The Vedic Experience. Mantramañjari
An Anthology of the Vedas for Modern Man and Contemporary Celebration

 

 

The word Veda, which in Sanskrit means “knowledge, wisdom”, is used to designate a unique and inimitable body of religious literature that is among the most ancient of human works. The Vedas, in fact, deal with a collection of texts, complex and extraordinary in their variety, that are transmitters of profound values and doctrinal principles, at least in part, still unexplored. Further, the Vedas concern a undertaking of the highest spiritual value, expressed in many cases with a poetic imagination of rare beauty and evocation. These characteristics without a doubt make the Vedas an undeniably precious gift for all of humanity.
Unfortunately, with the exception of the Upanishads, which constitute the final part of the Vedic revelation, very little of this ancient body of texts has been translated into Italian or Spanish. There is not even as yet a Spanish version.
The present anthology, therefore, not only contributes to filling a void in Indic studies, but also offers – through the method of inquiry that so unmistakably characterizes its author – an ulterior motive for interest inasmuch as through the translated text a kind of ideal path is delineated that begins from the first hint of life in order to arrive at its full realization in the experience of total freedom proper to the true life without end.

Panikkar’s work (whose original English edition came out in 1977) was introduced not so much as “a book on Hindù testimony to Vedic revelation understood as revelation of the depths that still resound in the heart of modern man, so that he might come to have greater awareness of his heritage” and still further “as an invitation to make one’s own the fundamental Vedic experience.”

With this fluid yet thoughtful translation of the most significant passages from the Sacred Hindù texts – without excluding the Bhagavad-Gîtâ, which according to the great Indian age, Shankarâchârya, represents the quintessence of all the Vedas – Panikkar succeeds at the by no means easy task of illuminating so to speak their extraordinary modernity, offering to the attentive contemporary reader an instrument of meditation, of personal reflection, of prayer, and even of a possible path toward knowledge of the one, universal and eternal Reality.

translation from Italian