Sunday, August 16, 2020

#SattvicHamburgers Anyone?

Sattvic Hamburgers?


To make dharma sound 'appealing' and 'contemporary' to westernized audiences and young professionals, a common strategy employed by some Hindu intellectuals is to combine Sanskrit/Indic terms and western categories to produce neologisms.  
 
Examples of oxymorons generated by sandwiching of incompatible Sanskrit/Indic terms and western social/economic/political categories include:

Vedic Liberalism
Dharmic Capitalism
Vedantic Socialism
Hindu Left / Hindu Right
 
Here, an Indic prefix is attached to the western category. Western academia often adds some western prefix to an Indic category:
Neo-Hinduism (Paul Hacker, exposed in 'Indra's Net' by Sri Rajiv Malhotra)
Neo-Vedanta
American Veda (credit Phil Goldberg) 

What is the problem?
The output western re-categorization generated after a deep immersion in 'English Samadhi' is reductionist and harmful. This should not be surprising given that the Sanskrit/Dharmika terms come with a far broader range of meanings and applicability that include the Paramartika while rejecting that which is anrta and adharma. On the other hand, the western component of the newly generated category is usually secular and materialist, and indifferent to Rta and Dharma. Neologisms coined by Abrahamic missionaries are not secular since their goal is to increase the curb-appeal of history-centric theology. They use a dab of dharmika paint to generate religious oxymorons that many gullible Hindus buy into:
 
Vedic Gospel     
Dharmic Fundamentalism
Christunatyam  
Christ Yoga 
Sufi Bhakti 
 
Whether you add poison to Devi's Prasad, or Devi's Prasad to poison, the deeper dharmic meanings get diminished and severely distorted, and ultimately digested into the western (secular or Abrahamic) category. 
 
We must decolonize and work harder to better understand and retain the original terms, and then apply them more effectively in a contemporary context.
 
 
 
 
 
 
References and Further Reading
Books by Rajiv Malhotra
 

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