Would you be offended?

[Archive]

Posted By: Mr.Charlie

That postcard is interesting, but perhaps a little misleading. Swastika is a Sanskrit term and is found in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain literature. Since there is no "L" in Sanskrit, I don't see how its iconography could possible symbolize the love, life, etc. It is a nice sentiment, but was probably made by somebody with good intentions and half-knowledge.

I can't tell you how many times people have forwarded e-mails to me that are purportedly quoting the Dalai Lama when it is obvious to anybody that knows anything about the Dalai Lama or Tibetan Buddhism that they are not quotes from him. They are usually made up by well-meaning New Agers who probably think people will take their cool thoughts more seriously if they are attributed to the Dalai Lama.

Hitler seems to have been sort of obsessed with Sanskrit (though he could not read it) and the peoples who used it - the Aryans. His understanding was twisted and distorted. The Aryans were actually Persians from modern-day Iran who migrated and invaded the Indian sub-continent (actually the area bordering Pakistan and India) about 3500 years ago. They brought with them a group of sacred texts in Sanskrit known as the Vedas and a religious tradition that became the forerunner of Classical Hinduism. "Aryan" literally translates as "superior one" and there is evidence that the Aryans saw themselves as racially superior to the indigenous South Asians. In the Buddhist Sanskrit (beginning around 2100 years ago), the term "arya" took on a different meaning. An arya was still a superior one, but the meaning of "superior one" was a person who had cultivated direct experiential wisdom of the nature of reality. It connoted a spiritual attainment and that is still the sense of the term today in Buddhist cultures and literature.

All of this was lost on Hitler. I doubt he would have wanted to be racially aligned with Persians or religiously with Buddhists. But because Sanskrit and Latin are the two roots of the Indo-European language family, he seemed to think there was significance there for him.
JimB

edited one grammatical point.