HOW INDIA HAS EXPERIENCED MANY A DECAY BUT AVOIDED DEATH

As found in the book:

UNIVERSAL MESSAGE OF 

THE BHAGAVAD GITA

Written By: SWAMI RANGANATHANANDA

HOW INDIA HAS EXPERIENCED MANY A DECAY BUT AVOIDED DEATH:

Our Indian culture has passed through all these phases. Take the Vedic period, great culture. What struggles and hardships people endured to build it up. The mind was active and energetic and had great vigour. This continued till the Epic period. There was a tremendous setback; the "Mahabharata" war at Kurukshetra, more than three thousand years ago, was a great setback! The best of the race died in the war, thousands of them. That is considered to be a watershed in our history. Sometimes later, new strength came but again it declined. It went on, like waves rising and falling, but the uniqueness, as I mentioned before, is that we decay but we never die. Some new power comes and we are refreshed once again. What a depth we had gone to in the last century! When we read the literature of the time, we can see to what low level the human mind in India had degenerated. All the original strength, vigour, and creativity disappeared, and we were a half-dead people. Out of that state came a tremendous awakening and new developments. How did it come about? Here comes the great idea. Not only does a great spiritual teacher arrive on the scene and raise the people, but sometimes a cultural cross-fertilization also takes place. Western culture helped destroy many of our foolish notions. It showed us new paths and made us more energetic. This was not the intension of the Westerners, but that was the result; infusion of Western ideas into India resulted in a new awakening and a new strength and youthfulness.