Sunday 6 February 2011

De Smet, one of India's great advaitins

George McLean, in an email to me of 7 April 2010 (spellings corrected): 


What excited me about Fr. De Smet's original work was that it enabled the richness of Shankara and the Hindu tradition of the interior path to the divine to be re-related to the material world from which it has been separated.
Father De Smet pioneered this re-relation by opening the connection which the advaitin scholarship had severed in the interpretation of Shankara.
I see this as the key to the present need not to abandon the sacred but to show it to be the real foundation of the sense of the material life, and hence for us of the scientific world in which we now live.
I saw with my own eyes the excitement this caused at a meeting at the University of Madras when two key people jumped up at the end of his talk, which summarized the first part of his dissertation, to say that this was the way Hindu philosophy needed to be done and that he was one of the greatest advaitins in India, indeed in the whole world.” 

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