Final Lecture on Sanatana Dharma (Hinduism)

this is your second and final lecture on sanatana Dharma a religion better known as Hinduism okay as we continue in sanatana Dharma or the Hindu tradition it's very important that you have a good definition for the term Puja Puja is an italics on the first bullet and Puja is best translated as worship so a Hindu person will have a statue of a god or goddess either in a town square or a village or even in his or her own home and the primary act of worship for bhakti yoga which is again from last lecture the largest school of yoga we have the idea of bringing flowers or food or a drink to the god or goddess so this Puja dedication to the god or goddess very important part of the Hindu religion fasting which is going without food which demonstrates the connection for Hindu life between the physical and the spiritual as you deprive the physical body of something that it needs you call upon the god or goddess to fill that physical hunger with the spiritual food and going on pilgrimages is also a common practice for Hindu people going to a place that is considered especially holy or sacred giving you a picture of one such place here this is the armanath cavern and it is a popular place to make a pilgrimage too because of the sexual imagery that you would find there I have to understand that Eastern cultures tend to be much more comfortable in talking about human sexuality than Western cultures and not quite sure if that's because of some of the puritanical influences that we've had in Western religion but Hindus understand human sexuality is a very natural thing and because they have great reverence for nature this is nothing that conjures up images of shame or guilt but sexuality is something to be separate something to be celebrated and so whenever in nature a Hindu observes a lingam and a Yoni which is two particular symbols coming together that is considered again especially sacred or holy and so the lingam is what we would refer to as a phallic symbol and uh Yoni is a vulva symbol and so this is male and female coming together in nature and you have that with the stalagmite as the lingamorphalic symbol here and the opening of the cave of course is the vulva or the female sexuality and with that said it's not just reverence for nature at the cavern like our monoth but all rivers are considered especially sacred and holy as you'll see with the cell as you saw last week with the celebration of Kumba Mela as one of the primary Holy Days okay many of you may have heard of the caste system of India before although it's not widely practiced practiced today for centuries this was the primary way that Hindu Society was structured and the caste system is composed of four different classes of people pictured on the top left is the highest cast this is the brahmins they are the priests and other religious leaders and certainly the gurus that are the religious teachers that an individual would subscribe to a guru's teaching and then at the top right you have the military leader here and you would also include nobility or royalty as part of the kashatria cast this cast is going to be really important in our next two religions also because the primary leader of the religion referred to as Jain Dharma and then also Siddhartha gwatama of Buddha Dharma both were born into Hindu culture as part of this kashatria caste and then the vaishas or the third cast and these are your Farmers ranchers and Merchants pictured at the bottom left and at the bottom right we have the lowest of the cast The shudras which are the manual laborers and then below the forecast there's a group of people that were considered so disdainful that they're not even given a cast name but they are simply referred to as the Untouchables and these are homeless individuals and it is is or was believed within Hindu society that they must have behaved so badly and had such awful karma in a previous life that they were reincarnated to this lowest form of humanity barely even referred to as Humanity uh Mahatma Gandhi did much to overcome the prejudice against The Untouchables he referred to them rather than Outcast as the very children of God I believe your textbook makes some reference to that again because of Acts of government and practices of religious and societal Freedom that have taken place in Indian government we see the caste system has heavily been phased out but because it is so ingrained within Hindu history it certainly still carries some influence in that culture okay now don't worry too much here as you see four are really strange looking words in italics these are the four stages of life and the reason you don't need to worry is because you're only going to be responsible for the fourth and final stage so I'll let you I'll remind you that when we get down to the bottom of the slide but I do want you to have a general understanding of these life stages but again you you don't have to know the names of the first three uh from the time and this is again it's patriarchal society so these stages are only in referring to a man's life the first stage from birth to age 25 the Brock macron is when a baby then a toddler then a boy a teenager and then a young man commits himself to the teachings of a guru and also commits himself to celibacy that uh sexual attraction sexual activity should not be a distraction to him during this time in life and so he commits himself to celibacy so he can be a student and learn the ways of Hinduism and then what we in Western culture would refer to as the most prosperous time of life comes at the grahastha stage and from age 26 to 50. this is when a man Works in his particular vocation hopefully makes a good living and is able to provide a home for his wife if he chooses to be married and of course the children if they have children which would normally be expected again this is a time of life of prosperity and then after the children are grown and leave the house and the man has reached age 51 for this third quarter of his life he returns back to the things that he was taught in that very first stage of life and here at the vanaprasa stage he does stay at the home with his wife but he now for the most part lives in retirement and commits himself to meditation and study and then if the man makes it to age 75 the Hindu expectation would be and this is the one that you do need to be ready for on exam day the sanyasan is the final stage of life from 75 until death and reincarnation and here the Hindu man leaves his home behind and he lives out in the wilderness or out in the forest many times committed to nakedness fasting and prayer if his wife is still living the hope is that the family the grown children or other family members will take care of her because again this is the old Hindu man living his life completely dependent on God goddesses and nature and in showing this commitment to the gods the hope is that so much good karma would be built up that he will either be reincarnated as a higher being or he perhaps could even achieve Moksha which that's from last lecture that Liberation that freeing of the Atman the soul okay we do have some societal tensions that come with the religious identity here but not as much as we see within other cultures they're going to be two new religions Jane Dharma and Buddha Dharma that emerge in North East India of course sanatana Dharma is coming out of Northwest India and these other two religions of Jane Dharma and Buddha Dharma just like sanatana Dharma or Hinduism stresses the virtue of pacifism or non-violence and so Jane's Buddhist and Hindus were able to live together with a relative peace and even when the Muslims first came into India in the 7th Century of the Common Era or A.D the Muslims did not come into India with the spirit of Conquest they were not an imperial threat early on but eventually as the Muslim identity does become more and more Imperial and we see it married to the Mogul Empire we do see that there are a number of tensions in Northwest India between Muslims and Hindus it's a very violent history and much in gratitude to the work of Mahatma Gandhi there is some or I can't say relative peace there is greater peace though today than there have been in previous decades one of the actions of Gandhi that is considered quite controversial by many is that he helped establish a border in Northwest India that established a new nation a nation that you've probably heard about a lot in the news Pakistan and so Pakistan is a Muslim Nation a neighboring the Hindu nation of India and then lastly Hindus also had a complicated relationship with European Christians stemming back to the 19th century when uh Western even prior to the 19th century but it reached its apex and the in that in the 1800s we had Western Europeans uh colonize India Africa and much of South America and of course most of you know with colonialism this is a small group of people who have great military power moving in and taking over another area for the sake of economic Prosperity not to move into the area to cause the indigenous people to move away they're actually oftentimes used as slave labor as you can see in this picture some Indian men carrying around a British military officer but colonization is again having the military power to take over an area with a relatively small group of people so that you can bring about greater economic prosperity for your own people and oftentimes very much at the detriment for the indigenous people already living there okay and then we need to remember that sanatana Dharma is one of our most pluralistic religions that we have today believing that there are many paths to Salvation pictured here at the top right is a cartoon that is related to a parable that you can have down in your notes as the parable of the elephant and the blind man and one day a Hindu Guru discovers several blind men arguing with one another over what is truth and they're all convinced that they know what truth is and the other men that they're discussing uh the concept of Truth with are completely off and so the guru decides to teach these Blind Men a lesson and he takes them out to the Town Square he places an object before them and he tells all of them to use their hands to touch the object and then therefore they'll be able to tell him what it is they're touching and one man is touching what he is certain is a very big snake a python perhaps another man is reaches out and he touches what he is certain is a sword a third man a very large leaf and then a Fourth Man the column of a building a fifth man a very large water tank and then a final man a broom that he remembers his mother using when he was a child and they're all arguing with one another they're all certain that they know the truth and then the guru almost magically is able to open their eyes and they see that what is before them is an elephant they were all wrong the one certain he was touching a snake it's touching the elephant's trunk the one certain he was touching a sword one of the Tusk the leaf is the elephant's ear the column of the building the elephant's leg the water tank the elephant's belly that is full of water but certainly not a water tank and then lastly the tail of the elephant is what the last blind man mistook as his mother's broom so this Parable is used to say it is used to bring about humility and Hindu identity that you cannot be certain that your own personal experience is absolute truth it is simply that which you have experienced and so we do have a commitment to pluralism rather than exclusivism but strangely and primarily because of the tensions with Islam we have seen Hindu fundamental fundamentalism arise in India and those two terms put together an oxymoron if you don't know what oxymoron is it's when you take two seemingly opposite terms and you put them together most well-known example is probably Little Giant I mean what does that mean a giant is something that's huge and if you call something a little giant what exactly is that communicating well Hindu fundamentalism doesn't seem to make any sense either because Hindu is to be so pluralist and open to other Traditions whereas fundamentalism is saying only our tradition is right and even willing to be militant uh to protect that tradition and of course that's also an oxymoron because the Hindu tradition is committed to pacifism so this Hindu commitment to pacifism and pluralism and then you couple that with fundamentalism which is this you know militant certainty that only your group has the absolute truth is a strange phenomena that has arisen in India and again the primary reason that this has come about is because uh Hindu especially the younger Hindu generation is feeling threatened by continuing tensions with Pakistan so even though that border was put in place to try to keep peace between the two the conflicts and the Indus River Valley and the Punjab a region of India a do continue and these gentlemen pictured here at the bottom right are examples of that Hindu fundamentalism you can see uh one there holding a very sharp object and threatening violence and again this is a reaction against what uh the the threat of Islam in Northwestern India and because of uh the rise of this Hindu fundamentalism we had the Hindu government actually come together I'm sorry the Indian government actually come together to give an official Hindu identity so make sure you take a little time on this slide to see these seven uh really Staples of what it is to be Hindu number one we talked about those holy books the four volumes of The Vedas and so to be Hindu your spirituality your religion must be based upon The Vedas and then number two tolerance for others based upon the conviction that truth has many sides and that goes back to our parable of the elephant and then looking again at our gods of Brahman and Vishnu and Shiva the understanding that reality is in that constant cycle of creation which is what Brahman does maintenance maintenance which is what Vishnu does and destruction which is what Shiva does and remember destruction is not negative within Hindu culture it is necessary so that a new creation can take place uh belief in reincarnation that's quite simple as a conviction for Hindu identity and then there are many paths to Salvation that ties into the Tolerance on point number two and then there are others outside of sanatana Dharma that consider all of the statues and paintings of the gods and goddesses to be the same as idolatry and idolatry is any time that you have a picture an image a statue of a God and because you can therefore handle the god or goddess with your hands the idea is that you can somehow control or manipulate the god or goddess and make him or her do things for you and this charge of idolatry is something that Hindus vehemently deny that they do not have the statues and the pictures and the images in order to manipulate or control the gods but in order to Revere them so it was very important in establishing this Hindu identity that they make this statement that their faith is not idolatrous and then lastly a sanatana Dharma as a religion can never be subsumed under a single set of philosophical Concepts and what we mean by that is that there is no man-made philosophy okay no human constructed philosophy that could ever be placed as an umbrella over the religion sanatana Dharma and explain the religion strictly in philosophical terms the important point trying to be is being established here is that you can never have a human-made philosophy be more important than the religion because the religion was given of course by the gods and the goddesses and so that's simply what that point is making never put a human-made philosophy a top a god-given religion and sanatana Dharma has done fairly well in its expansion to the West although not so much in its most popular form that we have in India as I mentioned a few times to you in India the most popular form of practicing Hinduism is bhakti Yoga which is the very emotional romantic love shown toward a god or goddess and because that is tied into many stories that for westerners sound bizarre if you looked at the story in your textbook of Hanuman the monkey warrior I'm sure that story sounded quite bizarre to many of you and because Western readers do find these stories with animals that can communicate in in the same language as the people quite strange we see that bhakti yoga doesn't really take hold in the west Western Europe or the United States but in fact it is the more mystical meditative forms that really get anchored in Western culture such as Raja yoga and Yana yoga that we looked at on the previous lecture and so please get down in your notes the most well-known Hindu organization that has thrived in the West it is iscon and I do need to give you uh the spelling out here of what this uh means iscon I s k is international Society for Krishna okay that's the isk international Society for Krishna and then the c-o-n means Consciousness so iscon is the international Society for Krishna Consciousness and of course Krishna is the embodiment or Incarnation one of the embodiments or incarnations of the god Vishnu and this also ties in with the Transcendental Meditation movement which is simply another way of practicing Raja or Yana yoga of course of those both really rely heavily upon meditation okay so that's going to do it for sanatana Dharma and again I hope by Wednesday to have the lecture on Jane Dharma up and then going into the weekend if I can get the first one on Buddha Dharma up we'll be moving along very well continue to check the announcements regularly because that's where you'll see assignments posted

this is your second and final lecture on sanatana Dharma a religion better known as Hinduism okay as we continue in sanatana Dharma or the Hindu tradition it&#39;s very important that you have a good definition for the term Puja Puja is an italics on the first bullet and Puja is best translated as worship so a Hindu person will have a statue of a god or goddess either in a town square or a village or even in his or her own home and the primary act of worship for bhakti yoga which is again from last lecture the largest school of yoga we have the idea of bringing flowers or food or a drink to the god or goddess so this Puja dedication to the god or goddess very important part of the Hindu religion fasting which is going without food which demonstrates the connection for Hindu life between the physical and the spiritual as you deprive the physical body of something that it needs you call upon the god or goddess to fill that physical hunger with the spiritual food and going on pilgrimages is also a common practice for Hindu people going to a place that is considered especially holy or sacred giving you a picture of one such place here this is the armanath cavern and it is a popular place to make a pilgrimage too because of the sexual imagery that you would find there I have to understand that Eastern cultures tend to be much more comfortable in talking about human sexuality than Western cultures and not quite sure if that&#39;s because of some of the puritanical influences that we&#39;ve had in Western religion but Hindus understand human sexuality is a very natural thing and because they have great reverence for nature this is nothing that conjures up images of shame or guilt but sexuality is something to be separate something to be celebrated and so whenever in nature a Hindu observes a lingam and a Yoni which is two particular symbols coming together that is considered again especially sacred or holy and so the lingam is what we would refer to as a phallic symbol and uh Yoni is a vulva symbol and so this is male and female coming together in nature and you have that with the stalagmite as the lingamorphalic symbol here and the opening of the cave of course is the vulva or the female sexuality and with that said it&#39;s not just reverence for nature at the cavern like our monoth but all rivers are considered especially sacred and holy as you&#39;ll see with the cell as you saw last week with the celebration of Kumba Mela as one of the primary Holy Days okay many of you may have heard of the caste system of India before although it&#39;s not widely practiced practiced today for centuries this was the primary way that Hindu Society was structured and the caste system is composed of four different classes of people pictured on the top left is the highest cast this is the brahmins they are the priests and other religious leaders and certainly the gurus that are the religious teachers that an individual would subscribe to a guru&#39;s teaching and then at the top right you have the military leader here and you would also include nobility or royalty as part of the kashatria cast this cast is going to be really important in our next two religions also because the primary leader of the religion referred to as Jain Dharma and then also Siddhartha gwatama of Buddha Dharma both were born into Hindu culture as part of this kashatria caste and then the vaishas or the third cast and these are your Farmers ranchers and Merchants pictured at the bottom left and at the bottom right we have the lowest of the cast The shudras which are the manual laborers and then below the forecast there&#39;s a group of people that were considered so disdainful that they&#39;re not even given a cast name but they are simply referred to as the Untouchables and these are homeless individuals and it is is or was believed within Hindu society that they must have behaved so badly and had such awful karma in a previous life that they were reincarnated to this lowest form of humanity barely even referred to as Humanity uh Mahatma Gandhi did much to overcome the prejudice against The Untouchables he referred to them rather than Outcast as the very children of God I believe your textbook makes some reference to that again because of Acts of government and practices of religious and societal Freedom that have taken place in Indian government we see the caste system has heavily been phased out but because it is so ingrained within Hindu history it certainly still carries some influence in that culture okay now don&#39;t worry too much here as you see four are really strange looking words in italics these are the four stages of life and the reason you don&#39;t need to worry is because you&#39;re only going to be responsible for the fourth and final stage so I&#39;ll let you I&#39;ll remind you that when we get down to the bottom of the slide but I do want you to have a general understanding of these life stages but again you you don&#39;t have to know the names of the first three uh from the time and this is again it&#39;s patriarchal society so these stages are only in referring to a man&#39;s life the first stage from birth to age 25 the Brock macron is when a baby then a toddler then a boy a teenager and then a young man commits himself to the teachings of a guru and also commits himself to celibacy that uh sexual attraction sexual activity should not be a distraction to him during this time in life and so he commits himself to celibacy so he can be a student and learn the ways of Hinduism and then what we in Western culture would refer to as the most prosperous time of life comes at the grahastha stage and from age 26 to 50. this is when a man Works in his particular vocation hopefully makes a good living and is able to provide a home for his wife if he chooses to be married and of course the children if they have children which would normally be expected again this is a time of life of prosperity and then after the children are grown and leave the house and the man has reached age 51 for this third quarter of his life he returns back to the things that he was taught in that very first stage of life and here at the vanaprasa stage he does stay at the home with his wife but he now for the most part lives in retirement and commits himself to meditation and study and then if the man makes it to age 75 the Hindu expectation would be and this is the one that you do need to be ready for on exam day the sanyasan is the final stage of life from 75 until death and reincarnation and here the Hindu man leaves his home behind and he lives out in the wilderness or out in the forest many times committed to nakedness fasting and prayer if his wife is still living the hope is that the family the grown children or other family members will take care of her because again this is the old Hindu man living his life completely dependent on God goddesses and nature and in showing this commitment to the gods the hope is that so much good karma would be built up that he will either be reincarnated as a higher being or he perhaps could even achieve Moksha which that&#39;s from last lecture that Liberation that freeing of the Atman the soul okay we do have some societal tensions that come with the religious identity here but not as much as we see within other cultures they&#39;re going to be two new religions Jane Dharma and Buddha Dharma that emerge in North East India of course sanatana Dharma is coming out of Northwest India and these other two religions of Jane Dharma and Buddha Dharma just like sanatana Dharma or Hinduism stresses the virtue of pacifism or non-violence and so Jane&#39;s Buddhist and Hindus were able to live together with a relative peace and even when the Muslims first came into India in the 7th Century of the Common Era or A.D the Muslims did not come into India with the spirit of Conquest they were not an imperial threat early on but eventually as the Muslim identity does become more and more Imperial and we see it married to the Mogul Empire we do see that there are a number of tensions in Northwest India between Muslims and Hindus it&#39;s a very violent history and much in gratitude to the work of Mahatma Gandhi there is some or I can&#39;t say relative peace there is greater peace though today than there have been in previous decades one of the actions of Gandhi that is considered quite controversial by many is that he helped establish a border in Northwest India that established a new nation a nation that you&#39;ve probably heard about a lot in the news Pakistan and so Pakistan is a Muslim Nation a neighboring the Hindu nation of India and then lastly Hindus also had a complicated relationship with European Christians stemming back to the 19th century when uh Western even prior to the 19th century but it reached its apex and the in that in the 1800s we had Western Europeans uh colonize India Africa and much of South America and of course most of you know with colonialism this is a small group of people who have great military power moving in and taking over another area for the sake of economic Prosperity not to move into the area to cause the indigenous people to move away they&#39;re actually oftentimes used as slave labor as you can see in this picture some Indian men carrying around a British military officer but colonization is again having the military power to take over an area with a relatively small group of people so that you can bring about greater economic prosperity for your own people and oftentimes very much at the detriment for the indigenous people already living there okay and then we need to remember that sanatana Dharma is one of our most pluralistic religions that we have today believing that there are many paths to Salvation pictured here at the top right is a cartoon that is related to a parable that you can have down in your notes as the parable of the elephant and the blind man and one day a Hindu Guru discovers several blind men arguing with one another over what is truth and they&#39;re all convinced that they know what truth is and the other men that they&#39;re discussing uh the concept of Truth with are completely off and so the guru decides to teach these Blind Men a lesson and he takes them out to the Town Square he places an object before them and he tells all of them to use their hands to touch the object and then therefore they&#39;ll be able to tell him what it is they&#39;re touching and one man is touching what he is certain is a very big snake a python perhaps another man is reaches out and he touches what he is certain is a sword a third man a very large leaf and then a Fourth Man the column of a building a fifth man a very large water tank and then a final man a broom that he remembers his mother using when he was a child and they&#39;re all arguing with one another they&#39;re all certain that they know the truth and then the guru almost magically is able to open their eyes and they see that what is before them is an elephant they were all wrong the one certain he was touching a snake it&#39;s touching the elephant&#39;s trunk the one certain he was touching a sword one of the Tusk the leaf is the elephant&#39;s ear the column of the building the elephant&#39;s leg the water tank the elephant&#39;s belly that is full of water but certainly not a water tank and then lastly the tail of the elephant is what the last blind man mistook as his mother&#39;s broom so this Parable is used to say it is used to bring about humility and Hindu identity that you cannot be certain that your own personal experience is absolute truth it is simply that which you have experienced and so we do have a commitment to pluralism rather than exclusivism but strangely and primarily because of the tensions with Islam we have seen Hindu fundamental fundamentalism arise in India and those two terms put together an oxymoron if you don&#39;t know what oxymoron is it&#39;s when you take two seemingly opposite terms and you put them together most well-known example is probably Little Giant I mean what does that mean a giant is something that&#39;s huge and if you call something a little giant what exactly is that communicating well Hindu fundamentalism doesn&#39;t seem to make any sense either because Hindu is to be so pluralist and open to other Traditions whereas fundamentalism is saying only our tradition is right and even willing to be militant uh to protect that tradition and of course that&#39;s also an oxymoron because the Hindu tradition is committed to pacifism so this Hindu commitment to pacifism and pluralism and then you couple that with fundamentalism which is this you know militant certainty that only your group has the absolute truth is a strange phenomena that has arisen in India and again the primary reason that this has come about is because uh Hindu especially the younger Hindu generation is feeling threatened by continuing tensions with Pakistan so even though that border was put in place to try to keep peace between the two the conflicts and the Indus River Valley and the Punjab a region of India a do continue and these gentlemen pictured here at the bottom right are examples of that Hindu fundamentalism you can see uh one there holding a very sharp object and threatening violence and again this is a reaction against what uh the the threat of Islam in Northwestern India and because of uh the rise of this Hindu fundamentalism we had the Hindu government actually come together I&#39;m sorry the Indian government actually come together to give an official Hindu identity so make sure you take a little time on this slide to see these seven uh really Staples of what it is to be Hindu number one we talked about those holy books the four volumes of The Vedas and so to be Hindu your spirituality your religion must be based upon The Vedas and then number two tolerance for others based upon the conviction that truth has many sides and that goes back to our parable of the elephant and then looking again at our gods of Brahman and Vishnu and Shiva the understanding that reality is in that constant cycle of creation which is what Brahman does maintenance maintenance which is what Vishnu does and destruction which is what Shiva does and remember destruction is not negative within Hindu culture it is necessary so that a new creation can take place uh belief in reincarnation that&#39;s quite simple as a conviction for Hindu identity and then there are many paths to Salvation that ties into the Tolerance on point number two and then there are others outside of sanatana Dharma that consider all of the statues and paintings of the gods and goddesses to be the same as idolatry and idolatry is any time that you have a picture an image a statue of a God and because you can therefore handle the god or goddess with your hands the idea is that you can somehow control or manipulate the god or goddess and make him or her do things for you and this charge of idolatry is something that Hindus vehemently deny that they do not have the statues and the pictures and the images in order to manipulate or control the gods but in order to Revere them so it was very important in establishing this Hindu identity that they make this statement that their faith is not idolatrous and then lastly a sanatana Dharma as a religion can never be subsumed under a single set of philosophical Concepts and what we mean by that is that there is no man-made philosophy okay no human constructed philosophy that could ever be placed as an umbrella over the religion sanatana Dharma and explain the religion strictly in philosophical terms the important point trying to be is being established here is that you can never have a human-made philosophy be more important than the religion because the religion was given of course by the gods and the goddesses and so that&#39;s simply what that point is making never put a human-made philosophy a top a god-given religion and sanatana Dharma has done fairly well in its expansion to the West although not so much in its most popular form that we have in India as I mentioned a few times to you in India the most popular form of practicing Hinduism is bhakti Yoga which is the very emotional romantic love shown toward a god or goddess and because that is tied into many stories that for westerners sound bizarre if you looked at the story in your textbook of Hanuman the monkey warrior I&#39;m sure that story sounded quite bizarre to many of you and because Western readers do find these stories with animals that can communicate in in the same language as the people quite strange we see that bhakti yoga doesn&#39;t really take hold in the west Western Europe or the United States but in fact it is the more mystical meditative forms that really get anchored in Western culture such as Raja yoga and Yana yoga that we looked at on the previous lecture and so please get down in your notes the most well-known Hindu organization that has thrived in the West it is iscon and I do need to give you uh the spelling out here of what this uh means iscon I s k is international Society for Krishna okay that&#39;s the isk international Society for Krishna and then the c-o-n means Consciousness so iscon is the international Society for Krishna Consciousness and of course Krishna is the embodiment or Incarnation one of the embodiments or incarnations of the god Vishnu and this also ties in with the Transcendental Meditation movement which is simply another way of practicing Raja or Yana yoga of course of those both really rely heavily upon meditation okay so that&#39;s going to do it for sanatana Dharma and again I hope by Wednesday to have the lecture on Jane Dharma up and then going into the weekend if I can get the first one on Buddha Dharma up we&#39;ll be moving along very well continue to check the announcements regularly because that&#39;s where you&#39;ll see assignments posted

Transcript for:Final Lecture on Sanatana Dharma (Hinduism)

Transcript for:
Final Lecture on Sanatana Dharma (Hinduism)