United States or Caribbean Netherlands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Quite outnumbered also by Hindus, they identify themselves politically with the British rather than with the Hindus, so that as a body they do not support the Congress, the great Indian Political Association, and have no anti-British consciousness.
By some it is claimed that these ceremonies, when rightly performed, render unnecessary his suffering in hell or his returning to this world for rebirth. It is more likely that the purpose is to reduce the suffering and to enhance the progress of the soul between this birth and the next. In any case, all orthodox Hindus regard the Shradda ceremonies as possessing great virtue and high importance.
All day the Mohurrum drums beat in the City, and all day deputations of tearful Hindu gentlemen besieged the Deputy Commissioner with assurances that they would be murdered ere next dawning by the Muhammadans. 'Which, said the Deputy Commissioner, in confidence to the Head of Police, 'is a pretty fair indication that the Hindus are going to make 'emselves unpleasant.
Like the Brahm of the Hindus, the god of Epicurus and Confucius, and the Akarana-Zaman or Endless Time of the Guebres, Anyambia is a vague being, a vox et praeterea nihil, without personality, too high and too remote for interference in human affairs, therefore not addressed in prayer, never represented by the human form, never lodged in temples.
Many thousands of others who die in all parts of the land have their bodies burned and their ashes brought, by loving relatives upon pilgrimage, to this city to be sprinkled upon the tides of the Ganges, which insures eternal rest to the departed souls. What Mecca is to Mohammedans, more than Jerusalem is to Jews, is Benares to devout Hindus.
The Hindu home would not be, to a westerner, either pleasant or convenient. It looks dingy and dark, doors are small and massive, windows are few and generally closed. This is partly because they are intended to keep out the tropical glare, and partly because the people seem averse to occupying an airy room. A westerner would suffocate in a room in which Hindus would delight to spend a night.
But of its earliest form and extent we know nothing, except from the sacred poems of the Hindus called the Vedas, written in Sanskrit probably fifteen hundred years before Christ, for even the date of the earliest of the Vedas is unknown. Fifty years ago we could not have understood the ancient religions of India.
To Westerns, the brahmans are best known as the priests of the Hindus; more correctly, however, the name brahman signifies not the performer of priestly duties, but the caste that possesses a monopoly of the performance. The brahman caste is the Hindu Tribe of Levi. Every accepted Hindu priest is a brahman, although it is far from being the case that every brahman is a priest.
So that we see at the beginning of the Fifth Cycle hordes of new, primitive people in certain lands, and in other places advanced nations like the ancestors of the Ancient Egyptians, Persians, Chaldeans, Hindus, etc.
To begin with the Hindus: the Brahmans and some of the other classes are believed to be descended from the brave and civilized peoples of ancient Asia, of whom sacred and profane writers make such frequent mention, of some of the founders of Nineveh and Babylon, and of the later empire of the Medes and Persians, which was on the eve of subjugating Europe when stopped by the Greeks at Marathon and Salamis.
Word Of The Day