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Foreword
By Aidan Rankin, Ph.D.
I first became aware of David Frawley’s work earlier this year when I was at the University bookshop in Bloomsbury, near to my London home. It used to be called Dillon’s and owned by a long-established and worthy firm. Now it is Waterstone’s, a thrusting ‘success story’ of modern entrepreneurship. No longer a traditionally British bookshop, staffed by friendly amateurs, Waterstone’s has all the characteristics of a giant American emporium: glossy, squeaky-clean and staffed by indifferent, overworked students. Like its American counterparts, it is replete with self-help guides for stressed male executives and bitter, miserable career women, both products of a disturbed society. In the basement, a bar serves caffe latte, chocolate muffins and a bewildering variety of fruit juice. Waterstone’s, in other words, is a microcosm of the global monoculture, that spiritual and economic malaise which Frawley so incisively explores. Yet beneath all the gloss, there persist many of the qualities of a fine English bookshop, where rich gems of scholarship of scholarship and wisdom come to unexpected light, just as rich traditions of spiritual insight still withstand the modern Fetich of the market.
Exploring the ‘Eastern Religions’ section, I came upon a book by David Frawley, or Pandit Vamadeva Shastri, to give him his true name. It was entitled From the River of Heaven: Hindu and Vedic Knowledge for the Modern Age. Whilst glancing at it, I got talking to a silver-haired Indian, a distinguished-looking fellow in an impeccable pinstriped suit. He told me that he was an engineer, and an atheist, but that Vamadeva Shastri was a religious teacher he respected and who told the truth. He was a true Vedacharya, or teacher of ancient Vedic knowledge, and not a Western dilettante jumping on fashionable Orientalist bandwagons. His words confirmed me in my decision to buy the book. Since then - and it was only earlier this year - David Frawley has become for me a source of knowledge and wisdom, a teacher and valued friend. His exploration of the Vedas is intellectually rigorous but accessible, humane but making no compromises with the crocodile-tear compassion and phoney ‘political correctness’ of Western liberals.
Author - David Frawley
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