Ram Swarup has thoroughly and critically studied religions of the world. He can speak of these systems with an in-depth knowledge and ability to quote and mirror what they really think. And he has left an important legacy of many works on a broad range of topics including religion and philosophy, yoga, mysticism, and social issues. His Hindu View of Christianity and Islam is a classic in the field of comparative religion, for the first time perhaps introducing a yogic view of altered states of consciousness to understand the powerful and sometimes dangerous working of religious experience. The present book, On Hinduism, shows how to revive and revitalize the tradition in a practical way and to present it in the modern forum with clarity, conviction and universality. It is a manual of Hindu resurgence. An important issue is how different dharmic traditions should relate given the common missionary assault upon them, particularly Hinduism and Buddhism.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ram Swarup
Ram Swarup(1919-1998) graduated from the University of Delhi in 1941 and had been an original writer and thinker ever since. He participated in his country's struggle for independence, courting imprisonment. For some years, he was a close associate of British-born Mira Behn (Miss Slade), Mahatma Gandhi's adopted daughter. In the fifties he led a movement warning against the growing danger which international communism presented to the newly won freedom of the country. Around 1957, he took to a life of meditation and spiritual reflection, and since then he had made a deep study of the scriptures of different religious traditions. Ram Swarup was a noted writer in many fields. His previous books and brochures include Communism and Peasantry : Implications of Collectivist Agriculture of Asian Countries, Foundations of Maoism, and Buddhism vis-a-vis Hinduism. His Gandhism and Communism stressed the need to raise the struggle against communism from a military to a moral and ideological level. The brochure caught the attention of several US Congressmen, and some of its ideas were adopted by the Eisenhower administration in its agenda for the Geneva Conference in 1955. His Gandhian Economics, small but seminal, shows that the present industrial production system suffers form circularity, a deep internal technological contradiction-coal and iron, and a hundred other commodities symbolized by them, producing and consuming one another in a crescendo, round and round. His magnum opus, The Word As Revelation : Names of Gods, is on Linguistics, Philosophy, Vedic exegesis, and Yoga. It shows how a religion of 'many Gods' represents authentic spirituality.
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