Advaita and KevalAdvaita

Vidyasankar Sundaresan vidya at CCO.CALTECH.EDU
Sun Sep 27 16:03:16 CDT 1998


On Sun, 27 Sep 1998, Guy Werlings wrote:

> I could quote to you tenths and tenths of such meaningless translations
> of our French Indologists (they prefer to call themselves indianists)
> mostly interested in philology and still unable to produce one single
> readable and faithful translation, the worst ones being the translations
> of the Upanishads.

That's an amusing and a very interesting comment, considering that the
Western world was first introduced to Upanishadic thought through the
French translation (Oupnekhat) of a Persian translation (made in the
Mughal court, reputedly by Dara Shikoh, son of Shah Jahan). Perhaps they
coin such terms in order to mark Indian thought separately from Western
thought? Philosophical/religious terms originating in Latin or Greek
typically come loaded with their own meanings and history.

How about Andre Padoux and his team of scholars, who are mostly interested
in the Tantric literature? Have they made good, readable translations?

Vidyasankar



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