Religion in Karnataka - Culture

Culture

See also: Haridasa and Virashaiva

Karnataka played a very important role in shaping present day Indian religion and philosophy. Udupi, Sringeri, Gokarna and Melukote are well known places of Sanskrit learning and Vedic learning. Shravanabelagola, Mudabidri, Karkala are famous for Jain history and monuments.

The great saint Madhvacharya (1238-1317 AD), proponent of dvaita philosophy and Raghavendra Swami were born here. Adi Sankara, proponent of advaita found enlightenment in Sringeri which became the first of four mathas he established in India. Fearing persecution from the Tamil CholasRamanujacharya fled Tamil Nadu and came to Karnataka during the rule of the Hoysala dynasty and preached his philosophy from Melukote. In the 12th century AD, Virashaivism spread from northern Karnataka across the Deccan. Many of its founders, such as Basavanna, Akka Mahadevi came from the region. It was here the Jain religion got a warm welcome and enjoyed a glorious growth during the medieval period. It is also here where the current day Dzogchen Monastery and the Dhondeling Tibetan Refugee camps are set up and the Tibetans are very well absorbed in the Kannadiga culture.

Read more about this topic:  Religion In Karnataka

Famous quotes containing the word culture:

    “The higher, the more exalted the society, the greater is its culture and refinement, and the less does gossip prevail. People in such circles find too much of interest in the world of art and literature and science to discuss, without gloating over the shortcomings of their neighbors.”
    —Mrs. H. O. Ward (1824–1899)

    “Our culture is ill-equipped to assert the bourgeois values which would be the salvation of the under-class, because we have lost those values ourselves.”
    —Norman Podhoretz (b. 1930)

    “Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)