To Light a Thousand Lamps - The Theosophical Society

102 / TO LIGHT A THOUSAND LAMPS
encouraged by the then Governor-General, Warren Hastings,
to study Sanskrit and allied languages so that they
might better understand what moved the Hindu soul. So
impressed were a few of these oªcials that they began
to translate the great epics of India, the Rāmāyaṇa and
Mahābhārata, especially the Bhagavad-Gītā, as well as the
Upanishads. In 1785 Sir Charles Wilkins published the first
English translation of the Gītā in London — incredible that
we in the West have known of its existence for little more
than two hundred years. With similar translation work in
process in France and Germany, the philosophic treasury of
the East gradually infiltrated the thought consciousness of
the Occident.
At that time there was a rather sharp demarcation between
the scholarly elite and the great majority who were
academically untrained and therefore remained largely unaware
of the intellectual and spiritual impact of these emancipating
ideas. The dissemination of theosophy from 1875
on, along with the publication of inexpensive editions of
the Gītā and Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras, was the needed catalyst
to leaven the popular as well as the scientific and philosophic
thinking of Western culture.
Nowadays the concepts of karma and reincarnation, the
oneness of man and nature, the physical world as but a
transient appearance of the Real, and the possibility of communion
with the source of Being by anyone willing and
able to undergo the discipline — all these are becoming
a familiar part of Western thought. With haṭha yoga,
meditation techniques, and other Oriental methods of selfculture
rapidly being adapted to the Occidental tempera-