Kevin R.D. Shepherd's Blog, page 3

Shirdi Sai Baba

Shirdi Sai Baba The faqir known as Sai Baba (d.1918) lived in an obscure mosque at Shirdi, a village in Maharashtra. His precise date of birth is not known. His early life is difficult to reconstruct, although his last years were reported in far more detail.    The sources contain much data about numerous devotees, involving a majority of Hindus, some Muslims, and a number of Zoroastrians. One of the Hindus was Govind R. Dabholkar, who composed the Marathi work Shri Sai Satcharita, a v...

Shirdi Sai Baba

Shirdi Sai Baba
The faqir known as Sai Baba (d.1918) lived in an obscure mosque at Shirdi, a village in Maharashtra. His precise date of birth is not known. His early life is difficult to reconstruct, although his last years were reported in far more detail.  The sources contain much data about numerous devotees, involving a majority of Hindus, some Muslims, and a number of Zoroastrians. One of the Hindus was Govind R. Dabholkar, who composed the Marathi work Shri Sai Satcharita...

Meher Baba Update

Meher Baba 1957 Errors of assessment are a common occurrence in the contemporary field of “new religious movements.” Such matters necessitate due information rather than hearsay and assumption. The historical angle is necessary with the subject of Meher Baba (1894-1969), as with other figureheads of well known religious movements. The alternative is lore. A Meher Baba devotee inserted on Wikipedia a misleading version of events dating back to the 1960s. The errors were traced to the...

Meher Baba Update

Meher Baba 1957
Errors of assessment are a common occurrence in the contemporary field of “new religious movements.” Such matters necessitate due information rather than hearsay and assumption. The historical angle is necessary with the subject of Meher Baba (1894-1969), as with other figureheads of well known religious movements. The alternative is lore. A Meher Baba devotee inserted on Wikipedia a misleading version of events dating back to the 1960s. The errors were traced to the...

Kabbalah and Transmigration

In relation to Spinoza (d.1677), his contemporary Leibniz (d.1716) reported the former's belief in “a sort of Pythagorical transmigration” (Klever 1996:47). This report has tended to be ignored, and sometimes dismissed as an exaggeration. Some reflection is perhaps necessary.
The Leibniz reference can invite associations of Neoplatonism, and also Kabbalist gilgul. However, a substantial problem with the latter subject is the wide variation of Kabbalist belief. Gilgul or transmigratio...

Philosophy of Spinoza

Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (1632-77) was born at Amsterdam into a Portuguese Jewish merchant family. While still a young man, he was banished from the Sephardic community in Amsterdam, apparently because of his heretical views. He lived in the Christian world as an artisan, grinding optical lenses. His Ethics eventually became a classic of Western philosophy.  A sceptical idea is associated with Spinoza’s early years at Amsterdam (Nadler 2002), i.e., the soul is mortal and...

Descartes and Vivisection

Rene Descartes (1596-1650) opposed the traditional Scholastic philosophy of the universities, which then harboured an approach rooted in Aristotelianism as interpreted by the Christian Schoolmen. The Scholastics tended to identify their version of Aristotle with the Bible, maintaining that support for their exegesis was to be found in Biblical text. Any refutation of Aristotle was thereby equivalent to blasphemy.
 Descartes was born at La Haye, near Poitiers. His father was one of the lan...

Suhrawardi and Ishraq

Qajar era portrait of a murdered Nimatullahi dervish
Shihab al-Din Yahya Suhrawardi (d.1191) was an Iranian who became known posthumously as Shaikh al-Ishraq, meaning “teacher of illumination.” He was educated at Maragha and Isfahan, and his early training was apparently in the Peripatetic or Aristotelian philosophy associated with Ibn Sina (980-1037).
Suhrawardi afterwards travelled to Anatolia, where he resided for some years, studying with Fakhr al-Din al-Mardini (d.1198), a Peripatetic and...

Meher Baba and Dr Brunton

Meher Baba, 1930; Paul Brunton in India
Paul Brunton wrote the book called A Search in Secret India (1934). This became a bestseller. Reprints were eventually adorned with the credential of Dr. Paul Brunton. The British author became regarded by many as an authority on Indian religion.  I have talked with people who are under the impression that Secret India is a reliable document. Any suggestion to the contrary can be met with incredulity and outright denial. In my early years,...

Indian Mutiny 1857-58

Execution of Indian rebels by cannon in 1857, a painting by Vasily Vereschchagin circa 1884
The Indian Mutiny  is a strong focus for retrospective assessment. The original British reports are numerous. These reflect a colonial viewpoint dominated by Victorian ideas of cultural superiority. This angle was still dominant in Britain until the mid-twentieth century, and indeed continues to survive in some writings. Revaluation of the Mutiny is obliged to defer more substantially to the I...