Some thirty-five years ago, the wish came to me to study the Yoga-Sutra-s of Patanjali, and the Bhashya thereon of Vyasa, in the original Samekrt.
But I was very busy, in those years, with the work of the Central Hindu College of Benares; which had been founded in 1899, by Mrs. Annie Besant and Indian colleagues, to form a centre for the rationalisation, liberalisation, and solidarisation of what is now called 'Hinduism". This 'Hinduism' is obviously something very degenerate now. Formerly it was Vaidika Dharma, 'the Religion of Knowledge, of Spiritual and Material Science', 'Scientific Religion'; Arya Dharma, the Noble Religion', 'the Religion of the Philanthropic and Noble- minded'; Sanatana Dharma, 'the Eternal Religion', 'the Religion of the Eternal Spirit, the Supreme Universal Self'; Bauddha Dharma, the Religion of Buddhi, Rational Intelligence', 'Rational Religion'; Manava Dharma, 'the Religion of Man, the child of Manu the Thinker', 'the Human and Humane and 'Humanist Religion'. It was a spirituo-material, psycho-physical, scientific, far-sighted, comprehensive Code of Individual-Social and Socio-Individual Life; a scheme of a fourfold Educational-Political-Economic-Industrial Organisation of the whole Human Race, calculated to secure, for that Race, the maximum happiness possible, individual and social, this-worldly and other-wordly, here and hereafter. But for some centuries now it has been, and is today, an unsightly heap of conflicting superstitions, a dazing turmoil of hundreds of struggling sects, mostly senseless, some foul also (as, Indeed, unhappily, are the other great living religions too, though in a lesser degree); its followers, an amazing jumble, a jostling welter, of between two and three thousand mutually 'touch-me-not', mutually exclusive, mutually abusive, petty castes, sub-castes, and yet further sub-divisions, to the fifth or sixth degree, all utterly disorganised.
The honorary secretary-ship of the Board of Trustees and the Managing Committee of the institution was placed upon my shoulders. We were all working hard, Mrs. Besant hardest of all, to build up the college and make it a fit instrument for realising our ideal, viz., gradually restoring the old 'order' in place of this disorder, of reorganising the disorganised.
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