Woke Buddhas of Academia

11 Pages·2.394 MB·English

by  Vishwa Adluri, Joydeep Bagchee

Handout

Woke Buddhas of Academia
Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee

This handout accompanies the lecture on “Protestant Buddhism: Western Scholars’ Analysis
of Sanskrit Epics” delivered at the Conference on Western Buddhism. The complete conference
recording is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzGk3iGAVP4 (the lecture
begins from 3:33:33).

Abstract: This presentation examines the contrast between Western perceptions of Buddhism
and Brahmanism as relayed through the work of leading German Indologists such as Weber,
von Schroeder, and Oldenberg. Indologists’ accounts of ancient India often presented
Brahmanism as an oppressive system, characterized by ritualism, demand for gifts, and
bloody sacrifices. The standard narrative was that the Vedic ritual, with its simple childlike
worship of nature forces, had declined in the hands of the priesthood. Over time, ever more
elaborate systems of worship developed as the priests concentrated power and knowledge of
the Vedic hymns in their hands. The antidote to this priestly domination was provided by the
Buddha. The religion he introduced removed the worst excrescences of Hinduism: animal
sacrifice, superstition, idolatry, and caste prejudice. Not only was it rational, ethical, and
spiritual; it also fostered scientific and material progress and “the historical sense.” The
Buddha was explicitly called a “reformer” and frequently compared with Luther, while also
prefiguring Christ in his charisma and his compassion. Although scholars have repeatedly
shown that this account is historically inaccurate and is more reflective of Protestant
prejudices than any objective features of Buddhism (McGetchin 2009, Myers 2013, see also
Schopen 1991 on Western scholars’ “Protestant presuppositions”), elements of it survive even
in contemporary scholarship (Bronkhorst 2007, 2011, and 2016) . This presentation examines
the twin foundations of the application of a Protestant hermeneutic to Indian texts: the
emphasis on a pristine ur-text and the valorization of “history.” It traces how the “text-
historical” method amounted to a reading of India’s religious history in terms of racial kinship
(Aryan) and miscegenation (Dravidian), on the one hand, and religious corruption
(Brahmanism) and national decline (colonization), on the other. We shall also trace the
criticisms of Brahmanism back to their anti-Judaic and anti-clerical stereotypes in German
Protestantism, particularly as they became salient in the Kulturkampf. The reading of Buddha
as a Christ-figure was adopted by many Indian social reformers and echoes in contemporary
“woke” appropriations today. But it falsifies the historical relationship of Buddhism to
Brahmanism and misrepresents Buddha’s enlightenment as if it were nothing more than
social conscience.

I. Academics: Science versus Tradition?
Don Lopez: “When I mentioned to the Dalai Lama that our graduate students would be
making a presentation to him on the origins of Mahāyāna, he immediately asked whether
they had supernormal powers, suggesting that only someone who had a clairvoyant
knowledge of the past could know how the Mahāyāna began. During the seminar, three
students who were completing dissertations on Indian Buddhism made brief presentations to
the Dalai Lama. They explained how nineteenth-century scholars of Buddhism had seen the
Mahāyāna as a degeneration of the original teaching of the Buddha. Later scholars saw the
Mahāyāna as a lay movement responding to the conservatism of the monastic establishment.
1
After this perceived split, which occurred between the first century BCE and the first century
CE, two branches of Buddhism, the Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna, developed along parallel but
divergent courses. More recently, scholars have sought to look beyond the polemical
Mahāyāna condemnations of the Hīnayāna and to consider archaeological, art-historical, and
epigraphical evidence. This research suggests that the Mahāyāna did not begin as a single and
self-conscious movement, but instead was a disparate collection of ‘cults of the book’ centered
on new sūtras composed around the beginning of the common era. These were not lay cults,
but ones in which monks and nuns were full and active participants. The evidence suggests
that so-called Mahāyāna and Hīnayāna monks often lived side by side within the same
monasteries, following the same rules, engaging in many of the same practices, throughout
the history of Buddhism in India. Indeed, the first epigraphic use of the term Mahāyāna
occurs only in the fifth century CE, some five hundred years after the composition of the first
Mahāyāna sūtras. The Dalai Lama listened attentively to all of this, sometimes stopping and
asking his translator to clarify a term or point. But at the end of the presentation he remained
silent until I asked him for his thoughts on what the students had said. ‘It’s something to
know,’ he said in Tibetan, using a term, shes bya (literally, ‘object of knowledge’), that evokes a
Buddhist aphorism: ‘Objects of knowledge are limitless.’ That is, there are infinite things that
can be known, but some are more consequential than others; hence it is essential to consider
carefully what is truly worth knowing. In this context, to call this information ‘something to
know’ suggested that it did not fall into the category of what is truly worth knowing. The Dalai
Lama went on to say that he has a friend, a great lama, who, when giving a tantric initiation,
saw each one of the past masters of the lineage from previous centuries appear in the air along
the ceiling of the temple. He was certain that his friend was telling the truth. He conceded that
what the students had told him was interesting and that it would be good for Buddhists to
have some knowledge of Western scholarship on Buddhism. However, in the end, he seemed
to view Buddhist practice and Buddhist scholarship (at least of the Western variety) as
ultimately irreconcilable. He told the students that if he accepted what they had told him, he
would only be able to believe in the rūpakāya, the physical body of the Buddha that appears in
the world to teach the dharma. He could not believe in the saṃbhogakāya, the body of
enjoyment that appears to advanced bodhisattvas in the splendor of the pure lands, adorned
with the thirty-two marks of a superman. And he could not believe in the dharmakāya, the
Buddha’s omniscient mind and its nature of emptiness. ‘If I believed what you told me,’ he
said, ‘the Buddha would only be a nice person.’”1

II. Debates over Traditional Authority
Jürgen Hanneder: “The pandit’s proficiency in a subject is often coupled […] with a certain way
of life and it may be difficult to divorce the academic aspect from the pandit identity. Since he
is supposed not only to function as a mere scholar, his view of the culture he embodies
through his erudition is necessarily more holistic. ‘Western’ Indology with its specifically
historically oriented, critical approach, had to make use of the Indian pāṇḍitya in order to get,
as much as possible, first-hand information, but it could not accept its theological dimension
without compromising its aims as a historical subject. Since this source of misunderstanding

1 Donald S. Lopez Jr., Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008),
194–95.
2
persists until to date, it should be made clear that the ‘western’ approach is not to belittle
traditional Indian learning, but a methodological necessity.”2

Heinrich von Stietencron: “The analytic thinking of Western interpreters who were schooled
in historical-philological methods stands in contrast to the traditional Indian commentators,
who not only harmonized and freely downplayed all breaks in the text [i.e. the Gītā], but,
above all, sought to read their own philosophical-theological concepts out of individual
textual passages, in order to secure Kṛsṇ ạ ’s divine authority for them—a spectrum that has
been further expanded since the beginning of India’s independence movement by the
politically motivated interpretations of modernity.”3

Table: Indological Reconstructions of an “original” Bhagavadgītā:4

2 Jürgen Hanneder, review of The Pandit: Traditional Scholarship in India, ed. Axel Michaels, Zeitschrift der
Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 155, no. 2 (2005): 672.
3 Heinrich von Stietencron, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Angelika Malinar, Rājavidyā: Das königliche Wissen um
Herrschaft und Verzicht (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1996), 6–7.
4 Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee, “German Indology and Hinduism,” in Handbook of Hinduism in Europe, vol.
1: Pan-European Developments, ed. Knut A. Jacobsen and Ferdinando Sardella (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 104.
3
III. Evaluating the Claims of Scientificity
Christian Lassen: “I omit an investigation of the names Pāṇḍu and Kṛṣṇa, white and black, and
merely throw out the conjecture that they are to be interpreted as the originally native black
[race] and the Sanskrit speaking, light-skinned [race] that had immigrated from the north,
whose western racial relatives are, even now, successfully fighting a similar battle with similar
superiority over the red races of America.”5

Albrecht Weber: “In regard to contents, on the contrary, the difference between it and this
portion of the Mahābhārata is an important one. In the latter human interest everywhere
preponderates, and a number of well-defined personages are introduced, to whom the
possibility of historical existence cannot be denied, and who were only at a later stage
associated with the myths about the gods. But in the Rāmāyaṇa we find ourselves from the
very outset in the region of allegory; and we only move upon historical ground in so far as the
allegory is applied to an historical fact, namely, to the spread of Aryan civilisation towards the
south, more especially to Ceylon. The characters are not real historic figures, but merely
personifications of certain occurrences and situations. Sita, in the first place, whose abduction
by a giant demon, and subsequent recovery by her husband Rama, constitute the plot of the
entire poem, is but the field-furrow, to which we find divine honours paid in the songs of the
Rik, and still more in the Grihya ritual. She accordingly represents Aryan husbandry, which
has to be protected by Rāma—whom I regard as originally identical with Balarama
‘halabhrit,’ ‘the plough-bearer,’ though the two were afterwards separated—against the
attacks of the predatory aborigines. These latter appear as demons and giants; whereas those
natives who were well disposed towards the Aryan civilisation are represented as monkeys,—
a comparison which was doubtless not exactly intended to be flattering, and which rests on
the striking ugliness of the Indian aborigines as compared with the Aryan race.”6

Christian Lassen: “History is evidence that the Semites lacked the harmonious balance of all
psychic powers through which the Indo-Germans became preeminent. [...] The Semite cannot
separate the relationship of the world to man in general from the relationship of the world to
his own ‘I.’ He cannot represent ideas in the mind in pure objectivity. His way of looking at
things is subjective and egotistical. His poetry is lyrical [and] hence subjective. His spirit
expresses its joy and its pain, its love and its hatred, its admiration and its scorn. [...] Even if he
expands his horizon it is only to represent his tribe as an individual over against other tribes.
[...] He is unsuccessful at [creating] epic because here the ‘I’ of the poet recedes before the
object [and] even less at dramatic works, which demand that the poet shed his personality
even more completely. [In contrast,] the Indo-Germans possess, alongside the lyrical, also the
other genres of poetry. They alone produced a national drama. They alone produced the great
heroic poems [Heldengedichte] that reflect the great deeds of antiquity handed down in the
legend in glorified form, that present the entire worldview of the spirit of a people
[Volksgeistes] to us and are present as the result of the poetic effort of an entire people. The
Semite is lacking in the material of the epic, but not the saga, which he poetically ornaments

5 Christian Lassen, “Beiträge zur “Beiträge zur Kunde des Indischen Altertum aus dem Mahâbhârata I:
Allgemeines über das Mahābhārata,” Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes (1837): 75 (italics in original).
6 Albrecht Weber, The History of Indian Literature, trans. John Mann and Theodor Zachariae (London: K. Paul,
Trench, Trub̈ ner, 1914), 192.
4
and develops but does not combine into larger cycles and, instead, preserves in his memory as
primordial history.”7

Christian Lassen: “First: narratives from older history, mostly concerning earlier kings, partly
of a more mythic-historical nature, partly with a dominant poetic interest such as the episodes
of Nala, of Çakuntalâ, and many others.
The second category, to which I ascribe the stories of the gods is, at times, hardly to be
distinguished from the first; I, however, include primarily the narratives with cosmogonic and
theogonic content such as the creation of all beings by Prag’ âpatis that is narrated in the first
book.
Third and final: didactic and cosmogonic materials. The sections that are called dharma are
doubtless of this nature; the Bhagavadgîtâ is another well-known example. The description of
the earth, of divine worlds and other similar [descriptions] too evidence a doctrinal intent.”8

IV. Buddhism versus Brahmanism
Perry Myers: “In the case of many Protestants like von Schroeder and Oldenberg, their
comparative work on Buddhism transformed into a Christian apologetics, in which religious
meaning became underpinned by implicit political aims—what might be termed a ‘colonial
consciousness.’”9

Douglas T. McGetchin: “Europeans were also interested in comparing Christianity and
Buddhism. There were remarkable parallels between the two religions that scholars,
theologians, and nonacademic authors studied and debated. According to their scriptures,
both Buddha and Jesus had miraculous births. Jesus denied the devil three times, just as the
Buddha had denied the temptations of Mara, lord of Samsara. Both religious leaders taught
similar ethics of compassion and love. These elements of the lives of Buddha and Jesus were

7 Christian Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, vol. 1: Geographie und die al̈teste Geschichte (Bonn: H. B. Koenig, 1847),
414–15.
8 Lassen, “Beiträge zur Kunde des Indischen Altertum aus dem Mahâbhârata I,” 77.
9 Perry Myers, German Visions of India, 1871–1918: Commandeering the Holy Ganges during the Kaiserreich (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 17.
5
so close that they led to debates about the question of whether one set of stories influenced
the other in antiquity.”10

Albrecht Weber on Buddhism:
“In the midst of this time of oppression by the brahmanical hierarchy … appeared a man,
giving himself the title of Buddha—the Awakened—and achieved a reformation … upon a
stupendous scale.”11

“The greatest enemy of Brahmanism ever is Buddhism. Buddhism might actually have been
able to suppress Brahmanism for a time. But, like Catholicism and the Reformation,
Brahmanism underwent purification and, consequently, also consolidation thanks to
Buddhism. … Finally because of a dogged fanaticism arising out of self-interest, Brahmanism
succeeded in reasserting itself and finally in driving Buddhism out from all of India.”12

“In its origins Buddhism is one of the greatest, most radical reactions in favor of the universal
human rights of the individual against the oppressive tyranny of so-called divine privileges
based on birth and caste. It is the work of an individual man, who, at the beginning of the sixth
century BC, stood up against the Brahmanic hierarchy and brought about a complete break of
the Indian people with its past through the simplicity and ethical force of his teaching.
Amidst the unrelenting distortion of all human feelings which the Brahmanic caste system
and government entailed … appeared that man with his gospel of the equal rights of all men
without difference of birth, caste, or class, indeed, even of gender.”13

Hermann Oldenberg: “People are accustomed to speak of Buddhism as opposed to
Brahmanism, somewhat in the way that it is allowable to speak of Lutheranism as an
opponent of the papacy. But if they mean, as they might be inclined from this parallel to do, to
picture to themselves a kind of Brahmanical Church, which is assailed by Buddha, which
opposed its resistance to its operations like the resistance of the party in possession to an
upstart, they are mistaken. Buddha did not find himself in the presence of a Brahmanical
hierarchy, embracing the whole people, overshading the whole popular life.”14

Hermann Oldenberg: “All these narratives are absolutely wanting in individuality; we seek in
vain to gather something therefrom as to how Buddha penetrated and operated on the
private, personal life of the individual among his disciples. Whenever we open our gospels, we
find portrayed the most delicate and deepest traces of the work of Jesus, which, providing,
consoling, from man to man: very different from the picture which the Buddhist Church has
preserved to us of its master’s work; the living human, the personal hides itself behind the

10 Douglas T. McGetchin, Indology, Indomania, and Orientalism: Ancient India’s Rebirth in Modern Germany (Madison,
NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), 131.
11 Albrecht Weber, Modern Investigations on Ancient India, trans. Fanny Metcalfe (London: Williams and Norgate;
Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1857), 21.
12 Albrecht Weber, “Braĥ manismus,” in Indische Streifen, vol. 1 (Berlin: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1868),
6–7.
13 Albrecht Weber, “Buddhismus,” in Indische Streifen, vol. 1 (Berlin: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1868), 104.
14 Hermann Oldenberg, Buddha: His Life, His Doctrine, His Order, trans. William Hoey (London: Williams and
Norgate, 1882), 170.
6
system, the formula; no one to seek out and to console the suffering and the sorrowing; it is
only the sorrow of the whole universe of which we again and again hear.”15

Adolf Holtzmann on Buddhism:
Theodor Benfey: “It is becoming ever more obvious that almost the entirety of the higher
intellectual existence of the Indians proceeded predominantly from Buddhism and [that] this
[i.e., Buddhism], as long as it blossomed in India, had the greatest and most recent share in
this [development].”16

Adolf Holtzman Jr. “One can first speak of an Indian history and literary history when we
have succeeded in once again reconquering for Buddhism its influential position in the course
of the development of Indian life.”17

“Essentially, Holtzmann’s characterization of Buddhism can be reduced to five points:
1. Buddhism was conducive to “a consciousness of . . . national solidarity.”
2. It was a period marked by the ‘upswing of patriotic feeling,’ and the ‘[unification of] all
of north India under a single local scepter.’
3. In a ‘time of fortunately ended civil wars,’ ‘national progress,’ and ‘growing prosperity,’
a growth in scientific knowledge ensued.
4. Patronage of ‘art and poetry’ at ‘the courts of Buddhist kings,’ was conducive to the
‘scientific development of grammar’ and the ‘blossoming of the intellectual life of the
Indians.’
5. Finally, this was also the period that saw the creation of ‘a vital artistic and scientific
life’ ‘borne and fulfilled by the most vital scientific consciousness.’”18

15 Ibid., 187.
16 Theodor Benfey, Kleinere Schriften, ed. Adalbert Bezzenberger (Berlin: Reuther, 1890), 209.
17 Adolf Holtzmann Jr. Zur Geschichte und Kritik des Mahābhārata (Kiel: C. F. Haessler, 1892), 102.
18 Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee, The Nay Science: A History of German Indology (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2014), 106.
7
Hermann Oldenberg’s views on race:
“Our consideration must now turn from Buddhism back to the poetic creations of the old
faith. Naturally, this faith has not remained the same in the meantime. The Aryan Gods, with
their human and humane forms, who were still inspired by a last breath of bracing northern
air, have faded or disappeared. In their place, a new generation of Gods has entered on-stage.
They are the Hindu Gods—many-headed and many-armed, ranked with snakes, resting on
lotuses, enveloped by an atmosphere of mysticism, lasciviousness, and cruelty. The entire
intellectual content of this new period is summed up in the gigantic poem that can be called
the great book of Hinduism, just as the Rigveda was the noblest work of Indian Aryanhood.
This is the epic, the Mahābhārata, the incomparably rich, colorful, chaotic, and formless
expression of the Hindu popular spirit. A heroic poem such as could only exist in India: poor
in heroism, but [containing] monstrous deeds of strength and boldness dreamed up and sung
by weaklings. And around the genuine action grew up, unrestrained by any limits, an
unimaginable vegetation of countless episodes, epics within the epic, fables, systems of
philosophy and law—the whole resembling the unfathomable depths of an Indian jungle,
whose trees have been woven together by the luxuriant tangle of creepers to a colorful
gigantic bundle.”19

“The Mahabharata is the powerful connecting link between old and new India, between the
India of the Aryan and the India of the Hindu.”20

“Its Gods [of Hinduism] are the misshapen, wild, cruel, lascivious Hindu Gods, at their head
Shiva and Vishnu. A transformation that affects the innermost core of the people, the people’s

19 Hermann Oldenberg, Die Literatur des alten Indien (Stuttgart and Berlin: J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung
Nachfolger, 1903), 5.
20 Hermann Oldenberg, Das Mahābhārata: Sein Inhalt, seine Entstehung, seine Form (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1922), 1.
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soul. Mixing with the dark-skinned aboriginals changes the invaders, turns the Aryans into
Hindus.”21

Richard Garbe: “Despite their Aryan names, the modern Hindu gods—Shiva, Vishnu, Durga,
Hanuman, and whatever else they may be called—are, I hold, not Aryan conceptions, but
conceptions of the aborigines. At the very least, I believe we must assume a mixture of
aboriginal and Aryan ideas and cults, in which the former (and worse) elements preponderate
by far. The illusion of the ‘Aryan brothers in India’ is one of fastest to be crushed there. Today,
the blood of the Hindus is, without any doubt, only in the least measure Aryan and even the
Brahmanic families have been strongly contaminated with aboriginal blood.”22

Richard Garbe: “When the Aryans conquered the country, they gave their language to the
aborigines. Thus, today, dialects of Aryan origin resound from the Indus to the mouths of the
Ganges in the mouths of the mixed races and even in the mouths of completely non-Aryan
tribes. It thus cannot surprise us at all that Aryan names have been thrust upon the divinities
of the aboriginals. The mixed breeds have become ever more alienated from the ancient
Aryan essence not only in terms of their language but also spiritually and morally. They have
adopted the senseless idolatry so antithetical to the latter and the horrific customs of their
ancestors from the black side.”23

V. Conclusion
• Scholars have failed to respond to the criticism of text-historicism:
1. Does text-historical analysis hold up to a critical examination?
2. Is it scientific?
• Nineteenth-century Wissenschaftsideologie continues in academia. Rather than examine
its sources and their methods, scholars continue to invoke “consensus” in place of
argument.
• Terms such as “postmodernist” and “Orientalism” are misunderstood and misused.
• Citing the ethnic origins of scholars or citing scholars who have no expertise in the
field (Zydenbos has never written on methodological issues in Gītā studies) cannot
substitute for a rigorous defense of text-historical methodology.
• “Binary” thinking in terms of stereotypes bedevils the work of scholars, who continue
to misunderstand that the issue is not “‘good’ and ‘bad’ scholars,” but objective and
verifiable versus subjective and tendentious methods.
• These scholars continue to misappropriate the term “text-critical” to defend what are
in fact apologetically motivated text-historicist arguments.
• Evidently, Scharf has not read Philology and Criticism (which he cites) in any great
depth, otherwise he would have seen that the real question the text-historians must
address is whether the so-called critical editions of the Mokṣopāya and Skandapurāṇa
produced at great public expense are actually sufficiently rigorous to withstand a
critical examination.
• Scharf commits the informal fallacy of claiming the moral high ground, but does not
see that it is precisely the text-historians who, by claiming to be “scientific,” edged out

21 Hermann Oldenberg, “Indologie,” Internationale Wochenschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik 1 (1907): 640.
22 Richard Garbe, Indische Reiseskizzen (Berlin: Gebrüder Paetel, 1889), 85.
23 Ibid., 85–86.
9
other scholars and interpretive approaches and demanded that everyone recognize
their tendentious methods and unscientific conclusions. Thus, the polemics against
structuralism continue in Scharf’s uncharitable and ungentlemanly review of a junior
scholar (Raj Balkaran) for failing to pay homage to the “big names” of the text-
historical school.

Mislav Ježić: “This outcome of text analysis has been accepted to this day by a number of
experts in the world (explicitly John Brockington, Georg von Simson, Horst Brinkhaus, Gavin
Flood, Przemyslaw Szczurek, Ivan Andrijanić, Robert Zydenbos, etc.), but on the other hand,
it is disputed by some Western postmodernist religious scholars (Alf Hiltebeitel), and most
efforts have been made to refute it by colleagues of Indian descent, sensitized to Western
‘Orientalism’ and analyticalness by Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee (2016), who devote
almost 100 pages—in vain—to their refutation.”24

Peter Scharf: “An artificial divide is set up between text-critical scholars ‘slicing and dicing [...]
for historicist or philological aims’ on the one hand, and those who read individual Purāṇas as
an integrated whole, for whom Balkaran’s primary example is Greg Bailey, on the other. In
certain respects, this unproductive binary recalls the arguments of divisive publications by
Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee on the Mahābhārata, which likewise set up a divide
between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ scholars, as though the Deva-Asura war needs to be transplanted to
the battleground of academia. Nothing is to be gained by such a division.”25

Ethical problems:
1. The European enlightenment makes a totalizing claim.
2. Either cultures are “unenlightened” or on their way to European enlightenment.
3. Further, it displaces ethics from knowledge.
4. The contemporary phenomenon of “woke” ideology does not address
anthropocentricity and historical relativism.
5. It does not fill the need for a transcendental, non-subjective ethics such as either the
Mosaic law or dharma.
6. Academic historical “critique” and unthinking “woke” ideology are part of a larger
reformist narrative.
7. Besides iconoclasm, the humanities need a new method and new ideas, which
historicism cannot supply.

VI. Question and Answer Session
Johannes Bronkhorst on the Enlightenment:

“However not only do disciplines like Indology need Enlightenment values, Enlightenment
values also need disciplines like Indology. The two need each other, their dependence is
reciprocal. In other words, if we wish to maintain and strengthen a society in which the values

24 Mislav Ježić, “Historical Layers of Bhagavadgītā—the Transmission of the Text, Its Expansion and
Reinterpretations. What Do Bhagavadgītā and the Cathedral of Saint Dominus Have in Common?” Filozofska
Istraživanja 41, no. 2 (2021): 249.
25 Peter Scharf, “What is Ailing Purāṇic Studies?” Indo-Iranian Journal 64 (2021): 174.
10