*Day 40*
Question - Gurudev, can you say something about the people in the picture of the Holy tradition and their connection to you and the experience of enlightenment?
Gurudev - This is an artists depiction of millennia of great masters, and from ages, they've selected just a few of them who came from time to time and portrayed them in the picture.
Not everybody is there from the millennia. The few of the Rishis who are depicted in that are Narayana, Padmabhava, Vasishtha, Shakti, Parashara, then Vyasa. That side of the stream has a little gap between them.Vyasa, Shuka, they're all different.
They are great Rishis of the holy tradition. Some other time we will describe all the different works they have done. Parashara is an exponent of astronomy and astrology, the movement of planets.
7000 years ago, it was written how many moons are there for Saturn, how far away they are and precisely when exactly they are going to transit into what point, what time the eclipses are going to come, when the meteor is going to hit the planet, when there will be a comet.
Everything is described and calculated. A mathematical genius that's Parashara. Then about Vyasa, it is said that he is master of all, not jack of all. Vyasam has not left any stone unturned. He was the greatest of scholars.
It is said that the whole world is just leftovers of what Vyasam ate. That means he has tasted every bit, everything, everywhere. Uchita means not leftovers that he has taken a bite of everything, every topic anecdotes subject : Physics and Chemistry,
Mathematics, biology and all possible things. And Gaudapada, one of the Rishis is an exponent of alchemy and Ayurveda, about all different herbs and which herb effects which part of the body and all that, and that's a big treatise.
Unfortunately, when the Mughal invasion happened in India, at the time of Aurangzeb, he burned all these. It was almost like the Spanish Inquisition in India. It is not highlighted in the history much to keep the communal harmony in the country, because people would get angry at the Muslims and they don't want any backlash on them.
So Jawahar Lal Nehru our prime minister kept it all aside. Already there was divide between India and Pakistan. They didn't want more problems. But these are written in the History books.
That Aurangzeb called all the scholars, Rishis and scientists and showed them the Koran saying, “All that you had in this library in Nalanda is present in the Koran”. They said, “Yes, it could be present in the Koran”. Then why do you need all those books. Burn them all. This one book is enough".
Then they said, "There are many things which are not there in the Koran but are there in those books". He said, “Then they have no right to exist because only this is God's word”.
“And all that is not God's word is work of the devil Shaitan. If is already there in Koran, you don't need it. If it's not there then it's not the work of God. It is the work of the devil. They have no right to exist. Burn them down”.
3 big universities were burnt down. 10000 students from Egypt, from Constantinople, from China were studying in these universities. It is said that the libraries were burning for six months. Now the present chief minister of Bihar is going to rebuild Nalanda university.
There are lots of requests because lots of Buddhists literature was there. In Japan Korea and China, they all want that university to be rebuilt and we will be building a second university in Magadh, Orissa in that same style, where youths from all over the world can come and study a combination of the modern and the ancient and academic excellence will be promoted.
