Prof. Vempati Kutumba Sastry: Sanskrit Speeches and Poetry (audio)

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It is becoming imperatively necessary that Indian knowledge should reveal in the Western way its scientific foundations. For if we do not do it ourselves, the Europeans will do it for us and do it badly, discrediting the knowledge in the process.
For this society of European and European-led inquirers [Max-Mueller, Theosophists etc.] arose from an impulse on which the Time-Spirit itself insists; their object, vaguely grasped at by them, was at bottom the systematic coordination, explanation and practice of Oriental religion and Oriental mental and spiritual discipline.
Unfortunately, as always happens to a great effort in unfit hands, it stumbled at the outset and went into strange paths.
...
A vain attempt to thrust in modern physical science into the explanation of psychical movements, - to explain  for instance pranayam in the terms of oxygen and hydrogen! ... to make a hopeless amalgam and jumble of science, religion and philosophy all expressed in the terms of the imagination - this has been the scientific method of Theosophy. The result is that it lays its hands on truth and muddles it so badly that it comes out to the world as an untruth. And there now abound other misstatements of Indian truth, less elaborate but almost as wild and wide as Theosophy's.

From this growing confusion we must deliver the future of humanity.

Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan is the apex organization of the Govt of India to oversee the development and promotion of the Sanskrit language all over the country. The organization oversees all government-sponsored sanskrit learning activities in India. Maananiiya Prof. Vempati Kutumba Sastry is its former Vice Chancellor ('kulapati'). Sri Kutumba Sastry is a highly acclaimed scholar in the sanskrit language and literature with decades of experience in teaching Sanskrit to advanced students in several Indian universities.

On this webpage, we present some of his speeches and poetry. We are grateful to Sri Kutumba Sastry gaaru for giving us the permission to publish his works online for everybody's benefit.

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