Essence of Sanatan Culture: The Eastern Light (Photostat)

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Vedic culture is known as Sanatan or eternal culture. Sat Sanatan Dharma is not a religion in the sense of one religious doctrine like most religions existing today. They have one person the founder whose spiritual experiences form the basis of that faith. Sat Sanatan Dharma is based on the spiritual experiences of tens of thousands of spiritually enlightened individuals, men and women, rishis (from the word drish to see), who transmitted the message of spirituality. At the same time, Kal time and Des place are important, so that this culture adapted to place and time. The Rishis, its transmitters and founders chose to be unnamed naming after their role, such as Vyasa the compiler, the translator, the one who gathered the knowledge.

In this way, they made it possible for their knowledge to be simply, impartially and without prejudice linked to earlier learning, adapted to place and time, and transmitted in an unbroken chain from Master to disciple Guru parampara.

Sanatan has far too many founders to count. The teachings of Sanatan Dharma are known as apauruseya, which means that they are not based on personality, but on principles. This is very important to emphasize since Sat Sanatan Dharma is not a discovery, an invention of any individual or group of individuals but just as scientists do not find the laws of nature but discover them, so these founders, the rishis did not find spiritual laws but discovered them in meditation.

Sat Sanatan Dharma is the relationship between the individual and the universe, and dharma also implies eternal, cosmic wisdom, law and action. Sat true, Sanataneternal and universal, Dharma that which contains and sustains the universe. Thus Sat Sanathan Dharma is what keeps society and civilization in communion through righteous living. In a broader sense, it means getting acquainted with the eternal laws of the universe that govern everything. Searching for them and applying these laws for the benefit of all is a way of practicing Sat Sanatan Dharma.

THE object of writing these few pages is in an attempt to give, however brief, an outline of the Sanatan cultural beliefs, some of those conspicuously outstanding landmarks in the lifestory of the East and India, which would give the reader an idea of the mould of the Hindu mind in particular and the Eastern temperament in general.

It is meant to convey, perhaps unsuccessfully, a pen-picture not only to the generally ignorant outsider but also to our own young men, born and bred under the direct actinic ray of the tropics with the resultant temperamental psychology of the emotional and sentimental Souls.

Dictatorial Nature has willed the Eastern temperaments with distinct Eastern peculiarities not to alter under changing times and circumstances. Top varnishes and paints may be applied to any people but the inner Souls of men carry with them strong strains of imbibed ancestral heritage, which generally refuses to be obliterated.