--- In [email protected], Jonathan Chadwick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > authfriend <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
--- In [email protected], Jonathan Chadwick <jochadw1@> > wrote: > > > > John Hagelin now routinely introduces Maharshi as "the greatest Vedic > scholar in the world." Are there any faculty from leading academic > institutions who e.g. teach Sanskrit who agree with this? > > Is this a serious question, or just a rhetorical one? > I'm not sure. > > In fact, I'm not sure what John means when he says this. For example, > Ruhollah Khomeini was an accomplished scholar of Aristotle and his > medieval Islamic interpreters: while this famous Ayatollah may not > have been up to date on the American secondary literature on Aristotle, > for example, he certainly knew his stuff in the original languages. > But is there anyone who attends meetings of, say, the American Academy > of Religion who would take Maharishi Mahesh Yogi seriously as a "scholar" > in a fairly strict academic sense? Or is this not what John means by > "scholar?" I doubt it; and, I doubt it. "Scholar" isn't really the appropriate word, because strictly speaking it means, as you suggest, academic-type knowledge. I think Hagelin probably meant something more like "the person who knows more about the Vedas than anyone in the world." But MMY's knowledge is more experiential and intuitive than academic; an academic wouldn't be likely to recognize this kind of knowledge unless he or she were a TMer who had absorbed MMY's teaching, I should think, and had had some experience of his/her own. As to whether MMY is "the greatest" even in the intuitive/experiential sense, I find his teaching on the Vedas pretty impressive, but I'm in no position to guess what MMY's peers in this respect would say.
