Intro to the History of Yoga: Philosophy, Practice, Transformation with Dr
SeanFeitOakes.com | 2017 Intro to the History of Yoga: Philosophy, Practice, Transformation with Dr. Sean Feit Oakes Class 8. Yoga in modernism: universalism, embodiment, globalization 1845 Boston Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson reads the Bhagavad Gītā (tr. Wilkins: first English trans.) It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered over and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us. (Emerson)1 1526-1857 Islamic Mughal Empire rules India. In 1600, British East India Company begins gaining dominance. 1858 British occupy India in order to crush the Rebellion of 1857 against the East India Company (1757-1857). In 1858, the “British Raj” included what is now India, Burma/Myanmar, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. 1893 Swami Vivekananda visits Chicago Parliament of Religions; founds Vedanta Society in NY, SF, LA. Do I wish that the Christian would become Hindu? God forbid. Do I wish that the Hindu or Buddhist would become Christian? God forbid. … But each must assimilate the spirit of the others and yet preserve his individuality and grow according to his own law of growth. …[H]oliness, purity, and charity are not the exclusive possessions of any church in the world and ... every system has produced men and women of the most exalted character. In the face of this evidence, if anybody dreams of the exclusive survival of his own religion and the destruction of the others, I pity him from the bottom of my heart, and point out to him that upon the banner of every religion will soon be written in spite of resistance: ‘Help and not fight,’ ‘Assimilation and not Destruction,’ ‘Harmony and Peace and not Dissension.’ (Vivekananda, closing address at the Chicago Parliament of Religions)2 “Perennial Philosophy”: Renaissance (neo-Platonist) idea popular in the 19th century that all great religions point to the same universal metaphysical truths.
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