The Vedic Experience

Mantramanjari

Abstract

When the publishers Darton, Longman and Todd wrote to me asking if I could review the latest book of Prof. Raimundo Panikkar, T he Vedic Experience: Mantramaiijari, for Journal of
Dharma, I readily agreed to oblige. But when actually the book reached me a few months ago its size and structure frightened me and I wondered whether my review would do any justice to this magnificent volume. As I started reading its Preface, Introduc�tions, general as well as special to each section, and the "Texts, Contexts end Texture", I was taken up by the wonderful insights of the Vedic seers rendered into contemporary English and set in a very meaningful pattern of human life. Towards the end of the reading, including the highly informative Glossary, I was convinced that the Mantramaiijari is unique in kind and content and it can rightly claim an "advaitic" character for itself, which it discovers for the Vedic seers in their world-vision enshrined in their hymns containing sublime insights about this cosmos, human life situated therein, and the One Real, enveloping everything. But I was led to almost the same existential struggle as the author himself was in when he was gathering the flowers of the Mantramaiijari: to write or not to' write, fearing that I may not give a correct understanding of Prof. Panikkar's insightful work.
To share something of the same tension of choice between "writing or abandoning" which the author had, here is that beautiful acticulation of Prof. Panikkar's own existential struggle, which he finally overcame by bringing out this attractive bouquet of the Vedic insights as relevant for modem man.