WHAT IS HINDUISM?
all its teachers – independently of transmission in time
through any lineage, and transcending any mere imitative
reproduction, practice or scholarly interpretation of that
tradition. This is its secret history, the source of its wealth
of insight – and the challenge it presents to contemporary
scholars, practitioners, gurus and ‘lineages’ associated with
this tradition.
The misconceived need to see ‘self-realisation’,
‘awakening’ or ‘enlightenment’ as having its source in a
temporal-historical lineage of gurus is directly paralleled by
the need to genealogically trace a historic source or
primordial homeland (Urheimat) for the diversity of Indo-
European languages, cultures and religious scriptures and
teachings – including the Vedas and Tantras themselves. In
contrast to the German Romantics however, Nazi
ideologists totally turned around and reversed the belief
shared by that lineage of thinkers who understood India as
their spiritual motherland and Germany as ‘the India of
Europe’. Instead, and in line with the Aryan Invasion
Theory, India was seen by the Nazis as a racially degenerate
‘Germany of Asia’ – the degenerate fruit of a so-called
‘Aryan’ and Caucasian master race deriving from the
North. In contrast, long before Hitler and Churchill (who
shared a common racist belief in the genetic inferiority of
dark-skinned Asian peoples) Max Müller, the recognised
German founder of Indology, still falsely associated with
the ‘Aryan Invasion Theory’, declared quite plainly that: