Hindu Engagement

Principle

  • Even if greater disengagement from western indology results in less vigorous study of hindu past in the short term, it will at least be on strong foundations.
  • Genuine and honest Hindu/ sanskrit scholarship does not need the shelter of academia to emerge.
    • There are religious institutions, rich circles of connoisseurs form around local experts in the shAstra-s.

Examples of foolish engagement

  • Acquiescing to sepoy-dom (explained below).

Bad funding

  • Various idiot rich hindu-s funding sanskrit/ hindu chairs and projects which are liable to be under the influence of anti-hindu academics.
  • Rohan Murthy’s funding of www.murtylibrary.com MCLI .
  • Various endowed chairs and visiting professorships
    • Indian ministry of culture Uchicago 2012 (UC).
    • Ramakrishnan Professorship 2016 UC.
    • Reliance Dhirubhai Ambani Chair at Stanford - Thomas Blom Hansen.

Possibly better engagement

  • Good funding: Fund deserving pro-hindu scholars directly (in India or abroad).
  • Drive up awareness about bad Indology and anti-hindu political activism. Make them pay a professional cost. Examples
    • 2016 anti-pollock campaign.
      • rAjiv malhotra’s Battle for sanskrit campaign, Anti-pollock petition [P], Counter petitions and letters [P1], Petitioners rebuttals [RS_BVP, R]
    • Anti-hindu score here.
  • Tracking Indologist activity via dissertation reviews - DR.

Know the limits of what to expect

  • “The Dalai Lama listened attentively to all of this, sometimes stopping and asking his translator to clarify a term or point. But at the end of the presentation he remained silent until I asked him for his thoughts on what the students had said. … He conceded that what the students had told him was interesting and that it would be good for Buddhists to have some knowledge of Western scholarship on Buddhism. However, in the end, he seemed to view Buddhist practice and Buddhist scholarship (at least of the Western variety) as ultimately irreconcilable. He told the students that if he accepted what they had told him, he would only be able to believe in the rūpakāya, the physical body of the Buddha that appears in the world to teach the dharma. He could not believe in the sambhogakāya, the body of enjoyment that appears to advanced bodhisattvas in the splendor of the pure lands, adorned with the thirty-two marks of a superman. And he could not believe in the dharmakāya, the Buddha’s omniscient mind and its nature of emptiness. “If I believed what you told me,” he said, “the Buddha would only be a nice person.””