As I delved deeper, I realized that the schisms between Christianity and science have never been resolved, not even after centuries of conflict. Inst… - Rajiv Malhotra

The American poet T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) was one of the few westerners who understood both the potency of Sanskrit and its relationship to dharma. He studied the language at Harvard, where it was an integral part of the philosophical curriculum. Ultimately, he refrained from embracing either Hinduism or Buddhism as a result of his own cultural upbringing and conditioning. Nonetheless, Eliot demonstrated his insight into Sanskrit in his major poem 'The Waste Land' not only by exploring the multiple meanings of the phoneme 'DA' (mentioned above) but by ending his poem with the mantra ' shantih shantih shantih'. He had enough understanding of the claims made for Sanskrit not to attempt to translate this mantra. In her book, T.S. Eliot and Indic Traditions , Cleo Kearns explains that it was the poet's study of the Upanishads and Vedic texts that showed him that breath, sound and silence were at the heart of language. Eliot understood that a mantra's efficacy depends not on its meaning, per se, but on the effect that its correct utterance and accompanying breathing techniques have. While he did not use the term, he could have been speaking of mantra-shakti, or 'mantra-power', when he wrote that language works through 'syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious level of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense …'

In the Mahabharata, the ceremony for the oath of a new king includes the admonition: 'Be like a garland-maker, O king, and not like a charcoal burner.' The garland symbolizes social coherence; it is a metaphor for dharmic diversity in which flowers of many colors and forms are strung harmoniously for the most pleasing effect. In contrast, the charcoal burner is a metaphor for the brute-force reduction of diversity into homogeneity, where diverse living substances are transformed into uniformly lifeless ashes.

He then goes a step further and briefly imposes a Freudian reading on the text, a reading outdated and crude even in the current Western context of cultural criticism. He says the depiction of 'the other' in Ramayana can be understood as a projection of the unfulfilled sexual desires of traditional Indians. .... The motive of applying a totally alien framework, viz., the Freudian one, to a traditional Hindu text is something that is questionable.