Santana Dharma

 *Santana Dharmas inroads into the world*

Nearly 177 countries have signed up for International Yoga Day and 2 billion people practice yoga across the world (as per UN statistics). Yoga is an integral part of Sanatana Dharma. Such yoga practice only is unifying one fourth of the world population under a common platform by whatever name you call it, be it Sanatana Dharma or anything else.    

In fact, Christians in the West seems to have rejected Church warnings that yoga is satanic. In the United States alone, about 10 per cent of the population practices yoga regularly. In the YMCA where people go for fitness classes, almost all non-Hindu members start and end their yoga practice with ‘OM’ and Namaste. Almost every other class they offer is related to yoga and meditation. They even had a ‘Yoga Day’ a few years ago that included bhajans.  

Late Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, who is considered the greatest inventor of the last century, states in his biography how an autobiography of a Yogi with minute details of Sanatana Dharma  is his most revered book which he had to read at least once a year to be motivated and inspired. He carried it on his iPad until his last moments. Not only that, before he died of cancer, he had arranged to buy 500 copies of the book and be given as a special gift with a personal message to every single top executive of many multi-billion dollar companies who would attend his funeral.  

It's not a surprise that J Robert Oppenheimer and many quantum physicists such as Heisenberg, Bohr and Schrodinger, all winners of the Nobel Prize in Quantum Physics, carried the book of Vedanta or BhagavadGita in one hand and physics in the other. In fact, Oppenheimer, who led the famous Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bomb, spontaneously chanted the verses from the 11th chapter of Gita when he saw the massive ball of fire after the bomb exploded in the New Mexican desert to test it. This poor man spent so much time of his life learning Sanskrit and attributed his deep insights to the Gita and the teachings of Sanatana Dharma.  

CERN institute near Geneva, where the topmost scientists in the world are today, with 23 member states, building the most sophisticated and advanced collider has an imposing statue of Nataraja, the lord of dance of the universe, right on its premises.  

14 top German universities are teaching Sanskrit and European universities are not able to keep up with the demand.  

Late Joseph Campbell, who is the most well-known mythologist of the last century and who inspired the famous Star Wars series, expresses Sanatana Dharma in the widely popular ‘Power of Myth’ series. This multi-part series was in fact filmed in the home of George Lucas who produced the Star Wars series. He as a university student quit the university because it did not offer Sanskrit. All his life he was a great follower of Upanishads.

Carl Sagan, the well- known astrophysicist who created the Cosmos series, says the secrets of the universe are hidden in the Hindu scriptures. This series was seen by 50 crore people in 60 different countries! He praised the Nasadiya Suktam, the seven ‘hymns of creation’ in Rig Veda as the most sophisticated analysis of the origin of the universe.

The spiritual teachers of the Christian world today, such as Eckhart Tolle, Mike Singer, Wayne Dyer, Stephen Wolpert (Ram Dass) and many others who have hundreds of millions of followers in the Christian world, all across the globe, are also deep believers of Hinduism and Buddhism teachings. They are bypassing the Church to explain Jesus’ teachings based on the teachings of Krishna and Buddha.

When Oprah Winfrey had a show with Echart Tolle, 3.5 crore followers across the world watched or downloaded it. His books are translated into 33 languages across the world and they are bestsellers. There is even an article in Newsweek in 2009 by Lisa Miller ‘We (Christians ) are all Hindus now’ and the Harvard Pluralism project talks about how Hindu concepts have deeply seeped into this nation (US).  

It is through Sanatana Dharma that most advanced inventions have been made to the world — the concept of zero, plastic surgery, gravity, chess, the Chakras, the Ayurveda, the martial arts that Chinese/Japanese follow, the binomials, etc — and that it led to most prosperous civilisation with 25-30 per cent of world GDP for millennia until the 1700s, when the British plundered $45 trillion and murdered more than 100 million in just three or four decades alone.

Gandhi said “Stop all conversions in India, it is the deadliest poison that ever sapped the fountain of truth.” If he had power, he added, he would legislate to stop all conversions in India. Ambedkar said that conversion is a denationalisation.

So colonial rule and the mass conversions have had their effect on the basic Indian trait of Sanatana Dharma but it has risen again like Phoenix from Ashes and started reverberating in the whole world now.