Welcome to Eternal Path Musings, a weekly newsletter for the modern and curious Hindu, featuring highlights around: religious texts, practice, history, politics, people, and ways to better our engagement and personal progress.
This issue features an: Upanishad Website Resource, a highlight on story consumption, and an aesthetic!
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Resource Highlight: Upanishad Website
The upanishads are among the most sacred texts of Hinduism, largely based around expounding upon the concepts of the Vedas. We did a highlight in Week 2 around the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, one of the most important for Saivite Hindus.
The Sri Aurobindo Foundation for Indian Culture (SAFIC) part of the Sri Aurobindo Society in Puducherry, has released recently a fantastic website with easily navigable links to verses of Upanishads, with the Sanskrit chanting, Sanskrit pronunciation, Roman transliteration, English translation(s), Hindi translation, and a Word glossary for each verse.
The link is: https://upanishads.org.in/
Additionally, they have App Store and Google Play Store apps to keep track of the Upanishads.
Action Highlight: Consume Hindu Stories
For generations of Hindus, hearing stories from the Puranas, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and other texts provided an opportunity for inter-generational bonding and the beginning of identity development. Many of us born in the United States learned from various religious groups or in a more visual fashion through the impeccable Amar Chitra Katha comic books (profile on their creator Anant Pai here). Hearing these stories provided many with their first thoughts around Hinduism and Hindu culture. People involved in storytelling in our culture find it incredibly rewarding, and here is a Pragyata interview with a storyteller focused on just that.
However, in the current era, many thumb their nose at Hindu stories and treat them with less respect than Harry Potter, Lord of The Rings, or Game of Thrones; this behavior stems from internalized self-hate. We do not take a position on which Hindu stories you should be reading, but we do take a firm position that mocking the puranas, or the Ramayana or any other Hindu text is in poor form. We note with profound sadness the decline of Hindu storytelling traditions, and encourage readers to check out Dharma Dispatch’s incredible piece on that topic.
Why is your particular choice in story consumption important? Whether you like it or not, your view of the world is filled by stories. The images and content you consume on television during sitcoms affect the way you act in daily life. For example, if you see a certain norm around dating in a TV show, even if it goes poorly for the asker, your mind subconsciously anchors on that action and you will likely perform the same action if placed in the situation. In an era of unbridled consumption, intentional consumption is the proper path. Better that you are inspired by Kannappa Nayanar (check out our highlight in Issue 2) or Yudhistira from the Mahabharata than some random TV character thought up by Bollywood and Hollywood degenerates. As controversies around pedophilia, rampant drug use, corruption, and terrorism links plague popular media industries, do you trust those involved in that degeneracy to write characters that inspire you to live a better and more sattvik life?
Now for those of us in the diaspora, we may not know where to find stories that captivate us in the Hindu tradition. One good place to start is the Mahabharata, and Prekshaa has a fantastic 99 part series on the text, that we highlighted in our Week 4 Issue. For Shaivites, Shaivam.org has links to great stories focused on the Saiva Siddhanta tradition here. The Upanishad website from above has a webpage devoted purely to stories from the Upanishads.
Pledge to spend 15 minutes a week reading through Hindu stories, and watch as your self-development and religious journey make great strides. Once you do that, make sure to share your insights with friends and family, and reach out to gurus and pandits of your tradition to dig deeper and extract crucial insights from and context into the stories that you have read and plan to read.
Aesthetic: Tamil Nadu Temple
