Love and Religion
There is a lot in common between love and religion, at least in India. This was stressed at the the L D Swamikannu Pillai Endowment Lecture held at the Madras University. V Ramakrishnan, former professor of the Department of Philosophy, University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka, who was the speaker on the occasion, in his address equated love with religion on the grounds that both were beyond definition and were entities of great feeling and experience.
Dwelling on Saiva Siddhanta, Ramakrishnan said this genre of the Indian bhakti tradition was exclusively built on this platform of feeling and experience.
Expressing regret over the continuance of English as the medium of study and communication in most parts of India, Ramakrishnan said this actually deprived the Indians of discovering the true identity and colour of the country. To know India in its original form, one must study in the vernacular like Tamil, Hindi or any other Indian language for that matter, he added.
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