesus Christ was a Yogi, he realised God as directly as any of the Vedic saints. And just as the vedic saints says [B]‘Aham Brahasmi’[/B] so does Jesus say ‘come to me’. When Jesus says he is the saviour he is speaking from a point which only few wise people can understand.

Sufi saint Sarmad was beheaded because he said similar statements. He was a yogi too. Just as Meher Baba was a great Yogi. And Meher Baba did not read vedas.

Shirdi Sai Baba did not read vedas. And even then he realised God and blessed millions with divine grace.

This proves that Yoga is not exclusive to Hinduism and that [B]yoga is NOT hinduism.
[/B]Yoga is the path of self realisation, and union with the supreme being.

Hinduism cannot claim it exclusively just because they coined a word for it before others did. Coining a word (‘yoga’) does not mean you own it.

There were Yogis before vedas came into existence. Those who are great enlightened being say these things. Since humans were created Supreme Being has blessed the path of Yoga to certain indivuduals. Those who walk this path understand this.

Just because the word Yoga is mentioned in Hindu scriptures does not mean Hindus discovered yoga. Yoga is eternal, it was there before even vedas came into being.

Hinduism is a religion which is created by high class brahmins who wanted to rule other classes.

This is clear as daylight.

#309

Sai Baba of Shirdi was a great yogi. He is indisputably accepted by muslims and hindus.

The readers of this thread should please read a short article on Sai baba here:

This would prove that being a Yogi does not necessarily mean being a Hindu.

#310

The British were not wrong in their distrust of educated Brahmins in whom they saw a potential threat to their supremacy in India. For instance, in 1879 the Collector of Tanjore in a communication to Sir James Caird, member of the Famine Commission, stated that “there was no class (except Brahmins ) which was so hostile to the English.” The predominance of the Brahmins in the freedom movement confirmed the worst British suspicions of the community. Innumerable CID reports of the period commented on Brahmin participation at all levels of the nationalist movement. In the words of an observer, “If any community could claim credit for driving the British out of the country, it was the Brahmin community. Seventy per cent of those who were felled by British bullets were Brahmins”.

For more on Anti-Brahminism and Anti-Hinduism refer to The Indian Jews - By Jakob De Roover - Outlookindia.com June 20, 2008.

#311

The attempt to rewrite Indian history, Brahmins began to be portrayed as oppressors and tyrants who willfully kept down the rest of the populace. Their role in the development of Indian society was deliberately slighted. In ancient times, for example, Brahmins played a major part in the spread of new methods of cultivation (especially the use of the plough and manure) in backward and aboriginal areas. The Krsi-parasara, compiled during this period, is testimony to their contribution in this field. Apart from misrepresenting the Indian past, the British actively encouraged anti-Brahmin sentiments. Apart from misrepresenting the Indian past, the British actively encouraged anti-Brahmin sentiments. A number of scholars have commented on their involvement in the anti-Brahmin movement in South India. As a result of their machinations non-Brahmins turned on the Brahmins with a ferocity that has few parallels in Indian history. This was all the more surprising in that for centuries Brahmins and non-Brahmins had been active partners and collaborators in the task of political and social management.

(source: The Plight of Brahmins - By Meenakshi Jain - The Indian Express, Tuesday, September 18, 1990).).

#312

Brahmins were identified as the ‘clergy’ or the priests of Hinduism. An explicit hostility towards the heathen priesthood was not helped by the inability of the messengers of God’s word to convert Brahmins to Christianity. In Brahmins, they came across a literate group, which was able to read, write, do arithmetic, conduct ‘theological’ discussions, etc. During the first hundred years or so, this group was the only source of information about India as far as the missionaries were concerned. Schooled to perform many administrative tasks, the Brahmins were mostly the only ones well-versed in the European languages – enough to communicate with the Europeans. In short, they appeared both to be the intellectual group and the most influential social layer in the Indian social organization. Conversion of the heathens of India, as the missions painfully discovered, did not depend so much on winning the allegiance of the prince or the king as it did on converting the Brahmins.

As Francis Xavier saw the Brahmins: “If there were no Brahmans in the area, all the Hindus would accept conversion to our faith.”

The Brahmins, by and large, were unimpressed by the theological sophistication of the Christian critique of paganism. This attack was born out of the inability of Christianity to gain a serious foothold in the Indian society. The ‘red race’ was primitive – it could be decimated; the ‘blacks’ were backward – they could be enslaved; the ‘yellow’ and the ‘brown’ were inferior – they could be colonized. But how to convert them? One would persecute resistance and opposition. How to respond to indifference? The attitude of these heathens towards Christianity, it is this: indifference.

(source: The Heathen in His Blindness…: Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion - By S. Balagangadhara p. 82 -149).

It is fairly clear to any sensible person you are a victim of propoganda.

#313

During the 14-17th centuries, a great bhakti movement swept through Central and Northern India, initiated by a loosely associated group of teachers or sants. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Vallabha, Surdas, Meera Bai, Kabir, Tulsidas, Ravidas, Namdeo, Dnyaneshwar, Tukaram and other mystics spearheaded the Bhakti movement in the North.

I own books on the saints you just mentioned. All of these are widely recognised Hindu saints. They all teach Vedic philosophy. None of them rejected the Vedas. What they did was work towards social upliftment during this time period, when I will remind you again, India was under foreign occupation and Hindu people lived in hostile conditions. It is during this period, as I have already told you, casteism becomes endemic.

What I find very interesting is how you full of nothing but pure hatred for Hinduism and yet here you are glorifying Hindu saints who teach Vedic philosophy. I also find it interesting you are glorifying Christianity, and yet this is the religion that is responsible for the oppresion of your Dalit people in the first place. Have you ever heard of the Goa inquisitions?

Ever heard of Hindu inquisitions? Hindu crusades? Hindu witch burnings? And yet you prefer the religion of the people who raped, murdered, maimed your people for 400 years and left your community in destitution.

I think you have the world upside down my friend.

#314

[QUOTE=whatsinaname;37533]A religious system which is created for the ruling classes is unacceptable to any modern rational mind.

Yoga is the path of union with God/Supreme-Being. This path was practiced by some individuals all over the world. Some happened to be amongst the ancient Indians. But yoga was never hinduism. [/quote]

Nope, it was not practiced all over the world. It was practiced in India and then it was exported to other parts of the world. It was first exported to the Egyptian mystery schools. Then to the South East Asians. Then to the Greeks and Christians. Then to the Muslims. Finally to modern Western people.

There is absolutely no evidence that Yoga existed anywhere else in the world prior to India. The earliest archeaological evidence of Yoga is in the Indus valley period. The earliest description of the practice and philosophy Yoga is in the Vedas.

The philosophy of self-realization with the supreme being is only to be found in the Vedas and not in the scriptures of any other religion. In fact this philosophy is considered heretical by other religions.

Anybody who walked on the path of self realisation and union with God was and is a yogi. Be it christian or a buddhist. That is why yoga was quite a common term used in buddhist scriptures in India, China as well as Japan.

Yep, they adoped the philosophy and practice of Yoga from the Hindu religion.

And similarly Jesus Christ was a Yogi, he realised God as directly as any of the Vedic saints. And just as the vedic saints says [B]‘Aham Brahasmi’[/B] so does Jesus say ‘come to me’. When Jesus says he is the saviour he is speaking from a point which only few wise people can understand.

There is no evidence Jesus even existed, let alone that he was a Yogi. In the Gospels Jesus does not teach Yoga to anybody. What he teaches is that he is the son of god and the messiah, and he tells everybody to follow him and worship him and spread his name. He goes around moving from place to place showing people miracles as the signs that he is the messiah. He tells everybody to abandon their family, friends, possessions and get behind him.

In modern day language this is called a cult and Jesus a cult leader.

Sufi saint Sarmad was beheaded because he said similar statements. He was a yogi too. Just as Meher Baba was a great Yogi. And Meher Baba did not read vedas.

You do not have to read the Vedas. Hinduism does not say you need to read the Vedas. Hinduism says you must practice living a dharmic lifestyle and strive to reach self-realization/union with god.

This proves that Yoga is not exclusive to Hinduism and that [B]yoga is NOT hinduism.
[/B]Yoga is the path of self realisation, and union with the supreme being.

No, this proves that Yoga has been adopted by people from other religions. However, those people are considered heretics in their religion. You said it yourself the Sufi saints were beheaded.

There were Yogis before vedas came into existence. Those who are great enlightened being say these things. Since humans were created Supreme Being has blessed the path of Yoga to certain indivuduals. Those who walk this path understand this.

There is no historical evidence of yogis existing before the Vedas. I will reiterate the earliest description of the philosophy and practice of Yoga is in the Vedas. It is nowhere else to be found.

Hinduism is a religion which is created by high class brahmins who wanted to rule other classes.

Nope, as Hinduism as an organized religion never existed prior to the British. Hinduism was a name given to the various religious traditions in India, many of which to whom the saints you described earlier belonged and the common philosophy they practiced. There has never been this Brahmin oppressor boogeyman until colonial times. But even today there is no Brahmin clergy in Hinduism.

Something tells me you want to beleive in a myth that you are oppressed.

#315

The truth about the literacy, education of people in India prior to colonial times:

Dharampal ( - 2006) was a Gandhian in ceaseless search of truth like his preceptor Gandhi himself. He has demolished the myth that India was backward educationally or economically when the British entered. Citing the Christian missionary William Adam’s report on indigenous education in Bengal and Bihar in 1835 and 1838, Dharampal established that at that time there were 100,000 schools in Bengal, one school for about 500 boys; that the indigenous medical system that included inoculation against small-pox.

He also proved by reference to other materials that Adam’s record was ‘no legend’. He relied on Sir Thomas Munroe’s report to the Governor at about the same time to prove similar statistics about schools in Madras. He also found that the education system in the Punjab during the Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s rule was equally extensive. He estimated that the literary rate in India before the British was higher than that in England.

Citing British public records he established, on the contrary, that ‘British had no tradition of education or scholarship or philosophy from 16th to early 18th century, despite Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Newton, etc’. Till then education and scholarship in the UK was limited to select elite. He cited Alexander Walker’s Note on Indian education to assert that it was the monitorial system of education borrowed from India that helped Britain to improve, in later years, school attendance which was just 40, 000, yes just that, in 1792. He then compared the educated people’s levels in India and England around 1800. The population of Madras Presidency then was 125 lakhs and that of England in 1811 was 95 lakhs. Dharampal found that during 1822-25 the number of those in ordinary schools in Madras Presidency was around 1.5 lakhs and this was after great decay under a century of British intervention.

As against this, the number attending schools in England was half - yes just half - of Madras Presidency’s, namely a mere 75,000. And here to with more than half of it attending only Sunday schools for 2-3 hours! Dharampal also established that in Britain ‘elementary system of education at people’s level remained unknown commodity’ till about 1800! Again he exploded the popularly held belief that most of those attending schools must have belonged to the upper castes particularly Brahmins and, again with reference to the British records, proved that the truth was the other way round.

During 1822-25 the share of the Brahmin students in the indigenous schools in Tamil-speaking areas accounted for 13 per cent in South Arcot to some 23 per cent in Madras while the backward castes accounted for 70 per cent in Salem and Tirunelveli and 84 per cent in South Arcot.

The situation was almost similar in Malayalam, Oriya and Kannada-speaking areas, with the backward castes dominating the schools in absolute numbers. Only in the Telugu-speaking areas the share of the Brahmins was higher and varied from 24 to 46 per cent. Dharampal’s work proved Mahatma Gandhi’s statement at Chatham House in London on October 20, 1931 that “India today is more illiterate than it was fifty or hundred years ago” completely right.

Loads of myths have been busted in this thread. The myth of an oppressive Brahmin caste controlling everything being one of them.

#316

Nope, it was not practiced all over the world. It was practiced in India and then it was exported to other parts of the world. It was first exported to the Egyptian mystery schools. Then to the South East Asians. Then to the Greeks and Christians. Then to the Muslims. Finally to modern Western people.

Actually on the contrary, they may have not called it “yoga” and certainly didn’t use asanas(which are really a small facet of yoga), but people have been communing with the divine just as long as India has been around and certainly didn’t need to learn from india to do so.

Surya you need a Guru fast, really you do.

#317

I do not see evidence of a signicant number of people communing with the divine outside of India in ancient times. The next biggest civilisation the Sumerians were not certainly communing with the divine, they had an oppressive priestly class that saw themselves as the rulers, worshipped reptiile gods and gave them blood sacrifices. The Babylonians and Jews worshipped an angry and vengeful god, that ordained murder, rape, genocide and infanticide. The Greeks and Romans worshipped a pantheon of warring gods.

Let’s just face it outside of India the rest of the world were savages. Not Yogis. This is why they were exiled from Aryavarta(ancient name for India)
Yoga as a science of self realization started with the Hindus in India. They then took it to different parts of the world. However, because they were savage cultures, Yoga never flourished in these parts of the world, except in small mystery schools that remained underground out of fear of persecution.

#318

The chief architect of Indian Constitution, Dr B. R. Ambedkar had to face discrimination and segregation at the hands of high class brahmins. It was due to this he denounced Hindu religion and he converted to Buddhism, which is the first religion in India which treated all human beings with compassion. The Hindus created caste system, they segregated people into lower and higher castes.

On of the evils of Caste System was [B]untouchability[/B]
Here is what B. R. Ambedkar had to face:

Fight against untouchability

As he was educated by the Borada State, he was bound to serve the State. He was appointed as Military Secretary to the Gaikwar of Baroda, which he had to quit within short time, this fiasco was described by Ambedkar in his autobiography “Waiting for a Visa” he states that “This scene of a dozen Parsis armed with sticks line before me in a menacing mood, and myself standing before them with a terrified look imploring for mercy, is a scene which so long a period as eighteen years had not succeeded in fading away. I can even vividly recall it-- and I never recall it without tears in my eyes. It was then for the first time that I learnt that a person who is an untouchable to a Hindu is also an untouchable to a Parsi”.[5] Then after he tried to find ways to make a living for his growing family. He worked as private tutor, as an accountant, investment consulting business, but it failed when his clients learned that he was an untouchables. In 1918 he became Professor of Political Economy in the Sydenham College of Commerce and Economics in Bombay. Even though he was successful with the students, but other professors objected to his sharing the same drinking-water jug that they all used

The widespread dissent and oppression by the hindus is evident from the fact that almost 5,00,000 lower castes converted to Buddhism under the influence of Dr B.R. Ambedkar:

After meetings with the Sri Lankan Buddhist monk Hammalawa Saddhatissa,[14] Ambedkar organised a formal public ceremony for himself and his supporters in Nagpur on October 14, 1956. Accepting the Three Refuges and Five Precepts from a Buddhist monk in the traditional manner, Ambedkar completed his own conversion. He then proceeded to convert an estimated [B]500,000[/B] of his supporters who were gathered around him.[13]

You are conveniently trying brush under the carpet the fact that high class brahmins enforced evil of caste system and their deeds were not any less than what Hitler and other oppressors of humanity did.

You may try to fool westerners that Hindus were all so enlightened but the truth is that Buddhism and Jainism are actual proofs of revolt against the bigotry and oppression being done by Hindus at that time.

The modern brahmins are making strong efforts, to spread lies that caste oppression never took place. It is still taking place, what to say of past times!

It is due to this that Indian constitution is creating reservation in employment opportunities.

Right from the times of Jainism and Buddhism to Guru Ravidass and then upto modern times of Dr B. R. Ambedkar there are evidences of caste system and untouchability.

And after all this people like you say, ‘Oh that never happened…Oh Manu Smriti is nothing…Oh it was all the doing of British…blah blah blah’

You are living in denial.

It is surprising how people like you can claim that caste system is a myth when right at this moment there are millions of dalits who are considered socially inferior to higher classes. They are segregated and relegated to the lower ranks of society!

Hinduism is not Yoga. It is oppressive. Yoga is path of self joining with higher self.

#319

[QUOTE=Surya Deva;37543]
Let’s just face it outside of India the rest of the world were savages. Not Yogis.[/QUOTE]

There is always one in every crowd. Why are you so filled with pride? Wierd you talk about yoga and yet you really don’t Know a thing about it. You may be able to speak intellectually about it, youre what people call a parrot. You parrot all sorts of information you’ve read and yet you do not put in motion anything that has been read. I may not know you personally,but from your posts I can tell a lot about your personality.

I think you’re right, I think its time you find a true Guru stat!

Hinduism is not Yoga. It is oppressive. Yoga is path of self joining with higher self.

Mostly yes id agree. Thats why so many dalits became Buddhist, Sikhs or Jains.

#320

The chief architect of Indian Constitution, Dr B. R. Ambedkar had to face discrimination and segregation at the hands of high class brahmins. It was due to this he denounced Hindu religion and he converted to Buddhism, which is the first religion in India which treated all human beings with compassion. The Hindus created caste system, they segregated people into lower and higher castes.

You are on losing grounds now because I now provided you with tons of information, with valid citations and references to show that in pre-colonial India casteism was not endemic. The most recent reference I showed you showed clearly that in schools throughout India in pre-colonial India, the majority of students enrolled were from the lowest castes.

You simply keep on harping on about the oppression in colonial India. I have already told you I do not dispute you that oppression happened in colonial India, but the cause of this was the British who - I repeat - systematically deindustralized India, taxed it to death, outlawed its education and traditional systems, pillaged, raped, murdered, maimed Indian people and impoverished everybody, creating a ruthless climate of oppression, illiteracy and superstition. This is the period when casteism became a huge social evil in Indian society. Meanwhile, the Brahmins were trying to remedy these problems of caste evils and many Hindu Brahmins worked towards solving these problems.

Like I said, it sounds like you rather believe in the myth that you are oppressed. You would rather accept propoganda by racist British colonialists, than actual facts. I bet you also believe that the whites are a superior race then and black people are inferior. Do you know what the British called Indians, “Niggas”