Dileep wrote:Katare wrote: Max Muller’s work that I have read comes out as one of the most pro Hindu/India work ever written.
I share this view. My uncle translated his two works "India what it can teach" and "Six systems", and I did the editing, fact checking and background research. Which means I had to think about all nuances of the text to verify that the intended idea gets to Malayalam. Based on that, I can assert that his words are not that of a xtian supremacist, but that of a genuine admirer.
Acharya Narendra Bhushan, the well known vedic scholar, titled him "Moksha Muulara Bhatta of Sharmanya Desa" and quoted some of his views about advaitha.
Dileepji - Both can be true. Max Mueller could be a genuine india admirer and like ubji says manage his east india company bosses with his Lutheran background and get paid non trivial amounts of money. Please take a look at the letters written by Max Mueller himself. When I say IEDs are hidden in his works . Here is an example from wikipedia :
For Müller, the culture of the Vedic peoples represented a form of nature worship, an idea clearly influenced by Romanticism.
Müller shared many of the ideas associated with Romanticism, which coloured his account of ancient religions, in particular his emphasis on the formative influence on early religion of emotional communion with natural forces. He saw the gods of the Rig-Veda as active forces of nature, only partly personified as imagined supernatural persons. From this claim Müller derived his theory that mythology is "a disease of language".
By this he meant that myth transforms concepts into beings and stories. In Müller's view, "gods" began as words constructed to express abstract ideas, but were transformed into imagined personalities. Thus the Indo-European father-god appears under various names: Zeus, Jupiter, Dyaus Pita.
For Müller all these names can be traced to the word "Dyaus", which he understood to imply "shining" or "radiance". This leads to the terms "deva", "deus", "theos" as generic terms for a god, and to the names "Zeus" and "Jupiter" (derived from deus-pater). In this way a metaphor becomes personified and ossified. This aspect of Müller's thinking was later explored similarly by Nietzsche.
The line of reasoning went like this : Rigveda is similar to other romanticists...mythology is a disease of language...it is indo-European...Jupiter zeus deva are all metaphors...
In my opinion Max Mueller succeeded in making the west hear what they wanted to hear and the east hear what they wanted to hear and got paid well.
Thanks to you and google scholar, I am reading the six systems now. Please note that I don't doubt the sincerity of your uncle's work , other vedic scholars or your translations. I would want to see malayalam works comparing rigveda to other romanticism philosophers ( from 1800 - again one can't blame max Mueller who relates to what he grew up with )and have comparison - but indian authors seldom spend time on purva paksha. I am happy to be corrected if such a work exists.
Again please don't focus on real hindu philosophy; that is what we do all the time - try this for a change :
That guy is in self-flagellation mode. It's about time we confine their bhashan to their little bubble. gone are the days they used to have first word in. now as influencial as those who cry at the end of the street. people moved on. they still stuck in the glorious days of '00s
